Strangest thing: We were down at Burying Hill Beach earlier this week, and Beagle Man reached back with the Chuckit and flung a tennis ball far out into the water, as usual. Of course, I dove in to swim and get it. Duh. Now the water’s starting to get a little
cool, which doesn’t bother me one iota, but pretty much no one else is swimming anymore. This time, though, something else, something huge, is
swimming — and it’s heading straight for my ball! Well, I’m thinking, that ain’t gonna happen, and of course I get to the ball first. But still, what the heck??!! What is this thing? Beagle Man doesn’t seem surprised in the least. Turns out he’s seen it before. He called it a “malcolm.” He even once wrote a column about him, nine years
ago, in the Westport News. I’ve included it below:
Earlier this week I was down at the far end of Burying Hill Beach, walking my dog, when I sighted a pink-skinned guy in a skimpy bathing suit heading down to the water’s edge back near the parking lot. Sure, it was “seasonably mild,” as my car radio had just reminded me, but I
knew enough about local conditions to surmise that the water temperature couldn’t have been much above 45 degrees – and I didn’t need a Dual Doppler radar to tell me that was cold. “Nut case,” I said to my dog, shaking my head.
My dog and I walked, and the pink-skinned guy swam – and we all wound up at the parking lot at the same time. The “nut case,” now toweling himself off, turned out to be none other than my old buddy Malcolm, who used to help me coach the Jaguars “back in the day” when my two older sons were in Little League. I shouldn’t have been surprised: Malcolm’s been
doing these polar bear dips on an almost daily basis for as long as I’ve known him.
“Looks like this year I’m going to make it all the way to the first day of winter,” he enthused, all lit up with his post-plunge euphoria. He added that his doc told him it was good for his health.
— Westport News, December 22, 2006
Maybe this’ll make sense to you guys. All I know is, from where I sit as a duck toller, the whole experience was weird, with a capital “W.”
Beagle Man and Ricky always have a lot to say, so I’ll just pipe up in The Duck Dog Speaks whenever I can.
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