Poetic License

Since the onset of my temporary (or permanent) retirement, my days are luxurious and long, filled with daydreams or naps, bracketed by home-cooked meals and steaming mugs of coffee or pitchers of slightly sweet iced tea. Books that had gone unread, gathering dust on my nightstand, now honor me with their gifts of story, whether real or imagined, and I take my own sweet time doing everything. There is no pressure to be done with it all by Monday at 8 a.m. There is no deadline, but there is still an alarm clock that gets me up early. I tend to my animals and sit down with the news and puzzles. It is a good life.

One of the most beautiful and welcome things in my life is the swimming pool. During my last few months of work, I had started work a couple of hours late on Mondays, choosing that day to go to the pool for water aerobics. I worked the extra hours during the week and never made it back for a second session in the pool. If I were lucky – and not too exhausted from work – I would get a second workout of some kind over at the YMCA during the week. I can’t overstate how tired I was at the end of every workday, though. Running over to the gym for a workout was impossible during the day, unlikely before work, and crowded out of my schedule on the weekends. On weekends was when I cleaned house and tried to recover. (I’m not your healthiest 64-year-old, if you haven’t already guessed that.)

When I found myself suddenly and unceremoniously dumped by my employer of 7 years, I said, “Well, I guess I can go to the pool every day now!” I have almost made it to that goal.

I would get up and drive 20 minutes to the bigger YMCA, which has an indoor pool, when lo and behold, my son discovered that until this past Thursday, the outdoor pool at my local Y was holding 8:45 a.m. water aerobics classes. I wish I had known that before! We started to go there. There I found a small group of older women who made the class fun, out in the morning sunshine with smiles on their faces and joy in their heart. They made me feel so welcome. I never wanted the summer to end!

But end it did. On Thursday, I met them all at the pool and we had an amazing class. It was more than movement and resistance, with a dance mix playing on the water resistant JBL pill radio at poolside. Each exercise was more fun than the last. It ended with us taking turns pulling the whip in a splashing, joyful game of crack-the-whip with pool noodles. Our instructor had one more surprise for us, though.

At the end of the class, the teenaged lifeguards went to the utility room and turned the water on for the slide!

Women, one by one, grey-haired and arthritic, climbed up out of the pool, anxious to get in line to climb the ladder to the top of the curved, twisting slide. We’re not talking about a bunch of little kids here, but for a moment, I believed they were. I could see each of them brighten and squeal with delight. Their broad smiles creased their eyes but showed what each of them might have looked like as a girl. The instructor, the former prison guard, the one who was a whiz at cooking — all of them young again. You could see how they might have been, who they might have been, before age had its way with them.

And one by one, down they came, around the curve, around the next, and then shooting out the end of the slide, holding their noses before the big splash! Was that enough? No, of course not. They repeated it over and over, until they tired or found themselves reminded of the bursitis or injury that had never quite healed. But for a short time, they were young again. It was Cocoon all over again!

This bevy of swans graced the pool on Thursday and gave me joy, hope, and a sense of belonging. Friday we greeted each other again, this time at a local cafe, and on the way out, we hugged and said, “See you soon at the pool!”

Only next time we will be indoors, enduring the cooler months while we wait for the return of the sun.

Namaste,
Jude