Monday, May 28, 2007

HALLELUJAH FOR THE DUCK GUARDS!


They are very serious. The duck Lifeguards. She sits placidly on the side of Capt. Gwen’s Harbor Bay Pool, watching serenely as CG kicks back and forth, back and forth. Then Pool Puss enters, delighted to no end to have a couple of quakers as her audience. But then realizes, no it’s not entertainment for them. They’re working. As witnessed by Ms. Quacker nudging Mr. Quacker out of the water and up onto the deck. Time to stop swimming for god sakes! There are people swimming! And lord knows, they need watching.

And so he does as she bids. Flapping up and out of the turquoisy misty water and up onto the deck next to her. Stands first on one webbed foot then the other. Tucking the unused one up under his broad round feathered belly as he stares intently at the two swimmers. For true to form, Capt. G’s pool is all theirs.

With the exception of the Duck Guards who know the pool will be all theirs again soon. When those darn people get out!

And out they do eventually. After a lovely, languid magical swim. The Ducks never taking their beady eyes from the two swimmers. PP giggling every time she passes them.

“Hey, G, did you see we have Duck Lifeguards tonight?” PP hollers over the lane line at her friend.

Capt. G shakes her head and grins. “Yeah, they’re here in the morning a lot. But haven’t seen them at night before,” pulling her goggles down over her eyes and diving off at a brisk crawl.

PP thinks this must be a sign. To have the Duck Guards here for HER swim. Esp. since she hasn’t been to Capt, G’s pool in months. The ducks musta known she was coming!

“Whew! That was so nice!” Capt. Gwen exclaims as they stumble spacedely out of the Club House back out to the parking lot, their wet heads nodding thankfully. “There’s just nothing like swimming!”

“Yup!” PP agrees. It’s so obvious.

“You know, for a while there, I was goin thro this existential crisis and even tried joining a few churches,” CG chuckles, shaking her wet head.
“You’re kidding!”
“Yeah, can you believe it? I tried all these different kinds of churches. Christian Churches. Humanitarian Churches. Unitarian Churches. And I’d be getting up early on Sunday mornings and thinking, Damn, I’d rather be at the Pool! And so then I’d skip church the next week and go the pool instead and think, yeah, duh, Church doesn’t make me feel this good! Only the Pool does!”

“Praise the Lord!” PP giggles.
“Yeah! And you know, I’ve talked to some of these other women that I’ve gotten to know since swimming here the last few months and they all say the same thing. NOTHING makes US feel better than swimming. Not Church. Not some Dumb Aerobics Class.
“Not sex?” PP grins as she climbs into CG’s family van.
Capt. G got that little gleam in her eye that PP knows so well….”
“Well…..maybe not sex, ok, not better than Good Sex!” she qualifies, laughing.

And PP joins in! It’s so true!
Yup, it’s the Church of the Pool. The Guru of the Swim! The Spirit of the Water.

Hell, whatever it is, Hallelujah!

Now if only they could get that Pool High organized somehow. They could go on cable T.V. and sing the praises of swimming laps, and kicking back and breathing rhythmically.

Hell, it’d be a moneymaker for sure.

As long as the congregation could swim, that is.

Or if they couldn’t?

Well, there’s always the Duck Guards!

Quack !

PP sighs happily to herself as CG pulls out of the parking lot and heads back home, leaving the ducks to swim playfully in their very own Quacker Church!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

“Water, Air, and Divinity, what a great combination. Free too, no one passing the “plate”, no one proselytizing, no one giving hell fire damnation for having “fun”. Perhaps “duck guards are some of the original songsters of the “universal church” in which we all belong like it or not….

Anonymous said...

It seems that the lesson here is - those ducks are more than life guards. They are the real ministers, the high priests, maybe even the ultimate Gurus themselves. In fact who needs a prattling old preacher or the fussy rituals of a stuffy church when you can have the the baptism of real temperature-controlled water, under the angelic watch of a Life Guard, plus the whimsical waddling wisdom of the true Quacker (better even than a Quaker). Oh how very zen-quack-erific!

Logorrhea

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