MLK 2012

Today we celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martian Luther King Jr.  I write this post sitting in a café, surrounded by people.  Fifty years ago it still would have been possible for me, an African American, to sit and sip coffee with others who don’t look like me, in this restaurant chain in Boston, but it would have been noticed.  I would have stood out. I would have had to pick the café with care, as some neighborhoods felt the need to keep obvious outsiders from being comfortable in their tiny corner of the metropolis.  And while perhaps I could do this in Boston, south of the Mason-Dixon line, my choices of establishment would be very limited, even given the same restaurant chain.  Choosing carefully would have meant choosing life. But today I am surrounded by blondes, brunettes, dark skin, light skin, people whose parents came from other countries, and people who probably speak another language at home.  As I stood in line behind a police officer, a white man perhaps a decade younger and a number of inches shorter than I am, I was aware of just how much the world has changed and yet how subtle that change is.  The officer completely ignored me.  I posed no innate threat to him or this establishment.  I was just another citizen.  

Photo by John Chuckman - http://chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wordpress.com

When Dr. King was alive, I did not have the privilege of just being another citizen, not even in the northern U.S. In a previous post I told the story of clearing the pool, when ignorant people made a choice in the 1960’s that was to my family’s benefit.  If any of you come from families that have made similar choices in the past, I say thank you on behalf of my family, though I hope you have gained some love and understanding over the years.  Because you are reading this blog, I’m guessing you have.

Last week my partner alerted me to a CNN article about a 31 year-old Ohio landlord who put a “Whites Only” sign on the fence surrounding her pool after seeing the biracial daughter of a white tenant swimming. This didn’t happen in 1961, but in 2011.  The landlord is not 81, but 31. And it didn’t happen below the Mason-Dixon line, it happened in Ohio, though in 2011 that should no longer be relevant.  Still, it happened.  It happened because the US is scarred by its racist past in ways that remain invisible until poked and exposed, hidden and yet too numerous to count.

Part of what my mother did as she taught swimming at the Center City Philadelphia YWCA in the 1960’s and 70’s was to help make Dr.’s King’s dream a reality.  When little black boys and black girls joined little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers in my mother’s pool, the dream was real.  Under her watchful eye she gave them the gift of life, a survival skill that they would never forget.  And this gift came from a black woman at a time when black women where all too often invisible or disempowered by white society.  Who knows what these children heard at home, but in her pool the dream was alive and it had a face.

  

We can not change everyone’s mind and we can not all be a Dr. King.  But in what we do everyday, in who we are everyday, we can stretch, we can reach, we can spread our arms wide and embrace a beautiful diverse world.  And in that embrace we can truly be free at last.

Lessons From Teaching Swimming

The best way to learn something is to teach it.  As a part-time swimming instructor, I know how to swim, but in teaching swimming there are certain principles that I must relearn for life out of the water.  Principles that make me a better person.

1. Prioritize breathing. A woman I was teaching once would swim a few strokes, then stand up – swim a few more strokes, then stand up again.  Each time she stood she’d be panting and wiping the water from her face even before her feet touched the bottom of the shallow pool.  My first assumption was that she tired easily.  But when I talked with her, I found that she was actually out of breath.  During those few precious strokes before standing, I saw her breath, but she wasn’t getting enough air with each breath she took.  Keeping her brief swimming rhythm was more important to her than breathing.  I told her that it’s more important to breath than it is to stroke.  I told her that eventually she will be able to do both well, but for now, she should prioritize breathing.  If she needed more time to breath, she should take the time, even if it meant her rhythm was uneven. Take the time.  When she did, she swam longer.

Every day I sit in front of my computer screen and bang my way through email.  Sometimes I skim through and deal with the more important items first.  But I easily get a sense of urgency and just jump in and slash away – first come first served.  Invariably I get myself bogged down in one task or another, one email request or another, one remote emergency or another.  I stop thinking and just go.  And when I do that, I forget to breath.  I stand up and cease effective work, complain about fatigue, and all too often avail myself of any number of distractions on my screen.  But if I remember to breath through my tasks, breath through my email strokes, breath through my day, I won’t have to stop nearly as often.

2. There’s no rush.  Another woman I was teaching was performing swimming strokes as if she was being chased – a little frantic and clearly faster than was comfortable.  Then when she stopped at the other end of the pool, she would gasp for air.  Some people think that if they don’t swim as fast as they can, they’ll sink.  But swimming isn’t a race, it’s a dance.  You flow through the dance with the water.  And when you flow nice and easy, the water will support you.  It’ll hold you up and keep you going with little effort.  You can swim fast or you can swim long, but you can’t swim fast for long.*  Let the water support you.

