Life’s a Pool

Since childhood I have loved being a solo swimmer in a cool, blue swimming pool. Now don’t get the wrong idea, people, this is no freestyle racing — we are talking the easiest and calmest of breast strokes, back and forth, in no hurry to get anywhere or tone any body part. This is slow, steady, almost silent swimming.

As a girl, I loved doing easy rounds of the small, kidney-shaped pool in my backyard. After these exertions, I might use some strawberry-scented Suave shampoo to wash my hair right there on the steps in the shallow end of pool.

As a college student in Philadelphia, my roommate Stephanie and I would head to Gimbel Gym on weekday evenings to swim laps in the Olympic-sized pool; afterward, we’d coat our unruly locks in cheap conditioner, wrap our heads in old beach towels, and bake in the gym’s sauna, a basic wooden chamber equipped with some sweaty black rocks, surely a relic from the 1980’s. This was the closest we got to an indulgent spa treatment during those college-student-on-a-shoestring-budget years.

In 1994 I did a semester abroad in Tel Aviv. Living in the Middle East for six months allowed me to travel around that region pretty freely during weekends and school breaks — especially at a time when Israel was in the thick of an optimistic peace process with Yitzhak Rabin at its helm, had recently made an historic peace with Jordan, and was on pretty friendly terms with its neighbor, Egypt. Not only that, but flying around the region, obviously pre-9/11, was cheap and easy. On the first of these breaks, I decided to take a trip to Greece. I had some friends with whom I arranged to meet up in Athens; I planned to meet some others later on in Crete, and between those two stops, I decided I would visit Mykonos by myself and see where the wind took me. I had heard that that island was filled with young people ready to party — I figured it wouldn’t be that difficult to connect with some other like-minded people. While in Athens, I visited a travel agent to book a hotel room on the island (recall: no smartphones with which to book on Expedia, and not a lot of internet to speak of in those days). I have a vivid memory of sitting in his little office on a side-street in that hot, dusty city. It was August. When I told him I needed a room on Mykonos, he laughed. It was the high season — rooms for check-in tomorrow would not be easy to come by. But we sat together in that little brown carpeted room, with papers and pamphlets piled high on his desk, and he found me a room in a small, cheap hotel that was a ten minute or so bus-ride outside of Mykonos town. My nineteen-year-old self felt grateful, (and slightly attracted) to this older, wiser man (probably in his sage old late twenties). With hotel reservation in hand, I boarded a ferry to Mykonos the next day. On the boat, I met a group of twenty-somethings who were on a guided tour of the Greek Islands, and I made a plan to meet up with them in Mykonos town that evening. I ended up having a ball with them for the next few days in Mykonos and then in Santorini before heading off to meet my friends in Crete, as planned. But before I could re-connect with my new friends that evening, I had to hop on a public bus at the Mykonos port in order to get to my slightly out-of-town hotel. I will never forget arriving at the slightly dilapidated whitewashed structure, and, more importantly, seeing its cold, enticing pool overlooking the Aegean. I checked into my room and immediately found my way to that pool. As I dove in, I felt the deep satisfaction of knowing I had gotten myself to this far-flung place, alone, and it, and its pool, were mine to enjoy for the next few days.

When my then-fiance and I decided to move back to California after college, we spent a month of the summer of 1998 driving cross-country in a used dark green Ford Taurus that we had borrowed $10,000 from my father to buy. It had grey leather interior (the kind of leather that pretended to be fancy, but was pretty déclassé, with lots of little perforated holes in it), a V6 engine, and a generously-sized trunk. It was our most valuable possession. A little Yorkie named Betsey, whom we had rescued from the mean streets of Philly earlier that year, spent the entirety of the trip nestled between us in the middle front seat. That is, when she wasn’t being snuck in and out of the various Days Inns that we would stay in each night, which I would select during that day’s drive based on whether they had a pool, and the number of stars granted it in a printed guide that I had picked up in Ohio. We navigated from town to town assisted by a Rand McNally Road Atlas with a picture of Utah’s Delicate Arch on the front cover. While we never made it to Delicate Arch, we did drive through Bryce Canyon National Park to marvel at the tall, colorful pinnacles that I have since learned are called “hoodoos.” Before arriving in Utah, we ate steak in Chicago, passed numerous signs hailing the imminence of the apparently famous Wall Drug of South Dakota (I had never heard of it before that), and tried to marvel at Mount Rushmore on a cloudy day that refused to give us any viewing satisfaction. Every evening, when we would walk in to our musty-smelling, plush-carpeted Days Inn room in whichever city or town we were in, I would strip off my shorts and t-shirt, put on my swimsuit, and go jump in the motel pool to swim my laps, back and forth. I remember getting in the water and feeling a deep sense of relief — after hours in the car, this sweet dip was my long-anticipated reward.

While I was in law school, that fiancé became my husband, and after graduating I got a job as an associate in a fancy law firm. After three years of marriage and one year of lawyering, we took a trip to a tony resort in Punta Mita. As I slowly swam to and fro in the resort’s stunning pool overlooking the Pacific, I remember looking around at the families vacationing there, and feeling silly — what were we doing there? It was just the two of us — we didn’t have any children to entertain…or escape from…so why were we there? I recall a feeling of being undeserving of the vacation. I was pregnant soon after that.

After I had two kids eighteen months apart, I didn’t have a lot of time to swim. So, despite difficult circumstances, it was a joy to reconnect with my swimming when, after a major crisis in my marriage, I took my four-month old daughter with me to stay with a friend living in Mexico, and on the way back we had a one night layover in Miami; I splurged and checked into the Ritz Carlton South Beach, where I swam seemingly endless contemplative laps back and forth in a giant empty pool at dusk, overlooking the Atlantic ocean, while my daughter quietly snoozed in the baby bucket, poolside.

In the intervening years, after divorcing and becoming a single mom and then re-marrying another man with three children of his own and blending our families, and as our children have grown older and I’ve had more time to myself, I’ve gratefully swum laps in more pools than I can enumerate, including the one that currently sits in my backyard. And every summer, as I return to the pool, I still feel joyful.

But these days, as I swim, sometimes I think to myself that I haven’t earned this special time in the water. I’m no longer a child, a struggling college student, a corporate lawyer, a young harried mother, a woman-in-crisis. I’m a comfortable, married, stay at home mom, whose kids have grown into independent teenagers that really don’t demand — and frankly don’t even want — the attention we felt compelled to lavish upon them when they were small. So I think to myself that these little summer “vacations” that I take in the water — well, they’re not really justified. I can hardly call them rigorous exercise, giving myself the excuse of improved cardiac health, or muscle-toning, or a slimming effect. Nope — these are just solo pleasure-cruises through the water; something I do when I really don’t want to do anything else, like attend to the lengthy to-do list, or engage with consistently depressing news, or do some real exercise. This is an escape for me, at a time in my life when I no longer feel like I’m doing much to earn an escape. Sure, life with five kids in the house is still extremely busy, but as summer slows everything down, kids go away to camp or summer programs, and the house gets quiet, I catch a glimpse of what my life will be like when there are not kids living in the house requiring my attention. It’s a lot….slower. I see the time I will have. And I think — with the luxury of that time, I’d better find more productive things to do than swim leisurely around a pool. And then I think: “Fuck that.” For the time being at least, only the water beckons, nothing else, and so, around and around I swim.