Crawling Through Summer When I Could Have Backflipped

The YMCA’s summer swim lessons sucked. They’d never compare to lighting firecrackers or jumping off the roof of our back porch for fun. I hated the long, sweaty bike ride to the Y, then quickly getting into my bathing suit, taking a shower, and waiting in the claustrophobic, damp, echo-filled indoor pool for our mean instructor to yell at us.

“In my Tadpoles course, you will learn the crawl stroke. It’s that simple. Anyone who cannot demonstrate strong crawl stroke technique will not pass my class.”

Is he kidding? I’m still shivering from the shower, and I’ve had ten minutes to recover. All I want to do here is swallow as little water as possible and never have to throw up.

For most of our first lesson, the instructor lined us up in the water to learn the leg kick. The following week, he drilled us on the crawl stroke, repeating several times how the arm motion had to work in precise tandem with our breathing.

After obeying his strict guidelines, my attitude changed. Maybe I was ready to put all the components together into one stroke and swim like other kids.

On the third week, I watched four other classmates swim to the other side and back, performing the crawl stroke adequately. It was my turn now. Standing in the water along the wall, I took one last breath and thrust my body forward into the chlorine sea of opportunity.

The first three strokes went very well. Wow. If I’d already gone halfway across the pool on just three strokes, I’d get to the other side and back with strength to spare.

The fourth and fifth strokes weren’t as spectacular. By the sixth stroke, my head surfaced for air whenever it wanted. My leg strokes took vacations. My arms worked anything but in tandem with my feet or my breaths. Remembering how and when to do all these motions together seemed too hard. My mind had turned to mush. Fortunately, however, I did not throw up.

I hated rules. I hated lessons. They were always complicated. I craved freedom and wanted to have fun like I did on Saturday afternoon family outings at the pool. Don, Doug, Cathy, and Mom would scatter to different areas of the pool to swim, but I’d sink straight to the water’s bottom and sit. Holding my breath for half-minute periods at a time, I’d linger in the clean, sun-warmed water to play with the little rocks on the pool’s bottom that weren’t supposed to be there. I enjoyed life away from lifeguards, swim instructors, and spazzy kids who hovered just above me, not to mention Don, Doug and Cathy who – having made it all the way to the Minnows class echelon – annoyed me with their swimming and diving prowess. They weren’t the type to appreciate things like dangerous tobogganing and jumping off bikes, so we never talked much about sports. In fact, whenever whistled out of the pool for Adult Swim sessions, I sat by the pool’s edge with my siblings in silence, sucking SweetTarts, wondering why adults chose to do grueling laps when instead they could backflip off the high dive and crash in the water back first.

I guess we all know now why adults don’t backflip off the high dive and crash in the water back first. That would hurt.

But nothing like the pain of swim lessons.

The excerpt above is taken from the chapter, “Competition,” in my memoir, “Maybe Boomer.” Check out the “Stories From Maybe Boomer” archives tab for more posts including memoir excerpts. 

 

As Thrift is Joy, the Store is Home

Joyful one minute, sad the next, I drive out of the thrift store parking lot a final time. After all these months, what have I learned working as a sales associate here?

While navigating my ride home, I reminisce.

At the store’s back doors, I go through countless articles people have just donated. Immense amount of junk, I think, even for when it was new! Get a load of this crappy little ceramic house. And what about that – the world’s ugliest candlestick holder? And now a plastic cutting board with a zillion cuts in it. No wonder they got rid of these things. Hey – don’t be so judgmental. Your job is to sort the donations, not roll your eyes. Just chalk it up to a “beauty’s in the eye of the beholder” kind of thing.

But then, many of the donors turn right around, enter the front of the store, and buy more stuff. What am I supposed to think? Stuff, stuff, stuff. Buy, buy, buy. There’s nothing wrong with buying, per se, it’s just that I’ve noticed how much people play such a value on consuming, far more than I realized before I started working here.

While cashiering, I basically serve two groups of regulars. The first are dealers here in Santa Fe, buying bargains for their own thrift stores or online outlets. The other group, a far larger one, is women over sixty. They love to shop. And shop. And shop. God love ’em – they make the store go round.

Then there are all the other sub-groups of shoppers. One such group is the needy, people who can’t afford to shop anywhere but a thrift store, especially for clothes. Another group consists of the noticeably ill, disabled, or those challenged in some way, perhaps so strapped by health care costs that thrift stores like this are their only opportunity to buy clothes, furniture and whatnot. And another group – I’ve finally deduced – are here for something quite personal: the comfort they receive from the thrift store experience. Maybe they like the people who work here – regular faces and fixtures in their lives. Maybe they’re lonely. Or maybe it’s as simple as understanding a day just doesn’t feel centered without a visit to the thrift store, a little home away from home.

A thrift store, however, is made up of a wide collection of individuals, many who carry an unfortunate situation around with them. I’ve seen customers walk up to the counter and pay with change, the only currency they have. I’ve consoled donors who’ve broken down at the back door, unable to watch me unload from the car a lifetime of personal items that belonged to their just-departed spouse. I’ve picked up furniture from people who’ve just lost their job.

