The American Spectator

p> Wednesday br> Here I am swimming lazily back and forth, east to west, then west to east, in my wonderful swimming pool. The weather is perfect here in Beverly Hills, as it has been for weeks on end. Blue skies, temperature in the low eighties or high seventies, no humidity, slight breeze. It is marvelous. As I swim east to west, I look up at our house, which (to me) looks perfect. It’s a 1929 Spanish style home with a balcony running along the second floor as it faces the pool. The roof is reddish tile and the palms tower above the roof. /p>

In the other direction, as I am swimming west to east, there are the jacarandas in our garden. For some reason, they do not have the gorgeous blue blossoms other people’s jacarandas have, but they are leafy and a rich, lustrous green. Glorious. It is always a thrill to think this is my life. I could have died in a concentration camp. I could have been mass marched to death in the snows of Poland. I could have died in a beating by Romanian thugs instigated by the Nazis. Instead, I get to swim lazily back and forth in my pool on a glorious summer day.

Would you like to know what the rhythm of my stroke is? You can guess. It’s “Thank you, God, thank you God, thank you God.” There is nothing I ever did to merit such a life. People always say to me, “Oh, Benjy, you worked so hard,” or “Oh, Benjy, your parents left you money.” But many people have worked hard in Czechoslovakia or Lithuania only to die in pogroms or gas chambers. My parents didn’t leave me a ton of money, and they were incredibly lucky to be alive and working in America, too.

The whole refrain of my life is that I get to live like this for two reasons: One, unearned grace of God, and two, the fact that I live in America, a nation on which God shed His grace.

So, as I swim back and forth, I pray my prayers of thanks.

The pool, by the way, is heated to a sinfully high temperature. This is my wife’s doing. She cannot really tolerate the cold much, and so she has the pool at bathtub temperature. I am not complaining. If it makes her happy, God bless her and it. But in all of my life, I have never been in such a warm pool.

I guess there is a metaphor there. I just don’t know what the metaphor is.

Anyway, I got out of my pool and into my robe and headed to the shower. In the shower, I listened to the Beatles singing a great favorite, “In My Life.” It has been close to 35 years since I first heard that tune and it still brings tears to my eyes.

blockquote> em>”There are places I remember, br> All my life, br> Though some have changed,