Mar. 02, 2002 - 19:35 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Bird Of The Water

I didn't keep a log book when I was a kid, I just grew a bit at a time without thinking about keeping track. So trying to remember what year or what age I was when this, that or the other happened is a matter of pure conjecture on my part combined with a little estimating.

I was old enough to be trusted to ride the streetcar to town and back on my own, but young enough that some one needed to field me at my destination. A trip across town to visit my cousins was a viable activity.

I have no idea how long the back and forth negotiations took between Mom and Dad. But I know now Mom and her ways and also Dad's line of thinking. A good guess on the general line taken by both would indicate the course of action. Dad saying, "He gets around pretty good and makes the trip across town, and he is ready for it now." Mom saying, "But he is a baby, he might drown." Dad then replying, "You get frantic when you read about the kids drowning in the sand pits around town. We both work and Doug will be alone in the summer from the time we leave 'til the time we get home. He needs to learn to swim for his own salvation, regardless how how we feel." Or some such bargaining.

One Sunday Dad told me that one of his friends from work had set things up for me to go to the YMCA downtown to learn how to swim, and that Monday I was to ride the street car and see Mr. Deal and then be shown where to go and what to do.

Aside from frequently dreaming of flying, high in the sky like an eagle and surveying all below and dreaming of swimming in the sea like a seal and my occasional baths in the good old galvanized wash tub in our kitchen, all I really knew about water is that it came out of the tap in the sink in our kitchen.

My dim recollection indicates that I was not frightened over the new thing to come into my life but excited at the prospect. Dad was so very matter of fact about it I guess that there was no doubt in my mind that I could and would learn to swim if I paid attention.

A few years later I would read about learning to swim in the Boy Scout Handbook and remember that the procedure was quite the same as that taught at our YMCA. The routine as I remember it was, stand in waist deep water, make various hand and arm movements, then learn the jellyfish float -- standing in the water, bending from the waist until my face went in the water for a little bit and then standing up, x number of repeats and then face in the water and pulling my feet up off the bottom of the pool. Great balls of fire, I was floating face down in the water that was really a thrill. I think the next thing was using the paddle board to learn how to kick and become familiar of movement through the water. Eventually, then gradually we were taught how to swim, then how to make it across the pool, and then how to make it across the deep end of the pool. We were led into swimming the length of the pool ending up in the deep end. We were given the basics of diving off the low board and quickly learned how to jump off the side of the pool and swim to the bottom and stay down for awhile. I loved the whole thing.

I was thrilled when Dad and Mom told me that I now had a membership at the Y and could go twice a week to swimming sessions. I would roller skate from home to the Y, swim and roller skate back home in the summer time and ride the street car in cold weather. I learned a bit about games on the billiard type table and some Ping-Pong and sometimes go watch the men playing handball but the bulk of my time was spent swimming.

As I grew my swimming took place at a pool in the amusement park in town and at a pool on the west side of town. Later when I was courting my wife to be, Heather, we would go swimming outdoors at a pool near her home. There always is a feeling of coming home when my body hits the water. There was a time when we lived in the Moline, Illinois area that I learned I could swim across Rock River, which was a fair distance for this drylander. I guess that is where I learned that swimming in warm water was fatiguing because sweat was not noticible, but did happen and led to exhaustion.

We went to Florida when our kids were quite young, in fact the youngest boy was born there. But there came a time when the baby boy could walk and scramble that we would go out to a lake near town, Heather would picnic and watch the little ones. Eventually our girls would mud crawl and I stayed with the oldest boy while he learned to swim. Eventually our girls began to venture out away from ankle deep water and learned to swim. Finally they youngest was able to join the action and Heather would stay near the shore with him and she an I would keep an eye on the girls. One day our oldest boy begged to be allowed to swim by himself and wanted to swim with some of his school chums. I let him go with strict instructions to check back with me every five minutes and turned him loose. Heather and I were standing near the girls and she said, "Oh, that looks like Junior on the diving tower." I took a quick look and swam as rapidly as I could, I knew it was him. By the time I neared the tower he had climbed up and dove off twice and was headed up the third time when I collared him and let him know that his Mom wanted to see him and that we were going to eat soon.

I became the Scoutmaster of our troop and had the pleasure of seeing the boys of our troop learn to swim at the Scout Camp in that area. There were all the variations of bravado, and timidity in that operation. One of the boys never got to the point of being able to do the jelly fish float, the rest of them rose to various levels of expertise. It was a deep thrill to me to help kids learn to swim. There was so much water in that area that it seemed to me to be imperative that every kid should learn to survive in water if the need arose.

In 1960 we moved back to Denver and the need to keep up the effort to survive was paramount, I was thirty nine years old and no one wanted to hire someone that old. I finally found work with a government contractor, but when a contract was finished there would be a layoff and my search for work took me into some weird jobs, low paying but a means of survival. Swimming retreated into the back ground as far as I personally was concerned. Our oldest boy was on his high school diving team and went to state several times. He is and has been a diving coach in high schools in our area.

I reached retirement age and we finally sold our house and moved into an apartment complex which has two indoor swimming pools and an outdoor one used in the summer. I still swim, in a hesitant way, carefully with no diving or funny stuff, enjoying every minute, a wetly flying Bird Of The Water. . . . . . . . . .

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