4th of July

WBLM used to do a radio show on the 4th of July, playing the top 100 hits. I think it must have been of the decade because I always remember listening to Led Zepplin. It provided us with a soundtrack to fight sleep with as we were stuck in traffic trying to get out of Thomaston after the fireworks. We were trying to be awake to spit watermelon seeds out at Aunt Edith’s house. It was pitch dark, we would sit with the cousins lined up on the rocks of her stonewall by her little square of patio bricks that we called “the breezeway.”

This would be our return trip to Aunt Edith’s house as she hosted a cookout during the day every 4th of July. This sounds mundane to my 45 year old ears...a cookout. Cookouts are a dime a dozen in my life now. But back then, that was the only cookout we ever were invited to.

Our life in Tennessee was shadowed and solitary. Summers in Maine were filled with dappled sunlight and family. The 4th of July was the only holiday we were able to celebrate with family. Our childless, holiday-loving, great Aunt Edith and Uncle Charlie were always happy to share the celebrations with us. They would come and get us and take us to the 4th of July parade, and later we would go to their house for the cookout. I don’t remember these distinctly until I was older and brought friends along with me, marking the years by pictures that I had an interest in. Sometimes there were more relatives around the table than others. I imagine there were years when my cousins weren’t allowed to frolic all day with us, but the best years have them in the memories. It was one of the few meals I ever got to see my mother sit down and enjoy. Uncle Charlie always manned the grill, and we ate and took advantage of their hospitality, as we would for years to come.

We would then head off to the fireworks and park at Uncle Charlie’s sister’s house in Thomaston. I don’t think Charlie and Edith ever came with us to them. But they would be waiting for us, far past their bedtime, with watermelon slices to stop by after. When I think of all those seeds we spit everywhere, I can only now imagine that the 5th of July consisted of Aunt Edith on the ground picking up each and every seed. She was as fastidious as she was gracious.

I doubt we even sincerely thanked Aunt Edith and Uncle Charlie for their kindness. We were pretty ungrateful little scoundrels. But every 4th of July, I think of them and our times with them.  I remember the smell of burgers Uncle Charlie cooked to perfection, endless games of tether ball and frisbee, the sun on their back lawn, my grandmother’s unusually stifled laughter, and watching the strange family dynamics unfold when the men joined the women once a year out in Aunt Edith’s backyard. Aunt Edith’s was traditionally a place for women and children to gather and have muffins and tea.

But the best moments were the dark sleepy hours after our senses were satiated by the boom and blossom of what seemed endless fireworks, the feel of watermelon melting in my mouth as I sucked in seeds to fire out, the feeling of being safe in the dark with family, up past my bedtime, happy from another year of doing the exact same thing as we had done every year before. There is something so quintessentially beautiful in the predictability of tradition for me. I think about this every 4th as I remember my family and especially Aunt Edith and Uncle Charlie. They carved their place into all of our memories by offering that same tradition every year.

I think of traditions and memories of Aunt Edith as we drive home every 4th of July after a cookout at my children’s Nanny’s camp, after they have spent the day with their aunts and uncle and cousins. I remember all the years of my babies toddling by Nanny’s lake, decked out in 4th of July clothes that would only fit for a year, as their Grampy manned the grill and Nanny made her strawberry delight--before there were cousins, before Larry was “Uncle”, when Jodi seemed less of an aunt and more of a playmate who was always willing to swim with them. I think of how they have carved and are carving their place into my children’s memories and creating a sense of tradition my children will carry with them their entire life. I hope they know what grateful scoundrels we are.

