Fathers' Days

The first time I swam -- I mean, all by myself, feeling only Long Island Sound beneath me, and moving, actually moving in that fearful, unnatural element that could take my 5-year-old life away if I stopped moving -- that very first time I did it, my father was not with me. Yet he had taught me to swim. Day after day at Compo Beach in Westport, Conn., he had stood waist high in the low-tide kiddy ocean, holding me about the middle like a magician proving there was no possible way his assistant c...