With autumn officially beginning today, another summer has gone by and I still have not learned how to swim.
Not that I didn’t try for so many years. I did go for 15 years to sleepaway camp where instructional swim was mandatory for campers. Okay, those last six years I was a counselor and could evade any swim instruction.
Speaking of evading instruction, for one of my summers I almost earned an intermediate instruction certificate (I would have qualified if I had mastered treading water).
My instructor told me to dive into deep water, swim underwater for 10 yards then tread water. I didn’t want to as I was not certified to dive into deep water, but as he was much larger than I, I reluctantly complied.
My dive was decent. I swam underwater. But as I surfaced I spouted I could not tread water. I sank, only to be raised above the surface by the head of the waterfront who, when I responded to his inquiry in the negative if I knew how to swim, admonished me never to enter deep water again before successfully learning to swim.
My instructor had pity on me so he gave me the Intermediate card with the proviso that I truly earn it next year.
How convenient. Armed with that card I evaded the mandatory swimming requirements at my high school and college.
I am not proud I do not know how to swim. I made sure our children learned. Dan even became a certified life guard, one summer working at FDR State Park’s public swimming pool where he alone recorded a dozen saves out of the more than several hundred that season.
My antipathy towards swimming is deep seeded. In two videos taken when I was younger than five, I can be seen struggling to get out of the water. In one, my mother is holding me in the pool of the Takanassee Hotel in Fleischmann, NY., where our family spent several weeks each summer. In the second, we are at the shore, probably Rockaway Beach, and Meyer Engelstein, a close friend of my father, is struggling not to drop me as waves break around us.
Much the same way I never learned to ride a two wheel bike as a youngster because my father let go and I fell hard on the pavement, I must have had some traumatic early childhood experience that has prevented me from feeling, from breathing, comfortably in water.
Eventually, when 40, I learned to bike. Despite attempts to teach me to swim, I never learned.
I am constantly surprised by friends and acquaintances who sheepishly admit they too cannot swim. A few months ago David G. suggested I join him at Westchester Community College’s beginners swimming class for seniors.
I agreed, but when it was time to sign up, somehow our communication got scrambled. I have no doubt it was my subconscious fault. Given another chance, as David masters advanced beginners on Sunday, I enrolled in the beginners’ class. Friday was my first lesson.
Asked by Angela, the instructor, what I hope to accomplish, I unhesitatingly said I wanted to learn how to tread water.
