Swimming

Watching the Olympics has made me yearn for more than dramatic montages. As we watched the men's swim qualifiers last night I said wistfully, "I wish I knew how to swim. It looks like so much fun."

"After we move maybe your parents could come over and watch Philo sometime and I could teach you," Mike said. Our new apartment complex has an indoor pool.

"Maybe," I said.

"You got pretty good at floating the last time we went swimming, " he said. Whenever Mike and I go to a hotel with a pool he tries to give me a swimming lesson. The last one was a year ago when we were in Ohio for a wedding. However, I think that calling what I was doing "floating" is sort of an overstatement. It was more like "not immediately drowning." I could hold myself just below the surface of the water if I barely breathed, kept totally still, and Mike kept one hand on my back.

Somehow I never did learn how to swim properly. My dad taught me how to dog-paddle well enough to keep from drowning if I fell out of a fishing boat with a life vest on. And I do remember having swimming lessons as a child. But somehow it never quite took and I made it to adulthood without being able to swim.

Now it's kind of a lost cause, I think. I'm too old for the type of swimming classes I'd need - the basic kind where they still let you wear those floaty things on your arms - and too afraid of water to take classes that are more advanced. I suppose I could let Mike teach me. One evening a week of swimming lessons would be a fun date. But I wouldn't be too happy to have my neighbors observing my swimming stroke, which consists mostly of a whole lot of thrashing around. That's why hotels are ideal - anyone who sees me will probably be halfway to Minneapolis or Dallas or somewhere else by the following afternoon.

But maybe this fall I will learn how to swim. Mybe. But I don't think you'll be looking for me (and my montage) in the summer Olympics in 2016.