There is also this, Fans.
Until a few weeks ago, Joe would have said that he already knew how to swim. It was true that he could move his limbs in an uncoordinated symphony that, despite the absence of any semblance of real organization, still served to move him through the water. He floats in it without holding his body stiff, and he enters it without a second thought. His comfort in the water is itself a comfort, gratifying to see.
But he'd gotten rather too big for his swim trunks. The bambini go to swimming classes Saturday mornings, and a few weeks ago, Joe was goofing off in his class, distracting his teacher and the other students in his class. Julie watched from one of the benches that line perimeter of the pool, her irritation building.
So after class, when he was wrapped up in his towel, Julie asked him to sit next to her on the bench and put it to him straight. She said something like, "You think you know how to swim? Well you don't. You are comfortable in the water and that's about it. Stop acting like you know everything, especially when it comes to swimming which is about a lot more than being comfortable in the he water; it's also about being
safe in the water." That's when she added that she'd signed Joe up go to day camp with Graham for two weeks this summer, where there would be swimming every day, but that if didn't start paying attention and practicing what he was being taught in swim classes, then he wouldn't be going.
It's sometimes hard to know how best to deliver a lesson in a "teachable moment," if you even recognize the moment for what it is. Julie felt terrible--taking Joe down a peg like that, watching his face fall, not adding a coda like "I want you to have fun, but I want you to be safe, too," to soften the punch. She had a hard time not smiling when Joe asked her when he and Graham were going to go to "swimming day care," a hard time keeping her voice flat when she replied, "July--if you shape up--and not at all if you don't."
If only Joe knew that the idea of obliterating those two weeks from the quilt of summer care working parents must stitch together is practically unthinkable! But he doesn't and mercifully, it hasn't come to that. Our Hero shaped up and yesterday, graduated from the Little 4 class to the Middle 2 class. He's not always perfectly behaved, but that's o-kay. He's present, learning, stroking, breathing.
Two weeks ago yesterday, a St. Louis Park middle schooler, a 12-year-old boy in seventh grade, died after drowning in the school's pool. He was found after the end of a gym class, in the pool's deep end, unconscious, but alive, and died two days later. The Parent Teacher Student Organization--the PTSO--asked that orange balloons be flown outside homes and business a week ago Friday to mark a day of remembrance for the boy, whose family has said could not swim, prompting all kinds of questions about why he was in the deep end and the class's supervision.
Of course the bambini asked why there were orange balloons all over town. Telling them that the balloons were to remember a 12-year-old middle school boy who died, and for his family and friends who love him and miss him, prompted questions about how people die--though not how
this boy died. Questions about death and dying aren't easy to answer, but when a child is asking them, it seems like the questions that start with how are easier to field than those that start with why, and they are more easily answered when they are about death as an abstraction, rather than a specific death.
The balloons, what happened to prompt their appearance, and the questions they prompted, have all sent Julie's memory back, and back again, in recent days to that poolside moment after Joe's swimming class, when she harshly told Joe he couldn't swim. She's felt keenly all our good fortune.
We have the time, and money, and inclination to try to ensure that the bambini know how to swim, but it is not really that fortune whose weight Julie has felt. Because in spite of all one might do to guard against accidents, she knows they still happen. She's felt the fortune of knowing the feel of the warm weight of the bambini in her arms, knowing even the cut of the irony of being frustrated at their interruptions as she tries to write these particular words, knowing the swell of love that pulls her away from the words, and back to the life.
