A couple of hours after dinner as the Girl went to do homework and relax after volleyball practice, the Boy, K, and I along with a good friend of the Boy’s went to the local YMCA for some swimming. It’s an outdoor pool but we’re in South Carolina: it’s chilly but only at first. After a bit of movement, the water is fine.

We’ve been trying to go to the Y like this regularly, but Monday night is just about the only night lately that we can definitely make it — that we can schedule it well ahead of time. And so we go and swim some laps, then the Boy frolics about in the water as we swim a bit more, then we head home. At this point, some thirty years after I last swam regularly, I can manage for an entire workout what I used to do for a warm-up. It’s discouraging in a way, but when we began doing this a few weeks ago, I couldn’t even do that. So there’s progress.

Tonight, as I was swimming backstroke for a change, I noticed that the moon is almost full. A full moon in early October can only mean one thing for me: it’s almost time for the Feast of Tabernacles, the eight-day festival I grew up celebrating in the sect in which I was raised. It’s been nearly thirty years since I last attended that ridiculously warped version of a Jewish festival I grew up attending annually. Nearly thirty years and the realization that it’s about time (its first day was always a full moon in mid-September to mid-October) still creeps up somewhat unawares. Certainly, I still keep up with a few of the little groups that try to cling to those old cultic ways, but it’s not something I think about regularly.

I do find myself wondering how things might have turned out if Tkach, the leader of the organization after its founder died, had not made the changes in the early nineties that led the sect to abandon all its heretical teachings and embrace plain vanilla Evangelical Christianity. Would my parents have remained in the group? Would I have remained for some period? Would I have become the skeptic I now am? Would I now be getting together lesson plans for a substitute teacher to fill in while I headed off for my religious conference (as it would have likely been seen)? Would I have gone to Poland after college and met K? Would I have enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University in the philosophy of religion (only to drop out after a year)? Questions without answers.

I am, of course, very glad I’m out of such a warped religion, but there is a certain nostalgia that accompanies this. The Feast was the greatest week of the year. It was Christmas and a beach vacation combined. How could one not miss that in some way?