David McGlynn - A Door in the Ocean
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A Door in the Ocean: summary, description and annotation
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On a warm September night in 1991, in a quiet neighborhood north of Houston, Texas, David McGlynns closest friend and teammate on the high school swimming team is found murdered on his living room floor. As the crime goes unsolved and his friends turn to drugs and violence, McGlynn is vulnerable, rootless, searching for answers. He is drawn into the eccentric and often radical world of evangelical Christianitya journey that leads him to a proselytizing campus fellowship in Southern California, on a mission to Australia, and to Salt Lake City, where a second swimmingrelated tragedy leaves him doubting the authenticity of his beliefs.
In his postevangelical life, he finds himself exiled from his parents, plunged into financial chaos, and caught offguard by the prospect of fatherhood. A new job offers hope for a new beginning, until the possibility of losing his newborn son forces him to confront the nature of everything he believes.
The memoirs concluding chapter, which appeared in The Best American Sports Writing 2009, celebrates the authors love for swimming, the enduring metaphor for his faith and the setting for many of his lifes momentous occasions. Rough Water charts the violent origins of one young mans faith and the struggle to find meaning in the midst of lifes painful uncertainties.
In his postevangelical life, he finds himself exiled from his parents, plunged into financial chaos, and caught offguard by the prospect of fatherhood. A new job offers hope for a new beginning, until the possibility of losing his newborn son forces him to confront the nature of everything he believes.
The memoirs concluding chapter, which appeared in The Best American Sports Writing 2009, celebrates the authors love for swimming, the enduring metaphor for his faith and the setting for many of his lifes momentous occasions. Rough Water charts the violent origins of one young mans faith and the struggle to find meaning in the midst of lifes painful uncertainties.
David McGlynn: author's other books
Who wrote A Door in the Ocean? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
David McGlynn
Greg Iles
Dr. David Jeremiah
David Robert Anderson
Fr. Thomas McGlynn
Morgan McGlynn
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Table of Contents
Guide
Table of Contents
For Katherine, Galen, and Hayden,
my whole life
my whole life
Out of chaos, beyond theory, into a life that peaks and breaks, the wave emerges. The shore where it dies lies ahead and waits, unseen. A life must peak as it rides up the shallow approach, steepen, and break. I want you to think of yourself like that, of your body and soul like that, one flesh traveling to shore, to collapse, all that way to end by darkening the sand and evaporating. Where do you go? You repeat in other waves, repeat and repeat. Each bears a message. Each has a meaning.
MARK JARMAN, EPISTLES
Good People of the World
When the meet announcer called the race to the blocks, I lowered my goggles. I jounced my shoulders and cranked my neck from side to side a move Jeremy Woodley, my best friend, and I had learned from watching Jean-Claude Van Damme. I was in lane two; Jeremy was two lanes to my left, in four. Between us, a skinny boy in a blue Speedo from the opposing school bounced on the balls of his feet. I had no idea if I could beat him, and I didnt care either way. After the meet, hed disappear with the rest of his team into the yellow school bus parked outside. Jeremy and I had to see each other every day. I didnt care if he and I came in last, so long as I touched the wall before him. Beating him was the only thing that mattered.
Our coach stood beside the pool in a shirt and tie, damp beneath the collar and armpits from the dank, chlorinated air inside the natatorium, and from the lather he worked himself into while running alongside the lanes. His tan forehead glistened, and his thinning hair stuck out like the bristles of an old broom. He looked at me and clenched his fist, his gold state championship ring a judging eye in the center of his hand. The rest of the team filled the bleachers behind him. The girls hair bulged, oblong, in their silver caps, and the boys stood together in a line on the uppermost bleacher, beneath the snarling maroon-and-white bobcat painted on the cement wall. Trey Smiths head fit perfectly between the cats teeth. Here we go, Woodley! they shouted in unison as they clapped their hands. Lets go, McGlynn! Curt Wood, on the far end, clanged a big copper cowbell.
The starter blew the whistle, and the natatorium fell silent. Water gurgled through the gutter drains, and for a moment the pool stood so still that the surface appeared to swell above the coping. Step up, boys, the starter said into the microphone. His Texas drawl echoed through the room and sounded as though it had been piped in from far away.
