I can remember the formal lessons I had when I was 5 and 6 though I swam a lot before then. My mom used to take me and we'd do the porpoise where I would cling on her neck and she would swim in and out of the water.

It's one of my favorite mom memories.

It's harder to swim in the ocean, but you're more buoyant in salt water. My kids can't swim, because all their water time is spent in the ocean. Ben had an aversion to getting his face wet, and the few times we tried to teach him when he was the right age, he strenuously objected. We got lazy with the other two. We're planning on swim lessons for them, before this summer, because we're big failures in this area.

There are actually waves, currents, rip tides, undertows

My local ocean was the Caribbean. Not hard at all. Really, it was like the pool with added buoyancy and better scenery.

No fear of any kind of water here. In fact, I'm much more comfortable near, on or in water than I am not.

Tickybox is too cute for for words, and I need to plan another weekend up in Seattle soon.

I didn't really learn to properly swim until I had to take it in high school -- I could swim fine, doing a jacked up combination of the crawl and doggy paddling, but had never learned real strokes and stuff. I guess my backstroke was OK just naturally.

Growing up in midwestern suburbia, a big difference between then and now is that the newly-built subdivisions didn't have a central clubhouse with activities and a pool (outdoor or indoor) like today. Heck, we didn't even get a park with swingsets and a slide until the last street was being developed a few years after we moved there. There wasn't any local YMCAs until I was in high school, so our parents had to sign up to use a local motel's indoor pool, which probably wasn't cheap. They did offer swimming lessons there, so my sibs and I were able to learn how to do more than dogpaddle, unlike my mom.

As for access to lakes, outside of the Chain of Lakes area in the far NW suburbs and Lake Michigan, there are really no big pools of water that aren't chemically-laced retention ponds. Rivers, yes, but again there's the whole pollution-due-to-insecticides-and-factories issue, as well as the current.

Have celeb chefs really made much of a difference to the average American?

I think that it's more the influential restaurants, and not the chefs themselves, that take the credit for things such as gourmet pizza (Spago's) and the spread of organic foods and more innovative flavors (most of the 1980s hip places in LA and NY).

I learned to swim in a lake, but I stopped taking swimming lessons because I was too scared of heights to jump from the big tower, which you had to do to pass beyond advanced beginner. I assume I can still dog paddle and float like the best of them, but truth be told, I haven't been swimming since 1994. I don't have a fear of water so much as a fear of bathing suits, however.

I can back stroke fairly competently, but I cannot do the face down strokes. I cannot get coordinated enough to breathe on the right stroke.

I have problems with it that too, and generally tend to do something between a normal front stroke (whatever it's called) and dog paddling where my head stays out of the water. I can do it the "right" way, but it requires a lot more concentration on breathing at the correct time and I hate not seeing where I'm going, so I usually don't bother.

All the ocean's near where my mom grew up had a lot of waves and a strong undertow. So when you a re learning to swim - waves are knocking you over- stroong salt water is getting in you face, etc. I grew up learning to swim in a calm lake. I had a better oppertunity to learn to perfect my strokes. That same thing that happens to runners - when they get to the place where the rhythm is right and they can go on forever - happens when I swim. I don't think my mom ever had the chance to feel that. so she learned the strokes. but never got the speed, endurance, or fluidity.

I learned, or rather my mother attempted to teach me, to swim in a pool at the swim club. Later, I learned from my grandfather in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. I'm an ok swimmer. I can handle myself in deep water, but I have tendency to go out too far in lakes.