Swimming, a luxury for rich people, and those with outstanding friends…

Kids can be absolutely amazing. As much as they can be total a-holes, they can also be outstanding individuals. I’m not even directly talking about my kids, though I do believe it likely applies to all children. I’m also not not talking about my kids just so it’s clear that I know that my kids can be a-holes. I’m referring to the manner in which I essentially learned to swim, or better said was learnt to swim (I didn’t mean better said grammatically). 

I think swimming is historically for rich people, I guess that’s probably also currently true. Think about it, most of the shit that happens in or near water costs money, boat ownership,

jet skis,

beach house, in-ground home pool,

vacation to bora bora,

shark interactions,

the list goes on.

The instances in which money isn’t a heavy requirement typically involve a lake or a pond. You ever hear about an amazing swimmer that learned how to swim in a lake or a pond? Me neither. You ever hear about folks drowning in a lake or pond? Yeah, me too, all the time. Kids who learned how to “swim” in a lake can doggy paddle like crazy but they can’t swim real good, typically because no one in the world puts their foot on the floor of a lake and says, wow, I Love how that feels so while you are in a lake you are in a constant state of doggy paddle. Also, no one says, “I can’t wait to swim under water at the lake this summer.”, unless they’re one of the weirdos that die early in a horror film. They also don’t say, “I’m gonna bring my goggles with me to the lake.”, because the water is typically ass brown and you can’t see anything anyhow. So now we all agree, swimming is for rich people. 

Given this fact I didn’t really learn how to swim as a kid. Ok, this might’ve also been influenced by the fact that I was scared of everything. My Mom tried various swimming lessons, but I think they were all terrible, and I mean that more from her perspective than from mine. It must’ve been awful for her to sit there and watch her kid just scream and hang on for dear life to anything that was solid. I think she determined how good a lesson was based on the level of my crying, if I cried and was terrified less then that’s the class we would stick with for a bit. My Mom would always say, supported with directly aligned comments from my siblings, that if I didn’t learn to swim I would be sitting on the edge of the pool with my feet in the water while my friends were having fun in the pool or some other fantasized natural body of water that we couldn’t afford to be near. However, in my opinion, the use of exclusion as a motivating factor typically doesn’t work unless it’s in the exact moment of the thing that one is actually being excluded from, and also, in this instance, as my firework memories will show, they ended up being at least partially wrong. 

So the first firework memory that comes to mind related to the terrifying world of swimming involves me thinking I was going to drown while standing in three and a half feet of water when I was actually probably at least four and a half feet tall, or taller. I was at the Richmond Heights public pool with my childhood best friend and we were just chilling standing around in the three and a half foot deep section, probably age 7 or 8. My best friend was always very accepting of my short comings, which I think might be the first sentence in the definition of best friend. He wouldn’t joke about them or tease me or point them out, but he would just kind of know they were there and indirectly live through them with me. So we’re there and he knows I can’t swim but he’s still hanging out despite the fact that he can definitely swim, his family had more money than mine. Then all of a sudden, literally without warning, this kind of mean neighborhood kid, I can’t remember his name and it’s killing me but it was probably something like Randy or Timmy, came swimming up underneath us and flipped us both over. This was slightly weird as this kid was older than us and I wouldn’t say we were really close, and as I’m saying that I realize I may have just explained every childhood bullying type scenario, but he must’ve noticed us and decided to have some “fun” with us. Well I was stymied, I still recall seeing the bubbles in front of my eyes as I went under and started dropping to the floor of the pool, which likely isn’t true since I could’ve implemented the same lifesaving strategy that I implore my kids to use now, which is to simply stand up. I end up taking in a bunch of water and am coughing and panicking like a maniac. I would proceed to then spend the rest of our time at the pool still hanging with my best friend however he would do it in the pool and I would do it on a bench near the pool. This poor older neighborhood kid was also shocked by my reaction to his shenanigans and felt absolutely terrible about his actions. He didn’t know I couldn’t swim, as noted we weren’t particularly close, and so he just sat in the pool right by where I was sitting and essentially just looked at me like a sad puppy. I kept telling him it was ok, I really didn’t hold anything against him as he was just doing what kids do in a pool and didn’t know of my inabilities. 

