I learned how to swim the way a lot of kids in the family did. My father threw me into a swimming pool. Arms and legs akimbo. Panicked scream. Splash. “OK, now come back.”
I have pictures, taken at a La Quinta Inn, in El Paso, Texas. This was my parent’s idea of a vacation. It included a day trip into Juarez to haggle with merchants over the price of a marble chess set my father would later discover was not 8×8 square but 8×7. He tried to convince us that this was Mexican chess.
In one photo, my dad is trying to teach me to float on my back. He is holding me, one hand positioned beneath my shoulder blades, the other at my knees. You can see the tendons in my neck. I could not have been stiffer if I were in full rigor.
I know he will let me go and I will flounder and sputter and he will catch me again and tell me to relax. He will insist upon it. Relax! I will cry. We would replay a similar scene years later when he tried to teach me to drive.
Over the years, my siblings and cousins and I got the hang of holding our breath for elaborate bottom-of- the-pool tea parties. We could do a serious dog paddle. But I went out for track in high school. One foot in front of the other, every step planted on sweet terra firma.
I learned to swim the way most of the kids in my family did. Which is to say we didn’t.
I started taking swimming lessons in mid-March. I was inspired by Las Hermanas, a group of women I wrote about back then. The women were interested in triathlon. Most were new to the sport. New as in it had never before entered their vocabulary. Couldn’t swim. Didn’t run. Hadn’t biked since girlhood.
The prospect of completing a triathlon both exhilarated and terrified them. It wasn’t just that they were looking to lose some pounds or improve their physical fitness. It was, I said then, that they yearned for transformation.
I think now that was only partially true. That meeting was also an act of reclamation. What they sought to reclaim, I could only guess. But on that list might be confidence, vigor and self, the self apart from mother, wife, employee, boss.
Are you going to join us? the women asked me. I held up my notes as I would a shield. I don’t know how to swim, I said.
I was almost 46, the mother of two children still in elementary school. I have a decade full of hubbub between now and my son’s high school graduation. I was almost 46. I had officially outlived my mother. I had moved into time she did not have. I had asked myself what I would do with it.
I went out and bought a bathing suit.
I’m not going to train for a triathlon, I told the women, but I’ll join you for the swimming lessons. The head coach, Yoli Casas, put me in a lane with the other beginners. Beginning is a matter of definition. A few of the women were terrified of water. Think of that. Every step down the ladder into the water was a display of courage.
You’re going to learn how to breathe, Casas told me. I bobbed in the water and blew bubbles, my head popping above the surface, then sinking below. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Like a kid. I came up grinning every time.
The rec center has windows that face east, framing the city skyline. In the morning, the sunlight illuminates the buildings and dapples the pool’s surface. All I can hear are the steady strokes of the other swimmers.
I was not prepared for this simple, quiet pleasure. For the way the world shrinks so that there is, for this hour, no more parking ticket I forgot to pay, no more daughter’s oboe reed I forgot to buy, no more work e-mail still waiting for me to answer.
All that exists are the light and the smell of chlorine and the feel of water around me, my arms moving through it, pulling me forward, my kick, my terrible kick, propelling me.
I catch myself, much as I am doing now, announcing to acquaintances that I am learning to swim, really swim, and when they ask how it’s going, I say: awesome. As if I were 12 years old.
It can be difficult to know when one is reclaiming some forgotten part of self or laying hold of something new, a heretofore unknown aspect. Courage or ability or tenacity or something else. I watch my fellow learners take their first strokes with their faces in the water or swim their first lap and then their second.
I watch them laugh — you must be kidding — when the coaches say “swim four 200s with 15-second rests between each.” And then they go out and do it.
I decide whichever it is, discovery or rediscovery, claiming or reclaiming, it is sometimes accompanied by frustration and often by exhaustion, but almost always, by joy.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
