CORNERED AND KICKED-Episode One

THIS IS MY BODY

I weigh 171 pounds. That's according to the scale in the locker room at the YMCA. I trust that scale, as I've come to believe the things I learn in the locker room at the local YMCA. This came after I doubted the story a guy in the steam room at the Y told a couple of months ago.  He said that the nuns who were overseeing his Catholic school class trip accidentally extinguished the eternal flame at JFK's tomb by dousing it with holy water. That may be the greatest story that anyone has ever told in a locker room, and (according to Wikipedia, which I instantly checked when I got home), it was true. So I suppose I can believe that I weigh 171 pounds. There will be 171 pounds of 53 year-old me taking on the challenges of this, the athletics section of The Peerless Ear. My weight can and will fluctuate over the course of these pages, but the age will go only in one direction, as much as I might travel backwards in memory.

To return, then, to my original point: I weigh 171 pounds, and it's this body that will hike, bike, kick, splash, trip, and fall through these tales.  This body—this five foot five inch, 171 pound body—is doing OK after a half-century or so of use.  Its blood pressure always runs a bit high, it sometimes has dizzy spells when it is asked to turn upside-down, and its right eye has recovered nicely enough, though not completely, from a couple of surgeries. It wheezes a bit in the cold air, its calf muscles get sore very easily, and injuries that used to heal in hours now take months and months. It is this body that I've slid into Speedo jammers, topped with a cap and fitted with goggles, and then plopped into the pool at the Y every day this week.

Indeed, though much of this section of The Peerless Ear (hereafter TPE) will follow the fortunes of The North Branford Legends, the soccer team whose season will begin in about two weeks (if the April snow that is falling outside the window as I type ever melts and disappears), swimming will come first. No cleats, no bike, no kayak, no helmet, no teammates, no racquet, no glove: just this 171 pound body in the water, doing the best it can.

Of course, years ago, there was less of me, and the best this body could do wasn't really so bad. I've always been a creature of the water, ever since our dad taught us to swim very early by holding me and my brother by our ankles upside-down in lakes and pools and then letting go. 

We invariably swallowed gallons of water and threw up. I suppose I got used to it in time, and eventually, I became a swimmer. In fact, I swam competitively for eight years, back in the day before anyone wore goggles, coming home every night with weird chorine-induced optical illusions. Go ahead and try it. If you swim in a heavily chlorinated pool at a military academy in the nineteen-seventies without goggles for two hours a night for eight years, every light you see will be surrounded by a rainbow halo. It's like being at a Grateful Dead concert. I'm sure that explains the look on my face in this photo. 

It was taken, as far as I can tell, in about 1978. I was a sprinter, defending my "anchor" spot on the 200 yard freestyle relay. I had a little speed and a lot of attitude and managed to keep my spot in the relay every time someone tried to challenge me, though all that comes from this picture is that I was very aware of the camera, even right before a race. That's a constant with me. Real athletes focus; I look around.

These days, at the Y, I feel either very sleek and speedy (if the pool is filled with 75 year-olds recovering from hip surgery) or lumpy and slow (if I wind up sharing a lane with someone young or fit or ambitious who's in a hurry to pass me again and again and again).  I chug and splash along and do my fifty laps, switching from freestyle to breaststroke and back again, daydreaming so energetically (about Shakespeare, about TPE, about my volleyball team, about cooking) that I generally lose track of where I am in my workout and punish myself by starting a set over from the beginning. When I finish, just to show off, no matter how tired I am, I pop up out of the pool, just the way I did at seventeen, right out of the water and straight onto my feet: no wimpy ladders or steps for this guy! As I grab my towel and head to the locker room, hoping for more tales in the steam room, I can see the records, up on the wall, for the local swim club. My own fifty yard freestyle, back in the winter of 1980, when I was seventeen, was a 26.6.  Not bad, I think, as I look up at the board, panting athletically, and I search for where that would put me against the kids of 2016. Not bad at all. I was a little quicker than Ali Tyler, the record holder for the Wallingford Dolphins. Of course, she's nine.

Thanks for reading TPE. Again, you can subscribe with the link that's at the bottom of the page (at least on the web verson).  The next post will be the first in the "While I Can Still Remember" section, a memoir about teaching and learning. Indeed, it was while taking a Water Safety Instructor class at the Y near my hometown that I first became taken with the idea of teaching people things, so I suppose that the four threads of TPE are going to be woven together like…like… A CHALLAH!   Stay tuned!

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