So somewhere between there and college, where I could frequently be found doing flips and gainers off the diving board in the school diving well, I learned to swim. Despite all of those lessons at various locations the most impactful lesson I think I ever received came from my friends. I’m guessing we were in about sixth grade, which would make me about ten or eleven and I think I was likely just roaming the city. My world had expanded a bit in regard to the areas I could now ride my bike and that included up to the city park and friends’ houses. In retrospect it was a fairly wide breadth and I think we rode pretty much everywhere. On this particular day my friends decided they wanted to go to the pool to which I had to reply that I wasn’t all that interested. I think it came out that I wasn’t all that interested because, well, I couldn’t swim. So instead of saying, ok fella well we’ll see you later or well you can just sit on the edge of the pool and put your feet in the water like your Mom and siblings always said would happen, they responded by saying, no problem, we’ll teach you to swim. Say what? They weren’t laughing at me, instead they were like we got you buddy. Two of my friends were also on the swim team, whatever the hell that was, and were highly confident in their abilities, as well they should’ve been, they could swim like champs. 

Here’s the thing, when you don’t know how to swim you don’t have a pass to the local swimming pool, and these things also cost money, so I informed them that I couldn’t even get into the pool. Whew, safe again! They had a solution to this too. I happened to be wearing jean cut off shorts, yes, you read that correctly, which could also serve as swim trunks back in 1986 without any issue, and so we went around the corner at the Richmond Heights pool where there happened to be a water drinking fountain and then my friend proceeded to splash water on my ultra-stylish jean cut offs to make it appear as if I had already been at the pool all day swimming, relying on the assumption that the teenagers running the front desk only check your pass one time, when you first enter the pool and that if my shorts were wet they would just assume I had already come into the pool and was swimming. They were correct, it worked without a flinch of incident. We went into the pool and the day was spent teaching me how to swim which literally included my friends holding me up on the surface of the water and telling me to kick and how to move my arms. I remember being on the surface and doing my kicking and flailing while my friend was swimming around me like a seal and swimming underneath me and looking up at me to be both hilarious and supportive, which it achieved on both fronts. 

When I look back on it I find it as a fairly significant moment actually. It’s kind of the collective evolution of several kids in a generation. My friends suggested teaching me to swim like it wasn’t even a thought, no problem, we’ll just teach you to swim. The move from needing to be led through life by our parents and sheltered and guided to solving problems on our own as a group is fairly glorious. This particular retrospective really embodies this adventure I guess I find myself on with this BLAWWWWG in that I wouldn’t have found it so “significant” had I not analyzed it a bit. When I do analyze it, I find it kind of beautiful, that random day a bunch of friends found themselves at the local pool with nothing to do but inadvertently grow as humans. My friends taught me how to swim. I don’t remember any of the numerous other lessons or any other details about learning to swim other than this.

Crazy enough the Richmond Heights Pool would become a spot where I would spend a ton of time in my childhood and then again in my early adulthood. One of those friends that was on the swim team and taught me to swim that day was often there with me at that time and we would just do crazy flips and dives off the diving board, being the “adults” at our childhood haunt. We would also spend time just hanging out at the diving well at John Carroll University which was a place where we were frequently by ourselves just chilling, diving and talking about life as we continued to help each other evolve. So yeah, kids can be pretty amazing, they can flip the fear of exclusion into that of major inclusion and instead of saying screw the kid that can’t swim they would say he’s one of ours, we hang together, let’s just teach this moron how to swim. I have to think of it this way I suppose because the thought of my friends holding me under my stomach on the surface of the water at a pool with 100 other kids around so I could learn to kick and flail my arms would otherwise not be a vision of pride.