| It’s the last week of February, a time when many of us are fantasizing about warmer climates and lazy afternoons under a palm tree. Irving S. Link, who was born the ninth child of immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, made the dream a reality—nearly every day for forty-two years. By the time The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik profiled him, in 1993, Link was almost half a century into an enviable routine: in the morning, he would rise and walk a short distance to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he spent much of the day lounging and playing cards by the pool. For lunch, Link would retreat to a private cabana to change—Gopnik describes him as “certainly the best-dressed eighty-seven-year-old in America”—and in the afternoon he would resume his position for more sunshine and socializing. The next day promised more of the same. But Link’s long idyll, Gopnik reported, was suddenly in danger. Five years earlier, the hotel had been purchased by a controversial new owner, the Sultan of Brunei, who hoped that a renovation would reverse declining occupancy rates. That would require a temporary shutdown—not a tragedy, as Link, a former travelling salesman, seems aware, but an unwelcome curveball nonetheless. As he confronts a future without his favorite hotel, Link reminds us that life surprises even the most fortunate, and that change is often for the best. In his roughly fifteen thousand days spent poolside, Gopnik notes, Link never learned how to swim. | 
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