Extra Value Swim Lessons

During the last ten minutes of the final day of swim lessons the manager turned on all the pool’s assorted water toys and let the children run free, a combined celebration and break from the ceaseless toil of never-ending bobs, floats and dives.

My son raced away from his instructor and spent the time at a row of some half-dozen jets designed to shoot water head-high to the grade-school set. At first he was content merely to run through them, but once an instructor showed him how, by blocking one of the jets with his foot, he could make the rest rush ultra-high, he did nothing else. If one blocked jet created a four-foot tower, he pondered, how high would three blocked jets go? He enlisted a friend when the span of his own feet fell short and the two created a geyser that loomed as high as a dinosaur and no doubt just as thrilling.

He was, in short, in heaven.

In contrast, his sister hardly budged from the side of her teacher, a seventeen-year-old slaving in the pool before commencing her senior year come September. My child idolizes her; she chatters incessantly about her hair and assortment of swimsuits when we’re not at the pool and hurries to sit next to her as soon as we are. This young woman wobbles on the very precipice of adulthood, one moment speaking to me clinically about my child’s progress, the next tugging on the top of her suit and flipping her hair as another swim instructor, a young man, saunters by.

These two teach next to each other in the pool, and while lessons themselves are carried out with the nothing but professionalism, the few moments between lessons allow for a just an inch of hijinx. Then the two surreptitiously splash at each other and whisper quietly. There is much gazing into eyes.

It is very sweet.

I watch, all but invisible due to age, from beneath a huge umbrella. I watch because I can so clearly remember being seventeen and enveloped in love and lust. I watch because I can’t remember being so effortlessly beautiful — though photographic evidence says I was.

And I watch because my child watches. She grins right along with her teacher as they splash the boy, and if he splashes back she gets wet too. “Do it this way,” the teacher demonstrated during the one class I spent with them in the water, and I watched my little girl’s eyes shine as she got a response from the young man. She beamed and laughed and I could so clearly picture her assuming the teacher’s place in just a decade.

“It’s a class in swimming and flirting all at once!” I said to the teacher, and she agreed that it certainly seemed so.

Two classes for the price of one? I’m happy with that bargain.