Some years ago, I went through a period of time when I had difficulty falling asleep. I did not seek medicinal remedies, but tried various relaxation techniques, mostly involving breathing exercises that I learned when taking Lamaze Prepared Childbirth classes with my first bride. After tossing and turning and breathing, I finally hit on a ritual that worked: I imagined myself swimming. I would visualize my slow, rhythmic movement through the water, stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, stroke…
I learned water survival early. The public swimming pool in my neighborhood was a place when one learned combat swimming, and the ability to survive the assaults of aqua-thugs. I competed in swimming in high school and when my first daughter was six months old, her mother and I enrolled her in a “diaper dip” swimming class. She has taught my two grandchildren to swim, and when I watched them in the pool at their apartment complex, I introduced them to the routine their aunt and uncle had found exciting: dolphin rides.
When my two youngest children were staying with me in St. Louis, Missouri, (I was divorced from their mother, who lived in Indiana) the 18-story apartment building where I lived had a pool on the roof. Lauren and Chris loved to swim in that pool and take dolphin rides with me. I would tell them to hold me tightly around the neck and with them on my back, would gently submerge, swim a few feet under water, then resurface. They would shake their heads to fling the water from their faces and cry out to me, “Again! Again!” Before they learned to swim, I would tease them by standing on the deep side of the pool’s rope and sing songs from the 1989 Disney movie, The Little Mermaid. I would imitate the voice of Sebastian the crab, belting out “Under The Sea,” and the more mellow, “Kiss The Girl.” This ritual was passed on to my first two grandchildren, who learned to embrace the ritual of dolphin rides, whose cries of “Again! Again!” echoed those of their aunt and uncle and overrode my “Under The Sea!”
Seventy-one percent of the planet Earth is covered by water, and approximately 60 percent of the human body is water. Water is a life-giving and healthy substance everywhere (except perhaps, in Flint, Michigan) and for most living things. I have spent as much time in it as I could, in high school, in public pools and in the rivers, creeks and oceans that I could get to. As a young boy, I watched the 1954 movie, Creature From The Black Lagoon, and marveled at the fantastic scene where a woman swims atop the water, and the creature below her matches her stroke for stroke, upside down, swimming, swimming.
Jef Mallett’s cartoon character, Frazz, is a songwriter who is a custodian at a grade school. The kids love Frazz, and in one series, he tries to teach an African-American boy to swim. That lesson was comedic magic to me, as Caulfield (named after J. D. Salinger’s character) struggled to learn to swim. At the end of that segment, Mallett published a statistic highlighting the high numbers of African-American children who drown, never having learned to swim.
“Dad: She’s all in,” my daughter Lauren called out to me. She was watching a DVD of The Little Mermaid with my 16-month-old granddaughter, who was transfixed on the underwater play as Samuel E. Wright voiced Sebastian the crab’s song, exhorting Ariel and contending that “everything’s better, down where it’s wetter, under the sea!”
My circle of water is complete.
cjon3acd@att.net