“How was your swim lesson?” We’re in the Kennedy High Pool locker room. The two women are bustling to remove their colorful suits: one bright pink with soft rose flowers, the other a vivid Prussian blue solid. I’d seen them in the pool earlier, their radiant suits standing out from everyone else’s black and navy ones. One had her hair piled up like a mountain inside a large black cap --a towering spectacle. The other had her matching fuchsia cap—only a small round hill atop her head.
They climbed
into the pool gingerly, squealing even though they were both at least 50 years
old.
Now we’re
getting dressed next to each other in the mayhem that is Saturday morning post
swim lesson: screaming children, frazzled moms, laps swimmers trying to get the
hell out of there.
“It was
great,” one of the women answered me now, as she pulled on her yellow and
orange striped sundress.
“It looked
like you all were having fun,” I respond.
One of them
gave me a look, then laughed. “Oh, we were on the Struggle Bus!” she exclaimed,
laughing, her friend nodding.
The Struggle Bus! I thought to myself. Wow! That is saying a lot about their experience. It is not lost on me that here I am, a white woman, talking to two Black women, and the connection to Rosa Parks and the struggle for Civil Rights. Is this where the term comes from I wonder?
But when I think about it, swimming can also be struggle, though of course not comparable to the henious kinds of bigotry and discrimination Black people went through and continue to go through in the US.
But if you're learning to swim as an adult, it’s not a natural thing to be doing;
donning a swimsuit and cap and goggles, learning specific motions to move your
body through the water. I see how hard it is for many of these learners. How their
arms fall flat on the surface of the water, no airplane angle with elbow up whatsoever.
And the kicking with its massive splashing starting at the knee instead of the
moving from the hip and using your core.
It is a
struggle!
I forget this since the water is my home. I feel so natural
in the water, moving through it easily and gratefully. My lightness and ease in
the water is what I live for. But I’ve been swimming all my life.
“Did you
swim competitively?” a big tank of a man asked me the next day.
“Yes.”
“Me too.
When did you learn how to swim?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was
really little, 4, 5 or 6?”
“Yeah, me too. Learned down at
The Plunge in fact.”
“I learned
at the Sunset Hills Club in La Puente.” I don’t know if this is really true,
but it sounds good.
So when these two women ‘struggle’
to swim, I have so much admiration for them. It takes a lot of courage to learn
something new as an adult, particularly something like swimming. There is an understandable
fear involved. I mean, you could drown! Not at the Richmond Swim Center, but
out in the ocean or the bay.
Not that
anyone goes swimming in the SF Bay except for crazy open water dolphin swimmers
that have some sort of nonhuman layer of fat to keep them warm!
Yet, it’s
important to know how to swim, cuz you never know. It’s like all those things
that we need to know how to do as an adult: swim, ride a bike, drive a car.
The women
are dressed now, gathering up their swim bags and heading for the door.
“See you
next week,” I call after them.
“Yes, you
will!” they both call back to me in unison.
I’m sure they’ll
be on the Struggle Bus for a few weeks, but I bet the end of the summer, they’ll
be off that bus and boarded on another—the I Love to Swim Bus will be waiting
for them to climb aboard and float away.
