Pools

The Secret Life of Swimmers

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Secret-Life-of-Swimmers-06A few days ago, at the pool, I was telling one of my pool friends about one of my last blog posts, Helen the Mouse.  She told me that she’s fascinated by pool culture as well, in fact, she had created an art project a couple of years ago.  She told me the name of it and indeed, I remembered reading about it when it first came out.  If you live in Culver City, you might remember seeing the images on streetlight pole banners. The pictures are evocative, crisp, sexy, and honest.  I loved them before I knew who did them and now I love them even more. You really never know who is swimming in that lane next to you.

Here is the link to the series.  

http://judystarkman.com/projects-/secret-life-of-swimmers/11/

Anatomy of a Scene

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This was photographed by her then husband, Terry O'Neill the morning after she won an Oscar for Network.

This was photographed by her then husband, Terry O’Neill the morning after she won an Oscar for Network.

I got into a fight with a pregnant lady today.  I’m not proud of it.  I’ll tell you what happened as objectively as I can.  As I’ve written about before here, I like to start my day with a swim at the pool where I have a membership.  In the winter, it’s not too crowded, but in the summer it’s very hectic, almost the entire day, with people trying to swim in one of the five lap lanes.  Today, when I got to the pool, I saw that lane #4 was open, but the others were occupied.  I also saw there was one name on the waiting list, but I assumed that person was gone or had already gotten a lane and was no longer waiting for an available lane.  I even looked around to see if anyone looked like they were coming toward the pool.  I wrote my name on the board that includes the waiting list as well as who is in what lane.  I wrote my initials in the box for #4 and started to disrobe.  As I was shedding my clothes (I was wearing my suit underneath my clothes), a 30-something pregnant woman walked over to the lap pool from the other pool, a family pool where she’d been swimming. She saw that my name was on the board at #4 and then began to get into my lane.  I said, “That’s actually my lane.”  She said, in an English accent, “No, it’s my lane, I was on the waitlist.”  I explained that when I came to the pool, the lane was empty, so it was my lane.  She told me that one of the workers was supposed to be watching to tell her when a lane opened.  I told her that he did not do that, that the lane had been empty for awhile.  She went to complain to the guy and I got in the pool and started my swim.  After my first lap, “Victor” came over to tell me that it was her lane.  I said that the lane was empty when I got there.  I also said that she could share the lane if she wanted.  The lanes are a bit too narrow to share comfortably, but the rules of the pool are if someone wants to share with you, you have to let them.  When I told her we could share, she said, “I’m NOT going to share a lane.”  I said, “Actually, it says right there on the board that you have to share the lane.”  She said to me, “You’re going to kick my BABY!”  I said, “I won’t kick your baby, I know how to share a lane.  You’re welcome to share the lane, if you want.”  And then I resumed swimming.  A few minutes later, there was another available lane, but I noticed that she didn’t take it.  Apparently, she left the pool not long after our scene.  The entire time I was swimming, I vacillated between righteous indignation and exploring the possibility that I had behaved poorly.  Actually, I can tell you right now, I did behave poorly.  I should have just taken the high road at the beginning and said, “Fine, take the lane, I’ll take the next one.”  I didn’t do that, though.  By the time I was done with my swim, I was ashamed of myself.  I played out how I might apologize the next time I saw her.  Maybe we would become pool friends.  I do love England.

Then something happened.  As is my ritual, I shower after I swim.  I bring my pants and towel into the changing room with me while my shirt hangs on the chaise lounge.  When I came out of the changing room, I started to put my shirt on and I realized my shirt had been covered by a wet towel for at least 30 minutes.  It was soaked.  Someone had put that towel there on purpose.  I said something to Victor who acted like he didn’t know what happened.  I said something to the pool manager who feigned shock and outrage.  The pregnant lady was long gone by this point.  I really don’t know who soaked my shirt, but I thought about it the entire 90 minutes I was walking around wet at work.  Some might say that it was my comeuppance, but I actually thought it was sort of funny.  I also enjoyed telling the story to my co-workers, who graciously agreed with me that she was most in the wrong.  I’m sure that she spent the day telling her friends about the effeminate fat American guy who stole her lane at the pool, too.  In fact, there is a possibility that you reading this have heard the account from both sides at this point.  And if you have heard her version and my version, be honest, who was in the wrong?  If you think it was me, don’t tell me.  

Guest Blogger: Barbara Cameron

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A couple days ago, my friend Barbara asked me if I was going to have guest bloggers. She said my post about pools prompted her to write something and wondered if I’d be interested in sharing it. I said I would be thrilled to post her piece. Not only is she the one person with whom I always talk books, she also recently won an award from the American Literary Review in the Creative Non-fiction category.

Enjoy:

Opening Ray’s envelope inviting us to join him in the pool, the visuals drew me right in. I was a swimmer my whole life. My father threw me literally in the ocean at age three and said sink or swim. I swam. Later, being on the Cherry Valley Swim Club swim team defined me in my early years, and I loved it because: I was fat and I was not an athlete. When we played baseball and football on my street, I was put in the most unnecessary position and constantly yelled at to “stop dancing around and daydreaming over there and pay attention.”
In the water, I felt thin. My body slimmed down and smoothed out, weightless. Every Saturday morning we had swim meets, and I won trophies because in the water as opposed to on land, I could move swiftly. One week, my father, strict, overbearing and one of the most amazing long distance swimmers I have ever encountered, must have gotten up from the sidelines because in the middle of a relay race, as I was doing my turn, twirling under the water, my favorite part – action specific to dance, gymnastics, which on land I couldn’t master gracefully, ready to press my feet against the cement and push off to give me that added advantage the “turn” gives all swimmers, I heard above me that bellowing voice from the man the entire neighborhood was afraid of, my father, yelling, “You’re losing time on your turns!”
It wasn’t an instant transition; it took building our summerhouse on the jersey shore, therefore, shifting allegiance naturally to the ocean, but by the time I was in high school I found myself saying, “I hate pools.” Why? I would say, “Too confining, no waves, nothing happens; it’s boring.”
Reading Ray’s piece I thought: no, too hard.
I fell in love with the ocean because I succeeded there, on my terms and on my father’s, because, like him, I was fearless in the ocean. And the poetry of this story is the same ironic poetry my father invokes in most stories I tell about him: the strictest father on the street, he trusted us, so we had no curfew. He had no rules in the ocean. He too stopped swimming in pools because they confined him; no cement walls, no lanes. He stopped swimming in the ocean while the lifeguards were there because – as he put it one day when they dragged it out and drove off with him in the beach patrol jeep because he refused to swim in front of the stand, “I’ll be damned if anyone is going to tell me where to swim in the god damn Atlantic Ocean.”
He took me out as far as we could go, almost unable to see the shore (terrifying my mother). He taught me how to get back to shore when we were caught in a rip tide together once. I fell in love with the waves crashing this way and that, getting out past the surf and floating, on a raft or on my body – bearing absolutely nothing and doing my favorite thing in the world: daydreaming.

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