When I was a young parent, I worked all the time – at my job, at home with family duties, at home with take-home work, then as a parent in grad school, plus grad school homework.  I can’t keep that frantic pace anymore.  But I know that there’s a balance to find in my life now where I can be more efficient and effective with less overall effort, relying a little more on experience.  No doubt hard work is important.  But it’s also important to understand that one can work hard or long, but no one can work hard for long.  Unless you’re being chased, don’t rush through life.

3. No drowning.  On the first day of a series of private lessons with a 6 year old who loved being in the water, I found that he especially liked swimming under water.  I know this because he showed me at every possible opportunity.  This was fine, but there were a few surface skills that he needed to master first in order to move up to the next swimming level.  One of those skills was treading water.  The problem was that this kid’s little legs and hands where not yet efficient at keeping his body up and head above water.  Which for him was fine, since he was comfortable just sinking under water.  But what his instructor saw when he attempted to tread was the waterline start at his neck, then rise to his chin, then move up to the back of his ears.  Standing in 4 and a half feet of water, I was able to calmly reach out to him, grab him under his arm and guide him over to the wall.  “First rule in my class,” I said, “is no drowning.”  His puppy dog eyes looked up at me.  “OK” he said.  

I am now the parent of adults who are all out on their own.  I have no pets I have to walk, feed or groom.  While I value my day job, it’s not one that has me developing products or services that are vital to life.  There is in fact no other place in my life where I get to say, no drowning and actively mean it.  My day job pays the bills, but teaching swimming teaches me that I can still make a difference. 

* Adapted from a common saying of cycling trainer Bobby Mac of Quad Cycles. 

** All images taken from the American Red Cross "Swimming and Water Safety" manual.

Size Matters

Size may not matter for a great many things, but it matters for pools. 

 

I grew up swimming in 25 yard pools.  My YWCA pool as kid was 25 yards.  My high school pool was 25 yards.  Most lap pools are 25 yards. That’s just standard.  OK, so maybe there’s a shallow and deep end or not.  Or maybe there are only 3 lanes, or 4, or 5.  But for me the standard length is 25 yards.  Even if it’s 25 meters, that’s still only an extra 6 feet and change. No biggie. I like 25 yards.

 

I went to a YMCA day camp for a couple summers that had a pool that was probably smaller than 25 yards.  The walls of the pool room were mostly a dingy yellow tile with black trim.  I’m not sure if the tile started out dingy yellow.  Who would choose that color?  I only hope that the walls evenly faded over the years of camp kids and swim lessons to finally take on the color of a depressed canary. This of course made the pool room dark, with eerie watery reflections on the ceiling, like in a bad slasher movie where the next victim is, for some unknown reason, swimming alone.  But I don’t want to misrepresent the Y – it’s not like there was a bare 60 watt bulb swinging over the diving board.  But no amount of artificial light could have overcome that depressed canary color.  So when we camp kids were in the pool, we had to play hard to make the room seem brighter.  The sounds of our voices and splashes played against the walls and ceiling.  The pool room was lit by our voices and imaginations, as we dove and burst up from our 10 foot vertical playroom with pool rings.

 

Size does matter.  Since those many decades ago of summer camp, I’ve found a number of 20 yard “lap pools,” but they’re not real pools to me.  Five strokes and I’m looking for the wall.  But I don’t want to seem like a snob.  Many people don’t care and that’s fine.  If you walk back and forth from one end to the other, it doesn’t matter how long the pool is.  If you like to float on your back and kick or if you’re just learning to swim, then what does size matter.  If the only reason you use the pool is to cool off after sitting in the hot tub at the gym, size doesn’t matter.  Otherwise, it matters a lot.

 

The University of Pennsylvania was my first 50 yard pool.  It was enormous!  I got to use it just once a year at the Philadelphia all-city swim meets, for the two years I competed in high school.  I swam the 100 yard freestyle, but I trained and competed all season in 25 yard pools. Come spring during the big city meet in that 50 yard pool, it felt like 100 yards was swimming over to Jersey and back.  Since I only had one wall to bounce off, I couldn’t judge the competition.  Am I winning my heat?  I don’t know.  I’m in open water.  Is that a tug boat?  The sound during those meets was deafening.  Hundreds of teenage teammates and parents filled the stands, screaming encouragement at their favorite competitors who were for one, busy, and two, had their heads in water.  The space was loud, but the swimmers couldn’t hear a thing.

