In the Water
I am generally not motivated by a competition but seeing all the men and women swimming in their lanes did make me think just slightly - I should be able to keep up with them too.
As I watched, trying to catch my breath from my single lap, I became hypnotized. The back and forth, the slow rhythm of their strokes paralleled the larger rhythm of the laps and when you saw the whole pool as a larger organism, the variances in form suddenly harmonized.
The swimmers were profoundly independent of one another. All ages, all speeds, different strokes, different rhythms. But at a distance, the repetition and similarity made you imagine that they were fueling each other, inspiring each other, that the orchestration of the organism was actually generating energy for the neighborhood's electricity. Or alternately that all this light and motion and water and harmony was giving each of them a secret store of energy for the day.
I imagined that they had each, through long habit, created internal swimming pools inside of their bodies. Inside these pools, tiny persistent swimmers, two dozen of them, swam in constant rotations in the lap lanes.
Down - flip - turn - back.
or Down, pause, rest, back.
Crawl, breast, crawl, back.
The tiny swimmers in their internal pools just kept going if their boss casually discarded a proposal that they had worked on for months. The tiny swimmers and the tiny pools kept churning if their hearts broke from an offhanded cruelty that flooded their insides with aching loneliness. Also if good news came and they did a wild happy dance and drank a regrettable second martini - the swimmers and the dependable rate of the tiny swimming pool that had grown inside of them continued oblivious to the weather of these emotions.
The internal pool tethered them to a metronome independent of loss, elation, hysteria, or bleak despair.
Stroke, stroke, flutter kick, stroke, stroke, breath.
(turn)
Stroke, stroke, flutter kick, stroke, stroke, breath.
I watched it all as an embarrassed outsider crouched in the shallow end, my pillowy fat body hiding below the bright gentle chlorinated surface.
I watched and I hid and I tried to catch my breath.
I noted that in their particularities they were less alike. Most were older than me. Some by 10 years. Others by 20 or 30 or 40. A few could barely walk from locker room to pool, legs or ankles or hips twisted and swollen by age and pain, but once submerged the rhythm subsumed them and the metronome and the harmonies became quiet chords and scales and melodies and refrains.
I decided I would at least stay for twenty minutes.
I still hadn't caught my breath but I could just take the breast stroke to the deep end and wait there for air and lungs and heart to catch up with my resolve. Maybe I would never come back, but twenty minutes, measured on the giant swim team clock on the wall? I could wait that long.
I came back. I worked up to a mile. I halved my lap time. I trained and swam a mile across the bay at my cottage. I lost 50 pounds. I worked up to two miles. I bought a speedo. I swam hundreds of miles in at least five states and more than twenty pools. I grew a tiny pool inside of me where two dozen swimmers of varying sizes and ages just keep swimming.
Back, forth, stroke, stroke, flutter kick, stroke, stroke, breathe.
They swim impervious to external threat, discrimination, loss, insult, injury, accomplishment, applause, rewards.
In the water I cannot hear the oxygen world above. It's filtered into a distorted set of oval sounds surrounded by intermittent jzzjing tiny bubbles.
And still...
A part of me will always be fat Andy. Crouched and embarrassed, watching. They belong, he will think. The universe belongs to them in their strong steady strokes. How did they become so replete with strength and skill and community? And fat Andy will resign himself to staying for at least twenty minutes.
(The key to everything is that a part of you is always fat Andy.)
Stroke, stroke, breathe,
(turn)
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