Once a Quitter
I'm standing at the edge of the pool, too scared to move. Elaine's in the water, her arms stretched out to catch me. Never been in anything but a wading pool up to now. Those are fun, sitting and splashing in the water, with my mom and my sister. Annie's a year older. She's not afraid to go into the big kids pool. I’m afraid of everything.
After a long wait and plenty of coaxing, I jump in, and Elaine catches me. Not so bad! Look, daddy, I’m swimming! I learn how to kick and stroke, and before too long, I'm making my way up the ranks at the Y, earning patches with names like guppy and minnow. Did I make it to porpoise or shark? Who knows. My favorite lifeguard is a man named Mark. He’s 19, about to join the Navy rather than get drafted.
The diving board was a blast. There were two low ones and a high dive. My early favorite kind of dive was the belly flop, which was discouraged. I gathered up the nerve to jump off the high dive once. Only once. That was enough for me.
Once I reached a certain rank, my dad switched me to swim team. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my idea. He didn’t want me to be a quitter, and this was his way of showing me how. He drove me to the Y for practice at night, unplugging his hearing aid while I listened to rock n roll on the AM. He’d plug back in every top and half of the hour to listen to the news, which was boring for me as a kid.
Swim team was mostly okay till we got a new coach who hated children. At least it seemed so to me. All I remember is that he was tall and skinny, with long, stringy brown hair, and he was mean to us, don’t ask me how. He was standing by the pool one day, and I was standing behind him, silent. He didn’t know I was there. So I pushed him in. Everyone thought it was funny, except him. When he got out of the pool and started heading towards me, I scrammed up the stairs into the locker room with him running and yelling right behind me. I spent the next ten minutes darting from here to there, trying to stay out of reach. But he was bigger than me, and eventually he cornered me, picked me up, and dragged me back down to the pool, kicking and swinging. Then he threw me in the pool, which was no big deal since I was already dressed for it, not like him, his clothes soaked head to toe. He probably had a wallet and keys on him, too. No wonder he was mad.
We had an uneasy truce after that. I didn’t get into trouble, and pretty soon he was gone. Like I said, he didn’t like children.
At some point, my dad decided there was a better swim team for me to be on, but it involved my mom dragging me and Annie all the way to El Monte by bus, which required transfers and what seemed like an hour just to get there. I don’t remember how we got back, but it was probably my dad picking us up after he got off work. Sometimes we ate ice cream at the Tastee Freez. That was before anyone ever worried about whether it’s good for you to eat ice cream.
I was a decent swimmer. I could do freestyle, breast stroke, and back stroke, no problem. Butterfly was tricky. I don’t think I ever won anything for butterfly, though years later, I became quite fond of it. I gathered quite a few ribbons and trophies, mostly blue ones and red ones, an occasional white one, tall ones and short ones, with the event engraved on it. I still wanted to quit, but by then they’d opened a brand new swim stadium by our house, so my dad joined me to that team, instead.
Finally, they let me quit. I joined the Boy Scouts, instead. My idea, and not a good one. I was the only one of me in our whole troop, and even the Scoutmaster thought the boys themselves should be in charge of my character building program. He had two sons, the younger of which, Warren, was someone I already didn’t like. I don’t recall the older boy’s name, but he was even worse. We went to camp for a week that summer, and I slept with one eye open, afraid someone would dip my hand into warm water to make me pee in my sleeping bag.
After that, I joined another troop where the boys were all really nice, but by then I just wanted to quit altogether, so I did.
I’m sure my dad was disappointed. He didn’t want me to be a quitter, but that’s just who I am. I’ve barely scratched the surface of everything I’ve quit along the way. Swim team, Boy Scouts, college. I eventually went back and got a degree in Political Science and Spanish, but I never did anything with those. Even now, after 23 years, I quit my IT business. I quit keynote speaking before barely getting started.
The one thing I haven’t quit is storytelling. I’ve been doing it in one form or another since me and Elston wrote that novel about Jed and Stefia, the talking dogs, back in fifth grade when we were supposed to be paying attention in class. I suppose you could say that’s when I quit paying attention to what everyone else said I should be doing. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
I probably should have listened to my dad and not been such a quitter. Who knows where I’d be. Still in the pool, no doubt.