Ma

The dew is on the grass, fog low to let in the sun
'cause they don’t know you’re gone

Peepers and loons sing spring’s sweet lament
'cause they don’t know you’re gone

Cottage doors slam on lazy summer days
'cause they don’t know you’re gone

Lakes still every morning and night, under a pastel sky
'cause they don’t know you’re gone

Ferris wheel turns as fireworks explode behind
'cause they don’t know you’re gone

Mountains rise past curves memorized, with orange trees ablaze
'cause they don’t know you’re gone

Christmas morning comes, coffee and camera in hands you made
even though we know you’re gone 

The stars fill up the dark sky, like a message expanding endlessly above
'cause I know you’re gone

The Beginning Place (May 19, 2014)

My childhood was the kind you survived by seeking escape. When I was young, I found safe harbor in the imaginary world I created with dolls, stuffed animals, and the fields that surrounded our house. When I grew out of toys, I discovered books. My older brother and sister would tell me how our mother used to read books to them at night and let them eat sugary cereal in the morning. This rendition of a book reading, Honey Smack serving mother was the first fairy tale I’d ever heard. My poor mother had to return to work when I was a baby and the last story I’d ever heard read was probably muffled by amniotic fluid.

Books were scarce in our house. I reread Heidi so many times I could practically recite it. Eventually, I found my mother’s old books. I enjoyed the adventures of the Bobbsey Twins, but my favorite was Wind in the Willows. I favored books that had places I’d rather be in. I much preferred the winding river that Rat and Mole drifted on, to my squalid little life. When I finally found the Narnia series, I was gone, gone, gone. If anyone I knew in Tennessee had had a wardrobe they could have found me in it praying and pushing on the back, hoping it would fall into a winter wonderland and a lone streetlamp. I didn’t know that these books had something so simple as a “genre” (sci-fi/fantasy) to help you identify and find them. Reading was a secret. No one I knew talked about it. My sister read horror books that scared me to know were sitting on our bookshelves, but the concept of a library as a place where fun books might reside was a novel one to me.

For me, our high school library in Maine was merely the learning ground of the horrifying dewey decimal system and the territory of a mean wobbly man whose name was either Mr. Little or Mr. Small. I accidentally called him the wrong name for as long as he worked there and wondered why he never seemed to like me. One day, I accidentally happened upon the beat up old sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks that resided in wire spinning bookracks. A friend and I were giggling, whispering, and trying to escape the glare of the librarian by picking up random books and pretending to read them. I  picked up The Beginning Place and that was the beginning for me. It’s one of Ursula K. LeGuin’s early, and now out of print, novels. Today, it’d be placed in the “Young Adult” section because it featured two teens, a boy and girl, unhappy in their own worlds getting lucky enough to happen upon another. There were bits of romance, secret villages, mountains, and quests etc. etc. But what entranced me the most was that the magical land these teens stumbled into was a place of eternal twilight. The concept is so brilliantly, deliciously romantic and captivating that my middle aged bedroom is painted my interpretation of the color of twilight. I then began reading all of the books on those wire racks, tracing my fingers over the “borrower” list of names of those who had read it before me, trying to see if I could find any kindred spirits.

After my brother left home for college, there weren’t enough books in the world to serve my necessary escape, let alone the paltry few in our high school library. My favorite actual escape became the house of my friend Su. Her house was not bathed in eternal twilight--but it was stocked with seemingly eternal Spagettios, granola bars, fruit roll ups, and sugary cereals--which was close enough. I found safe haven in her house where I spent most of my nights.  We were given pretty much the run of the place as her sister was long gone and her parents were often not home. I wouldn’t say Su was spoiled, but I would say her mother lovingly spoiled her in her own stoic way. Her mother was tolerant and patient beyond anything I had ever experienced, and they seemed to have a friendship between them that gave Su and me a lot of free reign. We were silly and spent hours in fits of laughter. We also had hours of quiet contemplation and boredom. We’d dress in sundresses and ride old bikes all the way to my cottage. For years, we drowned out the noise of the world in music and laughter. Our world together was chem-free which was ironic because our world’s outside of each other were not. Together, we formed this little pocket where we needed almost no one (our third musketeer, Angie, had moved away) and nothing but each other...although we sometimes had boyfriends and maintained other friendships. Unfortunately, Su was a year older than me and when she went to art college, I was suddenly left in a world devoid of the laughter and safety that she had provided. I was also still nursing a broken heart from breaking up with my first long-term boyfriend that spring.

