Where did you learn to swim

My father had been a lifeguard as a teenager and had determined early on that his children would have at least some skills against drowning. The summer of my sixth year found me in my small-town community pool with several other kids my age all learning to float, dive, flip, tread water and swim. Floaties were prohibited in that class, and to this day I cringe when I see kids using them instead of learning to swim for real. My swim instructor was very good and was loved by all the kids. She managed the local pool as long as I could remember. We always used to ask her why she wasn't married and didn't have a boyfriend. She would always awkwardly evade the question, and if any parents were around we would be immediately shushed and told not to be rude. We would catch bits of hushed conversations from the parents, but in our innocence we didn't know what a *** was and usually didn't even realize they were talking about our teacher. Not that it made any difference at all, but it's one of those things you suddenly remember twenty years later and say, "Oo-oh! Okay, nooow I get it." Another weird memory of that deep-south pool was that black people were not allowed in there. The pool was restricted to residents of the city. No black people lived in the city limits, because no one would sell or rent housing to them. Once, when a black family moved just inside the city line, the city redrew its map to un-annex that property. Eventually a black family bought a house too far inside the city limits to draw around, and they had to prove they lived inside the city legitimately before they could use the pool (whereas the white kids just paid for the pass and got in with no trouble). A few white families refused to use the pool after that. The children were actually protected in some measure from this bigotry. For years I and all the other kids just thought black people couldn't swim (or just preferred to splash around in the river nearby), just like we all believed that our teacher just hadn't ever found the right boyfriend. That teacher took me and a handful of others and made a team. We sucked and lost continually. Interest in a swim team waned in the community, so I had to go to a "swim and tennis club" across town, where the coach had once been a world-class flyer who had been just a hair too slow for the Olympic team. That's where I really learned some technique and picked up some speed. I continued swimming until my early teenage years, when I got beaten up by an older kid at a swim meet. So I gave up swimming in favor of martial arts. It was fifteen years before I came back to the water. Now I'm glad I learned to take a beating, because I need that training to be able to swim at my current pool.

My father had been a lifeguard as a teenager and had determined early on that his children would have at least some skills against drowning. The summer of my sixth year found me in my small-town community pool with several other kids my age all learning to float, dive, flip, tread water and swim. Floaties were prohibited in that class, and to this day I cringe when I see kids using them instead of learning to swim for real. My swim instructor was very good and was loved by all the kids. She managed the local pool as long as I could remember. We always used to ask her why she wasn't married and didn't have a boyfriend. She would always awkwardly evade the question, and if any parents were around we would be immediately shushed and told not to be rude. We would catch bits of hushed conversations from the parents, but in our innocence we didn't know what a *** was and usually didn't even realize they were talking about our teacher. Not that it made any difference at all, but it's one of those things you suddenly remember twenty years later and say, "Oo-oh! Okay, nooow I get it." Another weird memory of that deep-south pool was that black people were not allowed in there. The pool was restricted to residents of the city. No black people lived in the city limits, because no one would sell or rent housing to them. Once, when a black family moved just inside the city line, the city redrew its map to un-annex that property. Eventually a black family bought a house too far inside the city limits to draw around, and they had to prove they lived inside the city legitimately before they could use the pool (whereas the white kids just paid for the pass and got in with no trouble). A few white families refused to use the pool after that. The children were actually protected in some measure from this bigotry. For years I and all the other kids just thought black people couldn't swim (or just preferred to splash around in the river nearby), just like we all believed that our teacher just hadn't ever found the right boyfriend. That teacher took me and a handful of others and made a team. We sucked and lost continually. Interest in a swim team waned in the community, so I had to go to a "swim and tennis club" across town, where the coach had once been a world-class flyer who had been just a hair too slow for the Olympic team. That's where I really learned some technique and picked up some speed. I continued swimming until my early teenage years, when I got beaten up by an older kid at a swim meet. So I gave up swimming in favor of martial arts. It was fifteen years before I came back to the water. Now I'm glad I learned to take a beating, because I need that training to be able to swim at my current pool.