In the depths of my memory, many things I did with my father still live. These things come to represent, in fact, what I call joy and love.  I don't remember my father ever getting into a swimming pool. But he did love the water. Any kind of boat ride seemed to give him pleasure. And he loved to fish; sometimes he took me along.  But I never really liked being on the water, the way my father did. I liked being in the water, moving through it, having it all around me. I was not a strong swimmer, or one who learned to swim early, for I had my fears. But I loved being in the swimming pool close to my father's office and spending those summer days with my father, who would come by on a break. I needed him to see what I could do. My father would stand there in his suit, the only person not in swimsuit.  After swimming, I would go inside his office and sit on the wooden chair in front of his big desk, where he let me play with anything I found in his top desk drawer. Sometimes, if I was left alone at his desk while he worked in the lab, an assistant or a student might come in and tell me perhaps I shouldn't be playing with his office things. But my father always showed up and said easily, "Oh, no, it's fine." Sometimes he handed me coins and told me to get myself an ice cream...  A poet once said, "We look at life once, in childhood; the rest is memory." And I think it is not only what we "look at once, in childhood" that decides our memories, but who, in that childhood, looks at us. What was probably the author's father?
A poet. A professor. A fisherman. An ice-cream man.