When Su came home from college in the fall for the first time, my parents were still at the cottage we rented every year. She came straight out there, and we fled out to the lake in our rickety row boat. There was a silence. Not a silence of awkwardness from our relatively short time apart. But a reverence. A moment of perfection, of happiness, of being whole in the moment. We didn’t talk about our schools or our boys. We rowed out from the cove and Su said a simple, “I miss you.” I paused a minute in rowing and replied, “I miss you, too.” We weren’t much for telling how we felt, but there was no greater truth at that moment. By the time we hit the middle of the lake, we hadn’t said anything more.

It was the kind of afternoon that you write about but can never capture. The sun was strong and warm. The trees had turned orange, red, yellow, but the weather hadn’t turned that day.

There are few times as a teenager where you are happy, content, in the moment. This actually felt outside the moment of our real lives. It was a weekday. I don’t remember the details, I think she might have just been home for a doctor’s appointment. The next day, I’d be back at school, facing whatever I was facing at that time in high school. The next day, she’d be gone again. But right then, there on the lake, we were two girls in a boat surrounded by water and autumn trees. She was the friend I didn’t have to be something else with. I didn’t have to be smart, or a cheerleader, or a partier. I didn’t have to be pretty, or careful, or funny. In that afternoon, I imagine she found a recess from being at a new school, homesick, feeling a need to be talented, artistic, unique. We were the things that completed each other. We stepped out from our lives in that afternoon.

The sky was clear and blue. I was reminded of a dream I had once after reading the Narnia series. In the dream, I flew up in the sky above the lake hovering high above the middle, blue sky shimmering on the water far beneath my feet. The sky peeled back and beneath it was another world that looked just like this one. The same trees, blue sky, shining rippling waters, only everything was more vibrant, alive. I shared the dream with Su and remarked how it reminded me of a book I had read, The Beginning Place. As I started to tell the story of the land of perpetual twilight, Su began to finish my sentences for me. She had read the same book. In all the time I knew Su, I had never seen her read a book. We couldn’t believe we had both read it and been so inspired by it, but that neither of us had mentioned it. We continued to row across the lake, now telling our favorite parts to each other. I realized we were almost all the way across which was no small feat for my lazy arms. I saw a fallen tree hanging over the side of the lake (we had been searching for a rope swing off the shore, but had not aimed far enough right) and decided to finish our journey across.

We pulled the boat up by the tree and clambered onto it. We took our shoes off and threw them in the boat. We dipped our feet in the warm sunlit water as we kept talking. We talked then about dreams. The kind of dreams that books like The Beginning Place, make you think of. We were still young enough to have them. We were on the tail end of childhood, where magic still seems possible, we were not yet squashed by the world of adults. We snapped small branches off and dropped them into the water to watch them move, tucked our knees under our chins after we tired of swirling our feet in the water. The sun started to go down, falling away from the water first. We decided to head back to the boat. As we walked to it, we spied a small gap in the bushes beyond it on the shore. We looked at each other and our eyes lit up like kids, “Maybe it’s a trail!”  We ran over to it, not bothering with putting our shoes back on, sure that our exploration would be short and futile.

We walked for maybe ten feet through brambles, hopeful that we were on a narrow tangled path. As we broke into the woods, our feet were welcomed by pine tree needles and fallen leaves, a carpet of brown and red. We walked forward toward a green opening lit by the bright taunting retreating sun. Our pace quickened in the excitement. As we neared the edge of dark canopy of trees, we could see what was clearly a path.

The bushes on the sides were overgrown and reaching as we passed, warning us with scratches and stings. We rushed through the uneven ground that was now climbing steeper upward, as we began whispering to each other, “It’s the beginning place, it’s the beginning place!”

