The first time I really thought about nakedness, about my own naked body in particular, about the fact that animals were always naked and people almost never were, I was in my neighbor’s swimming pool. I was around eight and the older kids had gone to get snacks and towels. The adults were doing adult things. I was the only person in a fifty-foot-long blue basin filled with eighty-degree water. I slipped off my shoulder straps and suddenly rolled down my suit, caught it with my toe and flipped it onto the cement edge of the pool. I did the breaststroke for one lap and my own myopic, lifted-head crawl for another. For however long it takes three kids to make bologna sandwiches and find beach towels, I was in a new world, like the first man on the moon, had Neil Armstrong been given to giggling.
No one had mentioned this world to me. I went from pajamas to underwear to clothes every morning and back the other way every night. And somehow no one had said anything to me about what a good time was to be had between pajamas and underwear. After my Saturday of Nakedness, you might think there’d have been no stopping me. There was plenty stopping me: my parents, both of whom appeared, even in my dreams, fully clothed; school; boys; cold weather. But when I could, I’d lie under our willow tree, shielded by its long green curtain, and read P. G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Parker in nothing but my socks. Naked and laughing.
Best Naked Saturday Since I Was Eight: The man I love is standing in front of me, in our bedroom. He’s not naked; he’s actually more than naked: He’s wearing an undershirt, a very wide, white, and necessary mesh-and-Velcro lumbar support wrap, and the navy blue socks that are usually hidden by his suit trousers. His boxers are off because he’s coming to bed; his undershirt and socks are on because his terrible back pain makes both the reaching up and the bending over difficult. He looks at himself in the mirror and laughs out loud. He puts his black fedora on his head and models the whole look for me.
Naked and laughing. Can’t beat it.