THE SUMMER before I started graduate school, my parents invited me to vacation with them to the Yucatán. I’m talking a long time ago. I’m sixty-seven now, and this was back in 1976, when I was all of twenty-one, too old to travel with parents, I thought. But out of nostalgia for our trips to Mexico as a child, I had said yes.
We traveled along the Mayan coast when it was still simply two-story hotels along virgin beaches. At a little beach stand of hammocks called Akumal, we stopped for a rest. My parents disappeared, but I was lured to the water’s edge. I’ve always been afraid of the ocean, yet here the shoreline was sheltered by a curve of land and palm trees, shallow enough for me to feel safe. I waded in and lay down on my back, the ridges on the ocean floor adjusting and accommodating the curves of my body, the waves barely lapping at my ear lobes. I shut my eyes. Then something shifted. All at once I was no longer myself inside my own body. I I was connected to everything around me, and everything was connected to me. I was the waves, the ocean, the palm trees above me, the sky, everything little and large in the universe; we were all woven together as if created from one giant textile. For the first time, I had no fear of dying. I don’t know how long I was held in this state of joy, but it snapped like a bubble the moment my father shouted