Ahead the sun broke free onto grass, about 12 feet wide and up, up, up. Grass, mowed, green, framed with woods on either side. The land crested forward to something we could not see. We thought we knew the roads, woods, fields of our area and where we were made no sense to us. We walked a little slower, partially from the steepness, partially from a fear of what would be at the top. Would we reach the top of this hill of grass and realize we were just in someone’s backyard? Would we be transported in the light of the dropping sun into a world of eternal twilight? Both seemed equally possible. We walked on, whispering our hopes and fears, now holding each others arms scanning the woods beside us, moving with slow united strides, just a bounce away from “Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!”

We reached the top of the hill and dropped each other’s arms. Our wide path opened up to an enormous empty field. Lush green grass bent in the wind, ending seemingly a mile away in a tree line the setting sun colored the tips of orange. We ran out into it screaming, “Where are we? Where are we?” We spun around in airplane circles, bare feet now feeling the crunch of the stiff grass and the cuts and scrapes the adrenaline had dulled. This was like the fields of my childhood in Tennessee, green and vast unfarmed land. This was the field that I’d been searching for since we moved to Maine. It was the fields I had wandered in last making the solemnest of goodbyes before I stepped into the moving truck. It was what I sought instead of the cornfield remains of my grandmother’s overgrown field, what I wandered through countless thick pine woods hoping to spy. Su and I screamed and ran and leapt like children. We eventually began a slow wander from each other, lost in our own interpretations of magic.

I found Su after the setting sun began to cool my feet, in a smaller side field off of the main one. Alone in this field’s center was a huge ancient twisted oak. Its power emanated and pulsed. Su was sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, quiet, in stony silence, staring out past the tree. I sat beside her and from this vantage point I could see through the slopping trees the water of our lake, rippling and dancing, reminding us we had not traveled too far. The air here was chillier, haunted. I felt, unwelcome. In hushed tones, afraid the tree might hear me, I whispered, “This place scares me,” to Su. She turned and looked at me, her eyes widening as if I had just called her bluff, “Me, too!” We scrambled and ran out of there like that tree was chasing us.

We explored further toward the tree line that was now a darkening shadow. To the left farther up was another field. It was covered with wild blueberry plants and low rocks and small birch trees. It was a magical meadow.

When Su and I stood at the entrance to the meadow, we could hear traffic. We wandered through trees toward the sound and found a crude driveway off of route 17. We stood there in the twilight, watching traffic go by, each car dissolving, shattering our illusion that we had been transported to a magical world. We were silent with disappointment at the mundaneness of such a trafficked paved road for only a moment before Su said practically, “Well, this will make it a lot easier to get back to.” I laughed in agreement. I wished then we didn’t have to walk through a dimly lit field and woods barefoot and row across a lake I was sure would be swooping with bats. I actually don’t remember the walk back across our field that we had dubbed “Our Beginning Place” or the dark long row to the cottage, into a night that I would have to say goodbye again to Su.

Su and I agreed we would only go back to the field together. But I went back when I was sad or lonely. I found her there, when I bundled up and read books I thought she might like. I would sit on the rocks alone, reading more books from the library, running my hand over the borrower names, seeing the neat careful handwriting of my ex-boyfriend with a date stamped a year before our love story. Another part of me had been unknowingly a kindred spirit member of our secret sci-fi/fantasy club.

Su and I soon began a new ritual of confessing when we had gone to our field without the other. But we liked going there together best. We swore we’d never bring anyone else there. A promise we kept until the next summer when we were dating best friends. Tall, lumbering, artistic types who were just the sort of boys you would want to bring to a magical field on a full moon night when you were girls wearing long black dresses. We did just that. But their laughter, their jokes and kisses, they belonged in a different world of magic. I never brought my boy there again.

I went to the field on the day I thought I would break up with my boy, but discovered I couldn’t. Su found me there, crying. Whenever the other one would disappear or was troubled, we would pull into the hidden drive and search or wait. Our need to visit the field that summer became limited. That was the best summer of my youth. The kind of summer that makes you look up the word halcyon.

