Backwards

 

“You know how I use the weights in front of me when I’m water walking?”

In the shower, Alice is talking. About the pool equipment of yellow and blue spongey looking weights used by the water walkers. The weights are attached at either end of a short white pole that the walker can grip. When walking, the weights can be moved back and forth under or on top of the water for an upper body workout.

            “Yeah,” I answer now, leaning back to rinse the shampoo out of my hair.

            “Well!” She cracks a guffaw. “I started using the weights lying on my back instead of walking and you know what? I went BACKWARDS!!!!”

            Here she really lets out a giant cackle. I join in. Remembering how when I was trying to teach my Gram how to swim in our pool in Hacienda Heights. My sisters and I in the bright sunshine of the blue tiled pool. Gram in the shallow end. We would instruct her to float and move her arms, like she was coming in for a plane landing with the cupped palms of hands, but every time she moved her arms, even if they were going forward in a freestyle stroke, she’d go backwards! “GRAM!” we’d holler, giggling. “You’re going backwards!”

            “Well, I know. Isn’t that something?”

            And we’d all laugh and laugh and laugh. It really was something. How did she move backwards when her arms were stroking forward?

            It was a mystery.

            So, today, when Alice tells me that she went backwards instead of forwards with her new in-the-water position, I wanted to share the story of Gram with her, but we were in the shower. There is only so much story sharing I can handle while trying to apply conditioner.

            Instead, I just nod and grin. This is plenty for Alice to continue. “I don’t understand it!” She laughs uproariously again.

            “It must have some deeper meaning,” I muse. And, I wonder what going backwards means when you want to go forwards. Both of these instances, my gram and Alice, involve old ladies. Do old ladies just want to go backwards instead of forwards? Is there nothing left to go forward to anymore? Time is running out. The future is so short. Isn’t it better to just go backwards to all that you’ve lived?

        

    Like that movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Brad Pitt lives backwards until he’s a baby again, instead of growing old and decrepit. Of course, there were disadvantages to this, too. I can’t remember what now. To me, going backwards in time is appealing. I could feel better physically, with more energy to write and swim. Perhaps I could even go back and relive specific situations and change them. Don’t we all have these? Times when you did something truly stupid and wish  you hadn’t.

            Do I divulge these situations now?

            Hell no. I am NOT going backward! It’s full steam ahead for me.

            Like I have a choice.

            Which simplifies the matter.

            Unless you’re in the pool, trying out a new swim routine, and you continue to go backwards.

            Alice turns off the shower, ambles out of the area, her gait stiff and painful. I could see why she might want to go backwards to a time when she could walk without pain. But she does get this in the healing floating of the water.

            Maybe instead of going backwards, we could all just go forward. In the water. With the fishes and the seals and the coots and the old ladies.

            Now, wouldn’t that make a great movie?

            I’ll ask Brad Pitt.