Something New

From the moment he woke up this morning, he knew he needed something different. As he brushed his teeth, looking at his face in the mirror, no longer anywhere even close to the end of middle age, he wondered if it were too old to experience something new.

Walking into the kitchen in deep meditation, he went through the daily ritual of brewing his coffee, all the time considering what the possibilities of doing something novel might be.

With his fresh cup of coffee, he did what he always did: Sat down at his desk to check his email. There were the usual ads from places he’d made online purchases. What a waste of time just screening his emails every morning. Unsubscribing from all of them, and from all the campaign solicitation messages constantly crossed his mind, but he never did it. He shook his head, irritated with himself for not expending the energy to do this.

Next, he ran through article headlines for his various newspaper subscriptions, reading the ones with titles that grabbed his attention.

Today, one article stood out. It was a story in the New York Times, about a man, 69 years old – the same age as he – who’d just swum from the Hudson River from the top down to New York City.

Huh, he thought, same age as me, but what tremendous condition he must be in compared to me. Examining his stomach, he took a sip of coffee.

He knew a Professor at West Point, an old college classmate who was still teaching military history courses there, and he decided to email him. The message was brief:

Hey, Charlie, by any chance did you see the 69-year-old guy who swam down the Hudson when he went past West Point?

After sending the message, he worked on the daily crossword puzzle. It was Monday, the easiest day of the week. His personal challenge was to finish Monday’s in under ten minutes, the closer to five the better. His time was 8:13. Not a record by quite a bit, but pretty good.

When he’d finished, he checked his email to see if Charlie had responded. Nothing.

Now he tackled the “Spelling Bee.” While other people would try to guess as many words as possible using the seven letters, he preferred to try and find the Pangram, the word using all seven letters, as quickly as possible. Sometimes he would guess it at a glance. Those were good days. He would momentarily wonder if he had some kind of gift.

It didn’t matter if on that day there was more than one Pangram; he only wanted to find one. Today it took him several minutes to find the word “invalidly,” which irritated him a bit.

He checked his email again. Nothing from Charlie.

On to “Wordle.” His streak, he saw was at 274. The only time his streak had been broken was one day when he didn’t play the game. Not realizing that you had to play each day to keep your streak alive, he’d been dropped back to zero. Now he played the game no matter what. You had to keep that streak alive. He was good at it, beating the WordleBot a couple of times a week, but he often tied with it, and this irritated him some.

There was no message from Charlie when he checked.

On to “Connections.” You were given 16 words. The point of the game was to find four groupings of four words that had something in common. This one, he was also good at. He’d usually get the first three groups. The fourth group often amazed him because he knew he’d never have guessed what tied the four together, like four words from the Canadian National Anthem, or the four colors of the Brazilian flag. He wondered if even every Canadian playing knew the first, or all Brazilians the second.

He clicked on his email box again. Nothing from Charlie.

Next up was “Tiles.” You had to match parts of patterns in a grid of little squares. Some days this challenge was difficult for his 69-year-old eyes, the patterns so complex due to odd shapes or colors too close to each other to distinguish a difference. If you got through all the matches, sometimes as high as 50, you were awarded the label, “Prefect.” It was always good to see that.

There was a new message, an advertisement for life insurance from his Credit Union. He deleted it.

“Letter Boxed” was a challenge he relished. You were given a box with three letters on each side. The idea was to put words together, drawing lines from letter to letter, with the goal of using all 12 letters within a daily designated number of words. The usual number of words you had to find ran from four to six. What he enjoyed most about this one was trying to use all the letters in fewer than the assigned number. For example, if the challenge was to use them all in four words, he’d look to use them all in three words. If it were six, he always wanted to do it in four. Sometimes he was successful at that. Most days he could use all the letters in under the challenge number.

Charlie must not be checking his email, he thought. It’s been over an hour now.

The game called “Vertex” he always skipped. His eyes weren’t strong enough to play a game like that anymore. Before when he had, he’d often strained his eyes.

So it was on to his newest addiction: “Sudoku.” He’d only begun to play this one a couple of months ago. The Times gave you three puzzles a day, Easy, Medium, and Hard. He’d start with the Easy and move his way up. In the beginning, before he began to get the hang of the game, doing all three could have taken two hours. The goal now, after two months of practice, was to finish the Easy in 10 minutes or less, the Medium in 15, and the Hard in 20. Most days he could do this. Sudoku was his new favorite by far.

All the games were played now, and still no message from Duke. Oh well, the old codger was still working.

He went back and reread the article about the swimmer. How clean was the Hudson? he wondered. Would an older person like this man be more susceptible to catching whatever it was that might be lurking in the water, especially as you neared New York City?

An image of the elderly swimmer, lying on a steel slab, his body ravaged by some kind of flesh-eating disease crossed his mind. The image caused him to shiver.

Finally, there it was. Charlie had responded.

Yeah, Chris, a bunch of us were cheering for him as he was going past. He came over to the shore to talk with us. You know, he was never a strong swimmer, but after he retired, he really got into it, had a pool put in. He swam laps in the morning and at night.

One day he was down by the river and all of a sudden he just said to himself, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone swimming the whole distance of the Hudson.”

So he decided to do it. He said he wasn’t interested in going at it non-stop, you know, at our age, so he took breaks to eat and take naps. Amazing, yeah? Not only would I not swim the Hudson, but I would never do it at night. And can you imagine what kind of freakin’ diseases someone out age might get hit with? Gross, man.

And so sad, too. It was on the news this morning, and you can bet it’ll make the front page tomorrow. He died. They found him in his pool. Looks like he drowned, but they think he might have had a heart attack. Hey, but at least he did one thing real different thing he wanted to do, right?

Take good care, stay well, and don’t take on too much, buddy. We’re at that age, you know?

Drowned? Maybe a heart attack? He went to the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. Just before reaching the counter, he slipped, dropping his cup. It shattered on the tile floor, but he managed to reach out and grab the counter’s edge before he toppled over.

Damn, he thought, it was certainly getting easier to go at any moment. After cleaning up the mess, he poured another cup and returned to his desk.

He read through Charlie’s message again.

Wait. What?

Going back to the beginning, he read it again, very carefully, using his finger to guide his eyes. The paragraph about the swimmer dying wasn’t there.

Rubbing his eyes, he stared at the message. What had happened to the part about the man drowning in his pool, and that he’d done the great thing he wanted to do?

Did I imagine that? he wondered.

“Well you obviously did,” he said aloud. “Ho, man, what the hell? Geez, where did that come from?

Staring at all those New York Times games made his eyes tired. But tired eyes couldn’t explain imagining that the swimmer had drowned.

The phone vibrated. It was Charlie.

“Hey, Charlie, man, you are never going to guess what kind of weird experience I just had when I read your email.”

“Hey, Chris, I was just going to say that you’re never going to guess what I just heard on the news about that swimming guy.”

* * *

Note: This is my rough draft for Thursday 01.18.24.