I looked down the lanes as I mounted the block. Jeremy stood with his back straight and his chest puffed out, his eyes fixed on the other side of the pool, as if getting there were his only concern. He filled his cheeks and let out a long stream of air. He turned his head toward me. His goggles were mirrored, his jaw set. He didnt nod, so I didnt either. Hed finished our freshman year with a faster time in the two hundred freestyle, had trained hard all summer while I was visiting my father and stepmother in California, and now, in the first meet of our sophomore season, he had every intention of putting this race, and me, to bed.
No way, I whispered as I curled my toes over the edge of the block. Not this time.
Two hundredyee-ard freestyle, the announcer said. Take your marks.
I bent and gripped the edge of the starting block. My stomach rose into my throat, the muscles in my back and arms beginning to twitch and spasm. I felt the horn coming before I heard it, that insidious simulated gunshot that Id begun to hear in my dreams.
When the sound came at last, I lunged.
Go!
An hour later, Jeremy and I stood in the locker room. Water lay in puddles on the floor and mold crept up the walls, turning from green to black as it saturated the grout. The tight space between the lockers, where he and I and the rest of the team peeled off our suits after coming out of the showers, smelled of chlorine and shampoo, the bloodlike perfume of rusting metal. They were talking about the boy whod been shot and killed the previous weekend. The story had made the news because the boy had been a top prospect to play college ball, and because he was the second football player killed since school had started, only three weeks before. The shooting had happened at a high school inside the 610 Loop, the highway dividing the city of Houston from its suburbs. Far enough away to feel safe, close enough to warrant comment.
I heard he was in line in the cafeteria, waiting for breakfast, Trey Smith, the senior captain, said. He made fun of some girls shirt or something, and she pulled a gun from her backpack and shot him.
Trey made a gun with his thumb and forefinger, turned it sideways, and pointed it at Mike Collins. Bam!
You bitch! Mike said, clutching his chest and falling backwards against the lockers. The rattle reverberated down the row. You skanky punk-ass slut.
Im gonna get you, sucker! Allen Swift shouted.
A cheap way to get laughs, but it worked. The meet had come down to the final relay, and wed won it, and Treys anchor split was his fastest in-season time to date. The head coach of the University of Arizona had already come to watch him practice. The coach from the University of Texas would be visiting in a few weeks. Treys future spread before him like a buffet table: senior year, college, the Olympics hovering on the far horizon. Even the dumbest jokes made us laugh.
Now the whole teams going to wear those lame black armbands, Jeremy piped in. Though wed been on the varsity squad since our freshman year, wed had to wait until we were sophomores to earn lockers among the upperclassmen. For weeks wed tried, and failed, to participate in their conversations. Jeremys win tonight had earned him the right to do exactly that.
I carried my shoes to the far end of the bench and sat with one foot propped on the pine, forcing my wet feet down inside my socks. Even though I told myself it didnt matter, and made a show of laughing at Treys joke, I couldnt help feeling sullen and embarrassed: Jeremy had looked at me like he knew he could beat me, and Id proved him right. Id finished fourth, a full second behind him.
Theyre all going to wear his number on their helmets, Mike echoed. Take a knee in his honor after every game.
Bullshit, Trey said. Such complete bullshit.
Operation Desert Storms brief, lopsided domination of the news eight months earlier had made the symbolism of paying tribute the yellow ribbons tied around the magnolia trees along the farm-to-market roads, the proliferation of American flags ridiculous. But at fifteen, what wasnt ridiculous? Jeremy and I could barely get through The Pledge of Allegiance without cracking up.
Curt Wood sprayed a stream of Right Guard into his armpit until the wisps of hair turned white. Trey waved the cloud away and coughed. Got enough on, sport?
It doesnt work right if I dont spray it close, Curt said.
Man, nothing can help that, Jeremy said. He sauntered down to me. He wore his towel draped over his shoulder. Cheer up, he said. You were gone for most of the summer.
I swam in California, I said. Id taken the county bus each morning at five, from my father and stepmothers house in Laguna Beach to the high school in Corona del Mar. Remembering those early mornings, the coastline drowned in a hazy grapelight, gave me another reason to tell myself my loss didnt matter: Id be back in California, for good, before the season was over. Even so, Id expected more from myself.
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