Six years later, after Su died, I searched for her in our field, in Our Beginning Place. I went there on the first warm day when I was home. I walked into the big field and whispered her name. I looked down the vast empty field. Its magic was gone now. I felt if I walked deeper in, I would still see her sitting under that ancient tree, and I’d want to run and warn her. My feet wouldn’t take me further, my heart wouldn’t take me further, an invisible force field of fear of all that isn’t magic in our adult world froze me. I stepped instead into the magical meadow and whispered her name. A monarch butterfly alighted on my finger. In all of our time there, I’d never seen a butterfly. I think Su would have hated being a butterfly. She would have much rather been a spider or a bat, but she wouldn’t have wanted to scare me, so maybe...

I started writing this piece about a book and in the writing process, it became a piece about Su. It’s been 21 years since we lost Su. Today is her birthday. I’ve always felt hindered in my ability to write about her. I felt it had to be a perfect tribute. With age, I’ve been freed from the notion of perfection. She wasn’t, I wasn’t, and at times, our friendship wasn’t. She doesn’t have to be a legacy, a butterfly, or my muse. I could write volumes on our years together, so many times that came before and after the day of Our Beginning Place.  For us all, she lives on in countless memories. I see her in that day, on the lake, amber preserved in the fall sun, as we discovered our beginning place and stayed ‘til twilight. She’s perpetually in my twilight, caught in a day, in a memory, in that moment of magic.

Happy Birthday, Su

The New Normal

Somewhere in the past two months rubble of writing I have a piece about all the things we don’t write on Facebook (in response to the awesomely funny top 7 ways to be insufferable on Facebook) and why it’s not because people are necessarily insufferable. They might just want to see the positive while not inappropriately over sharing their personal negatives.

Acceptable for Facebook is proudly posting links to honor roll lists or posts about how great your kids have done at something (I’ve got three kids, of course I do it). Posts about personal, child, or family medical struggles are also acceptable, and valued, as it is brave and wonderful for people to share. It is also helpful to know what people that you care about are dealing with. 

Quieter and seen in the days of no posts or perhaps links to humorous videos are those of us navigating the world of mental health struggles because our society really doesn’t accept that this is also a medical struggle.

Just as a parent is proud of a child who is recovering from a knee injury for slowly working their way back into sports, I am proud of my oldest daughter as she goes to her classes, talks to her teachers after she has fallen behind, and studies for mid-terms in the midst of one of her darkest depressions. But that’s not a post I would make on Facebook.

No one doubts that a child is in pain when they can pull up an MRI and show a ligament tear. But there is some notion that mental anguish is chosen, despite multiple doctor diagnoses. (It’s in moments like this that I am glad that Tom Cruise is not one of my Facebook friends. Although, I recently had the same thought when I watched Jack Reacher.)

My daughter has had a long hard road to even getting the correct diagnosis. She has likened it to sitting in an Emergency waiting room with a broken arm for three years while everyone tries to figure out what is wrong. The challenges of an adolescent with mental issues are multiple. There are only a few psychiatrists in our state that take adolescents and insurance (and most of them have a waiting list a mile long, many are completely closed to new patients). Most mental disorders are “emerging” when they are in teens. Many of the symptoms also are like exaggerated mimes of normal teen behavior. It’s like trying to diagnose a moving shape shifting target. After over three years, my daughter finally has what seems to be a good doctor and the correct current diagnosis.

But like all medicine, it is not an exact science. The right dosage of the right medicine one week may not be the same the next. We can’t prick our mentally ill children’s finger to get a number to see if they are coming close to a crash. We can only watch for signs of acceleration and deviation and sometimes we only know when we see the debris.

One of the hardest and most necessary things for parents to do for any child is to change your dreams for them based on reality. By the age of one, I could fill journal pages with the words my daughter could say. By thirteen, she was co-valedictorian and had worn a path in her school “auditorium” walking up to receive awards.

