Night Swimming

Night Swimming by Robin Schwarz is a book that I just finished reading today. Normally when I decide on which book to read next, I just stare at my bookshelf until something pops out at me. I like to think of this as fate deciding what I need to read next. This book was chosen about two or three days after Mark and I broke up. I wanted something to occupy my time but something that was a fairly easy read. After all, Mein Kampf is on my bookshelf and it would definitely occupy my time. I stared at my bookshelf for a good ten minutes before I finally decided that this would be the next book to read. Another factor in the genre was that I had just finished a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, which is about just what the title suggests. Very interesting read. I also had just finished A Thousand Splendid Suns. Also a good book, but more...serious. Therefore, Night Swimming was the choice.

When I started reading it, I knew that if I could focus my mind on the book, that it would be a good read. Simple, with a follow-able story line. I wasn't disappointed. Night Swimming is the story about a woman named Charlotte Clapp. At the beginning of the book, she goes to the doctor and finds out that she has one year left to live. She is also severely overweight. After she gets home from the doctor, she gets the urge to live her life to the fullest for her final year. She had worked for 15 years at a bank and decided that she was going to rob it, fake her death, and run away. She steals 2 million from the bank (which actually wasn't the banks money, anyway), pushes her car in the river, and flees. Her goal was to make it to Hollywood, but first she detours to Louisiana when she sees an obituary for a woman that she wished she could know before she died. She makes it to Louisiana in time to attend the funeral and decides to take the name of the woman, so by the time she makes it to Hollywood, she is now known as Blossom McBeal. She buys a condo with a pool, because when she was looking at it, she got completely infatuated with the maintenance man. Her main goal in going to Hollywood was to find love. 

She then does things to make it so that Skip (the maintenance guy) notices her. She asks him to hang a picture and then ends up eating lunch with him instead and never hanging the picture. She goes completely crazy trying to get him to notice her in a loving way. Then she finds out he's married to a gorgeous woman, but the marriage isn't going well. The woman left and didn't know when she would want to come back. Skip was still holding out that the marriage was going to work. All the while, he tries to help Blossom get accustomed to life in Hollywood and does things with her like go to Disneyland. Everything he did, though, was merely on a friendship level. While she is living her life during the day, during the night she goes to the pool and swims for hours. She eventually meets a neighbor named Dolly when she gets an invite to a birthday party for Dolly's dogs. She had to borrow Skip's dog because she didn't have one, but attended the party and made a great friend. One day, Blossom and Dolly are talking and Blossom spills the beans about everything starting with finding out that she was going to die. She also tells Dolly about her love of Skip.

Dolly convinces Blossom that in order to find love, she needed to focus on loving and doing what made her happy. Happiness doesn't come from loving someone. Therefore, Blossom decided to make a list of everything she wanted to accomplish before her year was up. She told Skip about this list (except for the fact that she wanted to pour out her feelings to him) and he was really excited to help her cross off as much as possible, even if he didn't know she was dying. She kept swimming at night and eventually got to 125 pounds. By this point, she was no longer focused on loving Skip, but rather loving life. One day, Skip noticed her by the pool and told her that she looked fantastic. Not just because she had lost the weight, but because he could tell the she was genuinely happy. She had then told him that the weight loss was because she loved to swim at night. Then, a few nights later, he met her at the pool and he confessed his feelings to her. The next morning, life caught up with her and the police showed up at her doorstep, but not before Skip and she had made a promise to live their lives with no regrets.

That's obviously not how the book ends, but I can't spoil the whole story. This book was perfect for me to read the last couple of weeks. It helped me to get past the anger and the pain that I was feeling and refocus my energy toward looking ahead at what is in front of me. I've always been an independent person. While it sucks that someone I loved just disappeared from my life, it's not the end of it. Therefore, I'm going to focus on what I want to do and what makes me happy. I advise you all to do the same.