There have been many times I wish I had learned to swim when I was young. I am deathly afraid of the water which makes learning to swim all the more difficult. That’s way too much water to drink. I think it would have been easier if I tackled this task when I was a young kid because kids are fearless much to the horror of their parents.
I’ve gone on a few tropical vacations in my adult life, (Hawaii, Bahamas) where swimming would have been a wonderful treat. The waters were so blue and cool and refreshing and so darn inviting but yet I sat on the sidelines and just wished I had the guts to go in. People were swimming, jet skiing, playing March Polo, looking quite cool on those very hot summer days.
Many years ago when I lived at home with my parents we had a pool in the back yard. Kind of ironic if you ask me since none of us were swimmers. We never went to the pool or beach to swim as a family. I think maybe if we had my younger sister would not have drowned at the neighborhood community pool many years previous when we were kids.
I remember looking out into the back yard one particularly hot summer afternoon and watching my father swim. He was standing on the edge of the pool at the high end and dove right in and swam to the other side and climbed out, walked back over to the high end and drove right back in.
I was totally shocked. I stood there for a few minutes processing what I had just witnessed. I was 20 years old at the time and had never seen my father swim. Never. I had no idea he even knew how to swim. Why in all these years had he not taken us to a pool or beach to go swimming? I have no idea but it would have been nice and I’m sure he would have been able to teach me to swim since there was no man in the world I trusted more then my father to keep me safe.
Labels: Thoughts