This year, she said to me that she feels like I am waiting, waiting for that good girl at the top of the honor roll to return. Maybe I was. Or maybe I just hadn’t yet untangled the version of my dreams and her life.

When my daughter was crashing last (Freshman) year in high school, misdiagnosed and on medication that was unknowingly triggering that emerging shadow into a frightening new reality, she couldn’t get up; she couldn’t make herself go to school. I was leaving work, paying for tutors, paying out of pocket for new doctors, watching as a shadow was stepping into her and making her the shape shifter. I was afraid, every day, that the shadow would win before I got the new help we needed to name it, to help her. This was not only on her shoulders, but mine. I had to advocate, to fight, to research, to search, to query, to add our names to waiting lists--again and again (with my husband’s help).

Meanwhile, seeing everyone’s FB posts of honor rolls and pictures of their jubilant seemingly perfect unmarred shining teens who appeared to succeed at every endeavor was a bit painful. Although these are the same kind of posts I had made and kept on making. Still, at the time, I felt it was necessary to block some of these, just as I am sure my daughter distanced herself from some of these same seemingly gleaming friends.

Recently, when I saw my daughter during these (Sophomore) end of quarter and mid-term weeks struggling with what was, by that point, weeks of anguish, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know because she asked for nothing. Because she poured herself over her books and said there was nothing to be done. And I was home alone with all three kids that week and had little time to really explore the veracity of her answers. I could only believe her. We had seen her doctor the week before for the increase that had yet to take effect, we had her follow up scheduled for the week after. Yet, she kept on, she went to school, she made appointments with teachers, she came home and sat a desk with pencils and books and computers. She sat hunched over them and I could feel the pain and suffering radiating off of her, it was palpable and heart-breaking. I felt a shift in seriousness that frightened me.

The difference is that before I was shouldering some of the brunt for her. She sloughed some off onto me and allowed me to champion her. Now she is shouldering it alone, as much as she can. As she will have to for the rest of her life. I think this is the shift. But to see your child in this kind of pain, be it mental or physical, that you cannot alleviate...it’s like someone reaching into you and squeezing off bits of your heart.

As much as I felt helpless that I could not take some of the pain for her, I also felt great pride in her. I don’t think I’m waiting for that “good” girl to come back. This girl is amazing. During pain and depression that would have left most people (including the girl she used to be) curled into a hopeless fetal position, she got up and moved and studied for some of the most challenging honors courses and...tried! This is what makes me proud of her. My husband sent me her grades the week after midterms, I didn’t open them. Because I would have been proud even if they weren’t honors courses, even if she hadn’t passed. But I heard it through the grapevine that she did. This didn’t make me any prouder, but it did make me happier for her.

In all of our parental futures is a time when we won’t have any more honor rolls, grades, colleges, and sports awards to mark our pride. We’ll have to find real world pride in our children, just as the luckiest of us have parents that feel that pride for us in our "old" age. What will make us proud is that our children are living or working toward a life that fulfills them.

I’m proud of my daughter for trying, I’m proud of her for surviving. I’m proud of her for growing up to be someone who cares. I’m proud when she makes it to some swim meets, despite the challenges for her; I don’t look at the times anymore. I’m proud that she is learning to play guitar and that she is starting to sing in front of people with her amazingly cool voice. I’m proud when she can admit she is intimidated but excited to read The Odyssey. I’m proud when I get a small glimpse of the unbelievably prolific and powerful writer/photographer/artist that she is. I’m proud that she’s just growing up. But I’m proud, most of all, to be able to honestly say she is someone that I really like.

I don’t have any more blocks on Facebok. Please keep on posting those links and pictures and braggings of your amazing kids. I don’t think you are insufferable at all. I think you are proud. And I want to be proud with you. And I hope that you’re proud with me.


Writer’s Note:
This isn’t about me any more. it’s not really even mine to write about, but with my daughter’s permission/blessing, I am...I’m place holding until someday when maybe she can write about it and help someone else.
 
Photo Credits:
Yanmei

Who Cares?

