On Sept. 22 our family drove to the shore of Lake Ontario to perform the ceremony of tashlich, where you think about what you did wrong in the previous year and then throw your sins into the water. Breadcrumbs stand in for your sins. Throwing stands in for their release from your conscience. Seagulls stand in for the wrath of God.
I had got rid of my sins the week before, so instead I went swimming. My parents camped with me hundreds of years ago on the shores of Lake Ontario hundreds of miles away in Kingston, but the waters in 1964 were filthy with green slime and dissolved sewage. Today is one of God’s and humanity’s great miracles, that The Lake Where No One Swims, as a local poet described it, has become fresh and clear again through a lot of work. It is too amazing to stay dry. Too chilly for just swim gear, though, so instead I wore a wetsuit.
The swim lasted 15 minutes and was delightful, with a view of the islands on one side and my husband and daughters fighting off hordes of seagulls on the shore.
Taking off the wetsuit in the women’s washroom involved flailing one arm towards the other until I could grasp an edge of wetsuit and peel it back, an inch at a time, while the compression in the suit slowly cut off my air supply. Too late I discovered it was inside out. The zipper was stuck. A woman came in to use the bathroom, heard a strangled grunt from my stall and left, the door slamming behind her. I considered heaving my torso against the ledge of the sink to crack myself open like a cylinder of crescent rolls, but in the end, gasping, I emerged from the washroom with the carcass of a wetsuit, as renewed as a newborn. I tried to explain myself but there was no need; selfies were being taken and compared. Next year’s sins were already in progress.