Up On the Stand with Plutarch
On a Saturday morning in the summer of 1993 — the summer that brought us Jurassic Park, Bill Clinton’s first term, and the Waco siege — Josh Lipson brought a 25.40-second 50-meter butterfly time to the Tenby Chase Swim Club on Forge Road in Delran, New Jersey. He set the boys aged 15–18 record that stood emblazoned on a wall at the club for more than twenty years. Then it came down.
I spent every summer from 2nd grade to my senior year of high school going to the Tenby Chase Swim Club. In the early years I went as a member of the swim team and as a kid who liked going to the pool with his friends. I stuck with the swim team (where I had an undecorated career) and tacked on a summer job as a lifeguard in my high school years. To this day I can’t smell chlorine without a vertiginous deja vu of mown grass and white deck chairs, the soft clank of tossed horseshoes and the delighted squeal of splashing young children, the sharp report of a guard whistle and the oft-repeated command to stop running on the pool deck.
The soundtrack of my summers, blasted through the club’s network of low-fi grey paging horns, was most often soft rock/pop station WBEB 101, branded ‘B101’. The music spanned the 70s up through contemporary hits. Now don’t think of Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, The Clash, The Ramones, Nirvana, and Radiohead. Instead think of Rod Stewart, James Taylor, Billy Joel, Elton John, Shania Twain, Counting Crows, Five For Fighting, Goo Goo Dolls, and The Fray. B101 traded in broad appeal, the sort that would lead the station to make the unimaginative leap from ‘B101’ to having a cartoon bee as its mascot. It wasn’t bad music. It was simply the sort of easy-listening day time radio employed by hair salons, Jiffy Lube waiting rooms, and community swim clubs.
B101 tended to lean heavily on a core rotation of songs. I’m sure in reality the ordering throughout the day was random, but in my memory ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ usually came on before noon, which would find me, if I was working that shift, still unfolding deck chairs and raising umbrellas before the official open of business. ‘Maggie May’ usually came on at about 2pm, when the crowd, heat, trashcan-fill, and malevolent bees reached their furious apex. ‘In The Arms of the Angel’ would of course come on at exactly the worst possible time in the dead hours between 6PM and closing when the crowd had cleared and the sun was on the wane and it felt like summer was almost over even if it wasn’t. In those moments it could be hard to believe there were any members at all.
But of course there were members. Nominally, the Tenby Chase Swim Club was a club in the sense that there was a membership and there were dues. But it didn’t have the trappings of a club, it was not clubby. There were no attendants, no valet, no club house, no loafers or golf carts or tennis whites (though there is a tennis court). It was not the club of Caddy Shack or Red Oaks, though with a name like Tenby Chase you could be forgiven for thinking it might be. The names of our rival clubs were similarly redolent of either the landed gentry, their foxhunts, and their over-under shotguns (‘Pheasant Run,’ ‘Wexford Leas,’ ‘Downs Farms’) or else Tolkien lore (‘Westwood,’ ‘Deerbrook,’ ‘Riverdel’).
There was just the solidly middle-class members looking for a way to unwind on the weekends, their kids, and us, the lifeguards, often found sitting atop the elevated chairs where we were variously swinging our whistles, chewing on our whistles, blowing on our whistles, looking at the clock, looking back at the pool, looking at the clock, and looking back at the pool.
Time on the stand was boring but time between the stand is what gives me that Don Draper ‘twinge in your heart’ nostalgia for the place ‘we ache to go again.’ Every 45-minute shift was followed by some 30 minutes of doing not much of anything. After getting relieved from the baby pool (always the final stop on the rotation), I would knock off some pullups and wend my way back to the guard table — a haven off-limits to non-guards where we kept all of our stuff and lazed away the breaks. There we had nothing to do but talk to each other. This was back in the early 2000s, the quaint era when we all texted at the speed of T9 (remember T9?) and surfed the internet at the speed waiting until your shift was over, going home, and waiting for your brother to get off of the family computer. There was nothing else to do. Each others’ company was all we had and we had it day after day.
It turns out that the defining activity of lifeguarding wasn’t being on the stand or saving people (that only happened for me once, and it consisted of little more than setting a 2 year old who had fallen over in the baby pool back on his stubby little legs). It was hanging out.
Remember that? Hanging out? When you went over to a friend’s house without a plan to actually do anything? There was something great in that. Something that you can’t get back when your social life consists of plans. But you didn’t need a plan back then, just the confidence that you’d enjoy each other’s company and figure it out. Sometimes I’ll experience this unexpectedly — a long car ride to a mountain house or getting stuck in an airport — and will come away with a certain invigorated feeling. Why, I’ll wonder, do I feel so energized after a five-hour car ride? And then it hits me: because there was nothing to do but enjoy the company of my friends. It’s always incidental when it happens now. It’s never an end in and of itself. It’s something nice that happens to you accidentally that you then fail, inconceivably, to try to replicate intentionally. But not in those summers. In those summers it was hanging out all the time.
Whenever I get caught up in nostalgia for the pool or college or studying abroad or business school or anything really I find it’s instructive, if not exactly comforting, to remember the Ship of Theseus.
The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical premise first recorded by Plutarch in 75 AD. It questions what it means for something to persist as itself:
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
Is this — the ship where every plank had been replaced — the same ship that Theseus arrived in or is it something else entirely? What makes a thing itself? When does it become something else?
