Watching him swim was to witness a metamorphosis. He became a boy again, seemingly shedding not only decades, but also anxieties and doubts. His Australian crawl was not so much a crawl as a glide, his strokes propelling him forward in quick little lurches, allowing him to cut through the water the way a rowing shell does.

Conversely, my mother spent her childhood in landlocked south-central Georgia and could barely swim a stroke. She had a fear of the water that went back to a terrifying experience she’d had when she was baptized at age 8 in a cold, muddy river. It was a full-body immersion, a kind of sacramental precursor to waterboarding. As a young married woman living in the Northeast, out of her element, she tried to conquer her water phobia. There are home movies of her nervously pretending to swim and frolic at the beach, but she never goes in over her head.

Perhaps because of her anxieties, she made sure her kids could swim, and we started classes early. I remember a boys-only class at a Y.M.C.A. For some reason we swam naked. That would never happen today, except maybe in Scandinavia.

When we were preteens, my sisters, brother and I were on the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club swim team. We learned flip turns and racing dives and garnered ribbons at meets with other clubs. I was a fair to middling freestyler, but I really excelled on the one-meter diving board. I spent hours bouncing up and out, as high and far as I could to impress girls and irritate grown-ups a few free-falling seconds later with my explosive cannonballs and cascade-producing one-legged can openers. Even back then I knew it was all about making the biggest splash possible.

Here are my Top 10 swimming spots — not in any particular order — the result of those 50 years on the road.