The Saturday after Christmas, I swam 100 100s or 10,000 yards during a loosely organized swimming event at the Y. I know what most people are secretly thinking but are too kind to ask, “Umm, is that good?” I know what most people would secretly thinking but would never ask,“Who cares?”

The first question is pretty easy to answer, yes, that’s good, especially for me. It’s considered the equivalent of running a marathon. It’s a bit less than swimming 6 miles.

The second question of “who cares” I had pondered for 4,000 yards, repeatedly, as I toyed with whether to finish the full 10,000 or not. I knew the answer...after careful censoring, nary a soul.

Most of the time, my family and a few friends do care (or pretend to) when I accomplish a new “athletic” goal. Primarily, because they’ve had to listen to me blather on about it for months or not be home to cook supper to train for it.

I had no intention of swimming all 100, so I hadn’t really talked about it. And trained for it? Well, let’s say that the entire day before I was busy accomplishing another first of gambling all day with my sister-in-law's holiday bonus at a casino as I was fed drink after drink with no food. I had been hoping to swim 50, secretly hoping to swim 60 (which would best my farthest distance of 3 miles). After my casino “day” turned into a casino “day and night,” I was hoping mostly to not cramp up from dehydration.

By 3,800 yards, everyone in my lane had left. I hadn’t outlasted them with my fierce determination, they just left because they had better things to do during the holiday season than swim back and forth in a pool all day. This was something I hadn’t really pictured...swimming alone? This was an unexpected challenge, physically because I had no one to draft off of, mentally because I had to count and time myself and had no camaraderie.

I was not alone in the pool, no...the faster lanes to my right were full of people swimming on an interval 15 seconds faster than me. I was already swimming intervals 15 seconds faster than what I had planned to swim, so I knew there was no chance I’d be moving up. They seemed to be having a great time, music, food, camaraderie, draft turn takers. It was like being next door to a party you weren’t invited to because you weren’t good enough...literally. Actually that’s exactly what it was, if you replace “good” with “fast.” It was like a John Hughes movie where the cute popular boy was the only one who says “hi” to you and asks you how you are doing (he did). But then if he swam away with his cute, fast, dramatically more impressive wife and you had to watch an aged Molly Ringwald swimming alone for 3 hours. Like that.

At the fasties’s 50, they took a quick party potty break, cranked up the music and whooped, sharing snacks. Not long after, at my 50, I got out to take a bathroom break and said proudly to the lifeguard, “I just finished my 50.” He looked through me like I was invisible and said, “We're taking bets which one of them quits first,” his head nodding toward the fast lanes. I wondered briefly if I was so slow that I was now a ghost.

At my goal of 60, I felt good. I thought, dang, I could do this. I mean, I might actually be able to swim 100 100s, 10,000 yards! Something I thought I would have to train the entire next year to be able to do. Like that woman who intended to do the half marathon option and got a little lost and ended up deciding to do the whole marathon and won. Like that, only if she came in dead last. It was just like that.

Then I wondered, heck, why would I do something amazing I had no intention of doing if no one (including myself) really gave a crap? The age old question of if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, is there any point in swimming 10,000 yards when no one cares? No one is watching? No one is wishing you well even from afar? Pretty much anyone I knew who would really get that this was a big achievement worthy of tackling was already doing it...in the lanes beside me...but faster. In fact, by accomplishing this goal unintentionally, I would forever take away any awesomeness in the act. Next year, if I said to my kids, can you come cheer me on at end, they’d say, “Why? You did it last year.”

I suddenly had a vision, so lovely I think in retrospect I might have been hallucinating. What if my kids could come, what if they took turns swimming with me so I wouldn’t be alone, and I’d feel encouraged to finish, to set a good example, and make them proud? I’d finish then! I knew I would! I jumped out of the pool and texted my husband if he brought the kids, I could finish it. Then I jumped back in and dreamed he’d do it. He’d at least bring my middle child, she can be guilted into doing most anything. My brother was even up. If I had told him I was swimming 100 100s, and needed to be cheered on, he would have come to the Y. He’d experienced the lonely let down of crossing a finish line with no one there for you. My sister would come to support me when I clip my toenails if I asked her. I could have a whole family fan club to get me through that last 1,000! He took about an hour to text me back. He wrote, “Impressive. Hope you finish.”