I’ve watched our manager ask shoplifters to leave the store. I’ve caught people ripping price tags off items hoping to get a better price at the checkout stand. I’ve dealt with hagglers who, with every visit to the store, want to wiggle the price down. Are these people con artist types, or just desperate and down on their luck?

Add to these folks the customers who wait by the front door ten minutes before we open, staring at me through the large glass windows, hoping I might open early for them. There’s those who walk in two minutes before closing, then linger ten minutes before heading to the checkout stand. And there’s those who donate large bags of goods, knowing inside that big black sack is also a lot of trash they’re happy to get off their hands.

To my surprise, many customers speak with thick, foreign accents – not just Spanish – making it crucial we take the time to help them understand the money transaction they’re about to make. There’s the time it takes us to finally understand certain customers really aren’t a threat to the store, only that they want to spend most of the day here to shop, relax and intermittently lie on a couch to read while occasionally nibbling on a snack. And there’s always the time we take to listen to customers talk about how much they know about gold, silver and jewelry – but don’t.

But what customers share most in their thrift shop experience is joy. Yes, joy. When people find what they want, they often bring it to the counter like a kid who’s just opened the Cracker Jack box to find the best prize ever inside. I sense many customers see this store as a house of healing, another home for them within our beautiful city, one that can be humbling to live in. And I am humbled by the joyous smiles I see at the counter, especially from those who’ve fallen on hard times.

 

In hindsight, I realize being part of these little customer joys was the perk to help me and other sales associates get through long days. Every day was long. Perhaps sorting through thousands of donations made us feel tired (imagine opening up your own garage doors to accept all the neighborhood’s yard sale items that didn’t sell over the weekend). Perhaps cashiering all day did it. Or, maybe it was just trying to make every customer a little happier than when they first shuffled in through the doors.

Anything to see joy.

Anything to  have a job.

Anything to live in Santa Fe.

Remember This? “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and Enlightenment

I’ve done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day

 

It had been a long-awaited album. His last, Born to Run, was four years ago. I sensed pressure was on for a great follow-up to that great album. 

The first thing I experienced when the album came out in June, 1978, was the record jacket, both sides revealing a somber, skinny Bruce Springsteen (the pre-Born in the USA pumped up Bruce), standing alone in a cheap hotel room. The album name, Darkness on the Edge of Town, included  song titles like “Factory,” “Badlands,” and “Adam Raised a Cain.”

Bleak. I wanted Born to Run back before I even played one song of Darkness.

Of course, I was a very young man then, and probably the last to know just how naive.

I gave the album many listens. With each, I was taken to places like “Candy’s Room,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “Promised Land.” The entire collection of soulful, searching songs was speaking to me about greed, inequity, disappointment, desperation, identity, satisfaction, love and hope; in other words, what real life is made of, not Top 40 life, and certainly not my own.

I was confused by the chaos all these human issues brought to me at once. Nonetheless, I appreciated how Springsteen ached to tell stories, as if busting out in Darkness, trying to bust apart the chains of man’s pain, warning “in comfort danger dwells; only on the dangerous cliff edge does one’s true self reside.” But I wasn’t sure if that’s what he was really saying.

There was an emptiness in my life such that Springsteen’s edge was as close to any edge I could stand upon. I was living in Gaithersburg, Maryland, then, not the edge of urban life, life, or anything – only the fringes of suburbia. Somehow, Springsteen’s words eventually penetrated the edge of my consciousness:

– The dogs on main street howl, ‘cause they understand / If I could take one moment into my hands  / Mister, I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man / And I believe in a promised land.

– I take her to the floor, looking for a moment when the world seems right / And I tear into the guts, of something in the night.

– ‘Cause in the darkness, there’ll be hidden worlds that shine / When I hold Candy close she makes the hidden worlds mine.

– Some guys just give up living / And start dying little by little, piece by piece / Some guys come home from work and wash up / And go racin’ in the street.

– End of the day, factory whistle cries / Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes / And you better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight / It’s the working, the working, just the working life.

– Some folks are born into the good life / Other folks get it anyway, anyhow / I lost my money and I lost my wife /  Them things don’t seem to matter much to me now / Tonight I’ll be on that hill ‘cause I can’t stop / I’ll be on that hill with everything I got / Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost / I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost / For wanting things that can only be found  / In the darkness on the edge of town.

In time, I sensed a testiness of my own. Discontent with machine shop work, empty experiences, boredom, unfulfilled dreams. So, I began to write songs; eschewed folk guitar and formed a rock band; became a freelance artist; worked as agency ad man before eventually finding a teaching career.

This rousing, creeping, crawling and often raucous stanza of rock and roll impressed me. Perhaps only at the edge does one gain best perspective. Slowly protruding from my shadow, Darkness prompted a head-on collision with my own life’s chorus.