The presentation of this exercise is attractive enough, what with its Attic origins, its mythological associations. But it loses its luster once we apply it to the mundane. Indeed, we can illustrate the same concept with a joke my Dad used to tell whenever he was doing some maintenance project around the house: ‘You know, boys. This is my favorite hammer. I’ve only had to replace the head once and the handle twice.’ Groan. Of course, you might say, the hammer isn’t the same. That’s why the joke is funny. Fine then. Riddle solved.
But, I wonder, are we so ready to concede that, if the hammer isn’t the same, then certainly, given the decades that have passed, neither is the man holding it? Ask not if Theseus’s ship is the same ship after the centuries, ask if Athens is even the same Athens.
Thought of this way, it becomes profound and recognizable. We recognize this readily enough in ourselves and it’s animating — we mature, we grow, we see how far we’ve come. But revisit the institutions you’ve passed through and it is altogether something different. Whether it’s high school, college, a city you used to live in, your old neighborhood, or a former workplace, they’ve grown and changed too. One year out, it’s not so bad. It’s more or less the same place. Some new people have come and some new people have left, but the comfort of recognizing faces and having yours recognized is still there. You go back five years out, though, and it’s unsettling.
Once when my youngest brother was in 8th grade and I was home from college, I drove to my old middle school to pick him up from a field trip that he had gone on with his physics class (‘Physics Day’ at Six Flags where you ride rollercoasters with accelerometers to measure your kinetic energy or whatever). I had hoped I would see my old Physics teacher, Mr. Kauffman, there. In reality I was probably a complete jackass in Middle School (it didn’t stop there of course — it probably continued to a more recent date than I’d care to admit), but I had liked to think I was more of a lovable rascal that dazzled my teachers with my smarts. I thought, in other words, that I was unforgettable.
And there Mr. Kauffman was! There he was standing in the parking lot next to the idling school bus waiting for all of the kids to get picked up. There he was with his white mustache, his completely bald head, his pleasant portliness, his rimless eyeglasses. I got out of my car and walked up to him with an expectant smile on my face. I greeted him asking if he remembered me. And he did remember me.
But there he wasn’t, with an enthusiastic handshake. There he wasn’t with the questions about what I’d been up to, how I was enjoying college. There he wasn’t with warmth and welcome. He said ‘Oh sure yeah I remember you. How’s it going.’ ‘I’m great,’ I said. That was it.
It stung — going back and feeling like a stranger, expecting a sense of belonging and finding instead a sense of visiting, perhaps even of trespassing. Doesn’t everyone here know? I was here. I expected, deep-down, that the institution would have a memory, but it doesn’t, or at least not a memory of me. It happens for anyone visiting after a certain time has passed. This, you might think, is not the High School/College/Swim Club/Whatever that I remember.
‘No, it isn’t,’ says Plutarch, smiling at us from antiquity, ‘What did you expect?’
To be clear this wasn’t a failure on Mr. Kauffman’s part. It was a failure on mine! He’d had hundreds of students before me and hundreds of students since. It was vanity to expect more than what I got.
Of course if you’re really, truly great, you can have a chance to make your mark. The senior prank you heard about the first week of freshman year — the one so outrageous that they cancelled prom as punishment, the rich guy who wrote such a fat check to your college that his name is forever etched into marble atop the library, Josh Lipson’s decades old 50-meter butterfly time on the black letterboard. But the inevitable came for Josh.
In the summer of 2016 Zach Fong crushed Josh Lipson’s record by almost a second. Josh had done something great over 20 years before. Long past the time that anyone would have recognized him if he had walked in, he was nevertheless there in a small way, as a name a passerby might idled over for a brief moment, as a challenge to be overcome by the kids on the swim team. Now any trace of Josh Lipson at the Tenby Chase Swim Club is gone — ripped from the letter board, scraped from the website, one rotten plank out and a new and stronger timber in its place.
I wonder if there’s still something that ties Josh to Tenby Chase, however tenuously — a spreadsheet of swim meet results squirreled away on someone’s hard drive, an old membership card decomposing in a filing cabinet somewhere. I wonder if there is for me.
Now of course my summers aren’t what they once were. Summers bring the little changes: the days get longer, the school across from my apartment doesn’t have the morning bustle of loud kids spilling out of a queue of SUVs, people at work go on vacation so it’s harder to schedule things. I can’t really even say — living as I do in San Francisco — that the weather changes. None of this is bad of course — I’m a damn grownup. And there’s a lot to like about it. Work can be a grind but it can also be stimulating and exciting. I experience my relationships with people to a depth that I wasn’t emotionally or intellectually mature enough to fifteen years ago. I don’t need Tenby Chase and it certainly doesn’t need me.
But sometimes even now I’ll even still catch myself, in April or May, with a fleeting moment of excitement, some vestigial reflex, that summer is almost here, that I’ll soon be waking up to a New Jersey Summer morning, with its dewy grass, its cacophony of cicadas, its easy warmth before the delirious heat of the afternoon. That I’ll soon be riding my bike around the corner to the swim club, dropping my backpack and kicking off my sandals at the guard table with a quick hello to my coworkers, feeling the hot, rough concrete of the pool deck under the soles of my feet, smelling the chlorine, hoisting myself up the ladder to the elevated chair where I will sit watching the pool, languorously twirling my whistle until my rotation is over, not a care in the world. In these moments it’s comforting to know that Tenby Chase is still there. It’s not my Tenby Chase of course, but if mine had never ended nobody else’s would have ever started.
I now hope that the guards at Tenby Chase, in a quiet moment, will find themselves with a sense of proportion, that they’ll appreciate it all and try to be thankful for it while they have it. But I also hope that their reverie stops right there. They need not bother themselves with ancient ships and institutional memory and old filing cabinets.
They’ll have plenty of time for that when they’re older.
