Years ago, I read that when Frank Sinatra was a young singer, he used to swim regularly to improve his lung capacity and his phrasing. He’d go from one end of the pool to the other on one breath. The training showed. When he sang, he could express the lyrics as thoughts and phrases, as though he were speaking, unencumbered by worrying about when he was going to breathe.

I’ve never been a good swimmer. We had one of those above-ground pools that my father (accompanied by a steady stream of cursing) would set up each summer. As we got older, we’d help, so the work went faster (although it didn’t reduce the amount of swearing). As the youngest of six kids, I never had formal swimming lessons. The thought seemed to be that if we had something larger than a bathtub in the backyard, the kids would learn how not to drown.

Up until my teens, most of my time spent in swimming pools was less about swimming than about not drowning. I noodled around in the backyard pool, but it was only about 15 or 18 feet across, and it was always full of other kids. There wasn’t a whole lot of swimming going on as much as a whole lot of splashing. I also had numerous ear infections in elementary school, and had tubes put in my ears in second grade. The ear doctor said I shouldn’t put my head underwater for a while. I think I was about 12 when he finally said, “Oh sure, you can put your head underwater.”  (This is also a lesson in getting timely information from your physician.) By that time, I had it in my head that something bad would happen in I put my head under water. I’d drown or my ears would explode and I’d go deaf or some other malady. Being under water was bad.  In high school swimming class, I tried to convince my gym teacher that I had a modified form of hydrophobia and consequently couldn’t put my head under water.

It didn’t work.

My college had a nice pool, and I’d swim there, but I did the swimming-without-actually-putting-your-head-under-water thing. It’s inefficient, but it moves you through the water. When I lived in the Netherlands, I’d bike to the beach about five miles from my house and go swimming in the North Sea. I’d swim out just past the point where I could touch the bottom and then tread water. It was kind of a forced method of teaching myself not to panic in deep water. But it didn’t teach me to swim.

And there my swimming stayed until about three years ago, when I finally decided that it was high time I actually learned to swim properly. There wasn’t any one impetus. It just seemed ridiculous that an active, strong, healthy adult couldn’t swim. And I had a little kid who loved the pool. How could I teach her to swim properly if I couldn’t?

So I went out and bought a pair of swimming goggles and added a swim session to my weekly workout schedule. The goggles helped, as not being able to see while under water made me feel more helpless than my lack of gills. And then I swam. First just gliding through the water, then an odd mixture of not-putting-my-head-under and faux rotary breathing. And I took my kid to open swim sessions and taught her to swim. The more comfortable I appeared to be in the water, the more comfortable she was. So I faked it.

Learning a new skill, especially a physical skill, is a gradual process. You struggle and struggle and then, one day, you realize you aren’t struggling anymore and you don’t remember when the struggling stopped and just doing began. Somewhere along the line, I realized I wasn’t faking being comfortable in the water. I was comfortable in the water. And swimming. Under water.

The kid and I went to open swim the other day. Just before we were going to leave, I paused at the wall in the deep end, took a deep breath, and swam a Sinatra. I moved through the water with a smooth legato.