Swimming

I cannot swim.  I never learned to swim. By sheer luch, through all these 85 years of my life, I was in no situation that required swimming for survival, like being on a sinking ship or being swept away by a high wave while wading too far off shore. 

As a child I was afraid of the waves washing on the beach.  As a grown-up, I was never attracted to get in the water except in a bathtub.  I claimed that, born late in January and therefore being an Aquarius, I had plenty of water on me and didn’t need to soak my whole body in water.  For the same reason I don’t drink much water, so I reason, and, in consequence, I tend to dehydrate.  

It’s not that I tried to learn to swim.  Swimming was a requirement for graduation when I finished my undergraduate education at UC Berkeley.  I took a course in my Senior Year and I was proud to have managed to learn to float on my back and make a few back strokes, five or six as I recall.  There was one test where, in the deepest part of the pool, I was to shoot straight down, touch the bottom with my feet and rise to the surface.  I never could rise without the help of a teaching assistant who went down with me and lifted me up with hands on my waist.  I like height; so, I enjoyed flying down from a diving board.  But I never learned to shoot into the water head on, so I hit the water with the whole body, splashing the water all over and receiving painful impact all over my body.

I did go to a beach in summer once in a while.  For a period of about ten years, I went to the shore from March to October whenever I had time to go; but I never went into the water. I went to lie on the sand and sunbathe and was never tempted to go into the water.  I cultivated a dark skin that made people say I looked like an African; the color vanished in a year when I stopped sunbathing. 

Once in a while I take a  soaking bath in a tub filled with hot water; but I feel safer under a shower with no chance of drowning.  

There is no chance now I will ever know how to swim, not even in a dream. 

06.02.18