Marin Meltdown

Part I

Of course going out of town is supposed to be fun, restorative, peaceful. But only if there’s a pool. And when PP and Dashingly Handsome BF got to the Marin YMCA the fiasco began.


“Looks like no one's in the pool,” PP murmurs, already having a bad feeling. Why would there be no one in the pool at 3 in the afternoon?

Only one reason.

The pool was closed.

Shit.

It’s once again goddamn spring break. This means that pools are subject to all sorts of wrong scheduling situations.

At Hilltopia it’s ‘Splash Week’—but that’s another blog.

At Utopia it’s Kid’s Boot Camp—but again, this is another blog.

At Marin?

The pool is closed all weekend for Special Spring Cleaning. Or some such shit.

“It’ll be open again Monday morning at 5 a.m.,” the Too Cheerful Marin Y Clerk offers. She wants to hiss, “That doesn’t help us now, does it?” but refrains. Instead she turns and stares sullenly through the glass at the empty pool, one lone pool man skimming the bottom.

Why couldn’t they just let her swim? It looked clean to her. She'd only swim for an hour. Over in the far lane. No one would even notice her. She'd be very quiet and very small.

She sighs loudly, “I’m going to the bathroom." Without looking at either TCMYC or DHBF, she tromps down the hall.

It was all so wrong! she thought as she began her bathroom business. She’d had a hell of a week: grading stacks of Research Papers; navigating her landlady’s move, leaving her stranded with no cable TV or internet; taking the Geo back and forth to the Chinese Mechanic to fix the Check Engine light to no avail.





The trip to Inverness had been her idea to ‘get away from it all’—and the stop at the Marin Y was the first key to this.

And now the goddamn pool was closed. She was hungry. And tired. And it was pouring rain.

What the hell was she going to do? she thought as she headed out of the bathroom to discover DHBF beaming, holding out a sheet of paper to her. “There’s a Y in Santa Rosa that’s open. But that’s pretty far.”
PP grunts.
“And then there’s the Mill Valley Community Center. It’s …”
“I HATE that pool!” she interrupts.

Undaunted, DHBF pretty much ignores this assessment. “It’s open for lap swimming at 3:30 and it’s 3:15 now, so we’ll time it just perfectly.”

PP resists commenting. They’d just been in a stupid fight over ‘time’—she could go on and on about this, but she won’t bore you all with the details. Suffice it to say that Time is usually not DHBF’s strong suit. She thinks he’d be the first to admit it. But maybe not. She'd rather not start another fight because of this blog. Or maybe she would. At least this orneriness captures her mood at the Marin Y.




In any case, the Mill Valley Community Center was always a goddamn Zoo. Full of screaming children in the hot tub; circle swimming adults in clueless abandon; and too much chlorine in the goddamn pool.

Yet……she knew she’d feel better if she got a swim in. She knew she’d feel even worse if they drove to the cabin in Inverness in the pouring rain and then she just sat there in the cold watching it hail down from the sky with no pool in sight.

So, it was off to the Mill Valley Community Center.

Would all of her objections be realized?

Stay tuned for the next part--Mill Valley here she comes!

~to be continued~