Because even if you marry your cute crush, he’d still rather do just about anything than suffocate in a pool watching you slowly swim back and forth, despite his having grown up in the “Pong” generation, which really is great training for watching such an event.

On and on I swam, at the ready to quit at first sign of potential injury. I kept track of my laps by moving ten Hershey kisses on the side of the pool. One time, I bit into one of their brethren so hard that I almost chipped a tooth. An exciting near injury moment.

Then I heard cheering, I think I might have even heard a chorus of "Fahoo Fores Dahoo Dores" and directions being shouted to gather for a picture. All the fasties had finished. I kept swimming like a little confused Grinchy fish in an empty bowl. As I finished my 85th 100, they called me over for a party picture. Yay! “Jake Ryan” asked how many I had left. I said, “15,” and he said some encouraging words. I knew I couldn’t quit then. Those few words of encouragement meant a lot. They would have meant a lot even if he wasn’t cute. So be sure to encourage people who aren’t as good as you in life, but especially if you are cute.


All but two of the fasties (who had a couple 100s to finish) left for the sauna. By my 90th, they were done, as was any of my upper body strength. I began to wonder if there was such a thing as chlorine poisoning. As fate would have it, one of the stragglers offered to swim with me to help me finish. Then our coach emerged from the sauna and said he would swim with me. They took turns swimming about the last 8 with me. To me, they looked like cowboys from a movie much better than a John Hughes film. Getting back in the pool after swimming 10,000 yards to help a friend...It’s not something many could/would do. If it were me, I definitely would have been in a cloud of my own exhaustion unable to see past the promise of real food and a chair. I would have finished those last 100s alone, but worse than being painful, they would have been dreary. “I get by with a little help from my friends” started playing in my head, replacing “Don’t you forget about me.”

I’d like to say, in the end, I did it for me, or for all the newbieish swimmers like me, or to set a good example for my kids. But really, in the end, I just did it. I’d also like to say that I had enough modesty to keep my accomplishment to myself. But I posted it on Facebook and found ways to tell anyone I could, in texts, emails, dropping it casually (awkwardly) into most conversations. And now I am writing this. Although many have responded with thoughtful compliments, I truly don’t mind if my initial assessment that no one really cares remains accurate. Which kind of makes it the coolest thing I’ve done.

I actually wrote this on the eve of swimming the 100s. I’ve been wondering how to finish. What’s the point? The conclusion? My body this week has delivered the message.

I’m new to athletics. I never entered any sort of race or competition until I was over 40. I started running about four years ago. It has been less than three for swimming.  After I did a half marathon (which I had trained over two months for), I felt like someone had taken a jackhammer to my body for about a week. After my second half marathon, my body felt like it was in shock for three days. I am not planning on a third. I know running is high impact, but I also know that my running mate suffered none of these acute after effects. On the first night after I swam the 100s, my arms were very sore. It was hard to reach back for popcorn during The Hobbit movie, a real sacrifice. After that, I felt very little negative effects. My ankles were a little sore, but otherwise I felt nothing in my legs. Five days later, I swam the second longest yardage workout that I had ever done. A week later, there were no truly noticeable effects.

I knew I had always felt different about swimming than running or biking. When I was first learning breaststroke, and recently butterfly, I thought about swimming like I used to think about boys--all dreamy with a soundtrack. After a good swim, I think about when I can swim again. After a good run, I secretly hope someone will steal my sneakers so I never have to run again.  Now, my body seems to be telling me that swimming might feel the same way about me. It’s a love story, and love stories don’t need an audience, so it’s okay if no one cares, but I went ahead and wrote this love song anyway.