| (Now) I am a swimmer and my love for water grows every day. ... the water teaches me things ... not only about swimming but about life. It is often the little things we do that make the difference between floating and sinking. I can't draw a straight line. I can't carry a tune in a bucket. I can barely balance my own check book. I swim like a rock. I wonder how many things we're convinced we can't do because we've successfully convinced ourselves that we can't. There are more than enough outside restraints placed on us -- why do we add to the list? Despite what I thought were my best efforts, swimming remained on my "can't do list" for a long, long time. It hurt because I always loved water. It hurt even more because I am a Pisces and it's hard to think of anything more pathetic than a fish that can't swim. But I suspect that the greatest influence on my love for water was my grandmother. We all called her Aunt Lee, and she was from Barbados, West Indies. She came to New York City as a young woman, but her heart stayed on the tiny island in the Caribbean. I remember going to Long Island beaches with Aunt Lee and my mother and watching her swim way out past the last buoy as I held onto the thick ropes and rode over the huge waves. She had no fear of the sea. She floated effortlessly over waves as tall as her Harlem apartment building and continued to swim away from shore until her white bathing cap shrunk from the size of a ping-pong ball to a tiny speck on the horizon. Water was her element. Sandy beaches were not the only way that Aunt Lee educated me about water. I often stayed with her and grandfather, Papa, in their Harlem apartment on weekends and school holidays. I slept on the velvet couch on the other side of the French doors that separated the living room from Aunt Lee and Papa's bedroom. On the nights that I slept over, Aunt Lee would shake me firmly telling me to get dressed hours before the city began to quake and rumble. Aunt Lee and I would walk through the sleepy Harlem neighborhoods that were bathed in the incredible indigo that permeated city streets at that hour. Our destination was the park that stretched along the Hudson River. Aunt Lee was always mysteriously silent when we first reached the river. I knew that she was thinking about home, about Barbados. I gazed at the spaces between gentle waves that were beginning to take on the color of the rising sun. Aunt Lee would begin to speak softly as I continued to stare at the river. I could actually see Barbados on those magical mornings. I saw the flying fish rollicking in the Caribbean and darting in and out of the morning fog. I saw Aunt Lee diving for what she called sea eggs and other gifts from the sea. I was 54 years old before I actually visited Barbados. I think the reason is that Aunt Lee's descriptions were so vivid and so imbedded in my heart and brain that all I had to do was close my eyes to be there. There were also real opportunities to spend time in the water very close to the housing projects I grew up in on the Lower East Side of New York City. The East River, that separates Manhattan from Brooklyn, is right across the highway from my projects and some kids were foolish enough to still swim there despite the fact that raw sewage from the projects was pumped directly into the river. The kids who swam there were swimming in -- among other things -- their parents' nostalgia connected to the days when the river had fish, the days before it became an enormous cesspool. It never occurred to me to even stick a toe in the East River. But there was a public swimming pool a mere 10-block walk from where I lived. It was called the Twenty-Third Street Swimming Pool. It cost 25 cents to get in and you could stay there all day. There was one large rectangular pool that was four feet deep, and a small diving pool that was nine feet deep. I was a non-swimmer but a pretty good diver and more than a little foolish so I'd routinely dive into the nine-foot pool and drift the short distance to an edge of the pool. The four-foot pool was great fun but not a place to swim or learn to swim. It was always way too crowded. On a good day I could barely take two feeble strokes before bumping into someone. There was also a Boys Club in walking distance from where I lived. It had a swimming pool on the fifth floor. You had to take a swimming test to use the deep end of the pool. I failed that test more times than I can remember. I have to credit sheer will and stubbornness for the few times that I made it from one end of the pool to the other. But I was not a swimmer. Swimmers do not fight the water -- they relax in it, respect it and somehow know deep inside that the water will protect them. You cannot successfully fight water because the water will always win. And if you think about it, fighting the water is like punching yourself in the face because our bodies are about 60 percent water. Interesting perhaps, but these little revelations did not stop me from sinking. So I put swimming on the list of things that I probably would not get around to learning in this lifetime. But something changed. My mother was diagnosed with cancer -- I think it was sometime in the spring of 2003. She has recovered beautifully, and I think focusing on a trip to Barbados was a key part of her recovery. My mother left Barbados when she was 12 years old and arrived in New York City on Christmas day 1937. In all the intervening years, she had never returned to the place where she was born. After my mother's surgery, she asked her doctor if it would be OK to take a trip to Barbados with her children (me, my sister Valerie and her husband Fred) before starting chemotherapy. Her doctor thought that the trip could be a good idea in that it would give her something positive to focus on. When my mother asked me if I would accompany her on the Barbados trip, I said 'yes' without any hesitation. The usual and often false considerations of time off from work, money and other logistics did not enter into the equation. I was going to Barbados. I was going to see the place where my mother was born. I was going to swim in the sea that Aunt Lee had told me about so many times. But there was one small problem: I still couldn't swim. So I figured that if my mother could take an arduous adventure of a lifetime following cancer surgery, then I could certainly learn to swim before the trip. One way to look at it is that I created new urgency around swimming. As much as I hated to admit it, I would likely be 112 years old before I would teach myself to swim. Swimming lessons presented to only reasonable alternative, so I signed up at a local health club. I felt pretty silly as a big middle-aged man doing little swimming exercises with a noodle and other floatation devices while little kids sat on the edge of the pool kicking the water and laughing while waiting for their lessons. Then I was reminded that feeling downright silly is a necessary part of learning and that regardless of my size and age, my swimming skills were comparable to the little munchkins on the side of the pool with their water wings and inflatable sea monsters. I visited Barbados and swam in the sea in the summer of 2003 and I've been swimming ever since. My mother is doing fabulously and living the good life in California just a few miles from my sister Valerie. By the way, Valerie is also addicted to swimming now and she's taking lessons. I don't have any plans to enter swimming competitions or to become a great swimmer, but now I am a swimmer and my love for water grows every day. When I am quiet enough and trusting enough, the water teaches me things -- not only about swimming but about life. It is often the little things we do that make the difference between floating and sinking. I wonder what other impossible things we can learn to do. What's on your list? |
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| Simple things/Lang Kenneth Haynes Swimming |
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