Lifeguard Off Duty

I decided to hang out at my condo pool after work. I was alone until a woman in her 60’s and her five year old grandson joined me. He was expressing his dislike of the pool which he deemed as fake because it had no lifeguard. I chimed in and said I was the lifeguard. He quickly shot that down with a snarky reply and his grand mom asked him to apologize. She politely introduced herself and we spent a few minutes getting to know each other. She told me she used to work for a local evangelical church, and I told her that I attended that church when I was a middle schooler. I asked her if she attended church there, and she said she did but that she wasn’t sure she was going to continue. She said that the congregation was changing, and it felt like I was supposed to know what that meant. I honestly didn’t. She said, “you know, it’s becoming mostly black.” It felt like time stood still. Did she really just say that? I felt like I needed to look around or at least check my calendar. 2016? My mind went back to another shocking conversation at the pool with a neighbor last year during which she used the term “these people” when complaining about neighbors forgetting to close up the umbrellas before leaving. As much as I know this exists, it’s altogether different when you hear it/see it/feel it firsthand. While I have never signed off or validated a comment like this, there have been times in the past where I would have felt compelled to fill the silence, ease the awkwardness, rescue the person drowning in their ignorance/prejudice/hate/foot in mouth, but not this time. We both splashed around in the water some more. She went on to explain that she had nothing in common with them. She seemed to be waiting for me to chime in, so I said, “well, the majority of my friends are black and we share similar interests.” More silence. She said they really weren’t reaching out to her, but then after some more silence admitted she wasn’t either. She asked me where I attended church, and I told her that I had stopped going a decade ago. She said that she needed to keep going, and that people not attending church and lacking values was really at the source of all the problems in the world. I felt like I needed to sit with that, and maybe she did, too, so I waited a few minutes, said my goodbyes, and exited the pool. While I can be very direct and expressive in social media threads about prejudice and racial issues, I felt like this forum called for a moment of silence, but in the silence I swear I heard Alanis’ ‘Isn’t It Ironic.”