 

The MIT pool is also big.  It’s somewhere between 50 yards and 5 miles long.  I should say it’s the “new” MIT pool.  The older Alumni pool is a fancier version of the old dingy Y pools, but with bleachers and only a slightly better paint job.  The pool in the newer athletic facility gets some natural light and is the size of an entire zip code.  This was the pool we used for WSI class.   The first day of class the instructor said, “To warm up, everybody swim to the other end of the pool and back, any stroke you want.  I want to see how you swim.”  OK, what time do you want us back? I have dinner plans.

 

The only people who swim in 50 yard pools are adults swimming laps and teenagers, who are either doing competition training or life guard classes.  Which means that when there isn’t an all-city competition, 50 yard pools sound different than 25 yard pools.  Sure the walls are further apart, so sound reflection is less severe, but otherwise 50 yard pools are in huge bright rooms with petite well trained splashes.  There’s no yelling or screaming; no diving and coming up with pool toys; no audio color.  People are there to just put one arm in front of the other.  So 50 yard pools lack some character.  I wonder how many rich guys have 50 yard pools.  If for no other reason than so women can see them and think to themselves, “Wow, that’s a big pool.  I wonder what he’s compensating for?”

 

Then there are hotels.  In the movie Up In The Air, George Clooney’s character is seen swimming laps in a 25 yard hotel lap pool. Where the hell is that hotel?  It doesn’t matter – I couldn’t afford it if I knew.  I’ve never seen a hotel with a 25 yard lap pool.  The hotel chains I stay in hire architects on crack.  The pools are weird rounded shapes vaguely resembling a kidney or an amoeba.  You have to be on crack to look to microbiology for shape inspiration for a pool. Or maybe it’s some concrete contractor having fun after smoking a lot of pot.  

 

“Dude, if you cover one eye, the pool kinda looks like a turd, doesn’t it?  So Cool!  So I thought we’d dot the turd with a little round hot tub next to it.  I mean come on – what do people expect for 75 bucks a night, right?”

 

When I wanted to improve my strokes before WSI training, I found the site for Total Immersion Swimming.  Their videos are great, but they demonstrate some of their strokes using an Endless Pool.   An endless pool is basically an overblown bathtub with a current.  Swim against the current and you never reach the end of the tub. Like magic, a pool where size can’t matter.  Yeah well, as my mother used to tell me, “Save all your pennies and one day…” But she would never finish that sentence.  One day I’ll be able to afford my own pool, which will be the right size and which I hope to use endlessly.  And it will have pool toys – for color.

Tub View

I don’t own a home, but I’m a proud renter. The whole American Dream home ownership thing has never been a strong draw in my life.  Plus given the economy, I’m ok with not having scary mortgage issues.

But one of the down sides for not owning my own home is that I can’t own a hot tub.  I love hot tubs.  I fell in love with them almost 30 years ago when I moved to California and it’s been a torrid bubbly love affair ever since, no matter where I’ve lived or traveled.  If you are my friend and you own a hot tub, know that we are not friends just so I can crash your jacuzzi every once in a while, but it doesn’t hurt.

As a member of Bally’s Total Fitness,  I was greatly dismayed when they closed some clubs a year ago to help their bottom line.  They closed the one near where I work, which made dealing with daily traffic, cubicles and hours under florescent light far less appealing.  That club had a 25 yard pool (which unfortunately is rare) and a huge hot tub.  And the culture of that gym was geared more toward weight lifting, so there weren’t a lot of swimmers – score!  Now I’m down to just one club in my area with a full size pool for lap swimming… and hot tub.

Since I completed WSI last Christmas, hot tubs at Bally’s have not been the same.  Before, I sat in there to warm up before starting my laps.  This year due to either laziness or fatigue (or both), I’ve been soaking up those hot jets for longer and longer every time I get in.  Sometimes I won’t even do any laps, but just close my eyes and do the rotisserie thing – lie on my back for a while, then roll over to my front with my head in my folded arms, then repeat every few minutes.  Oh yeah.  This is water done right!

Once relaxed, I’ll poke my head up, feeling better, but not wanting to get out.  Instead I’ll just watch other people swim.  And here’s where my life has been changed forever.  It used to be that I didn’t care how other people swam.  I just cared that they got out of the pool so I could have the lane, thank you very much.  But now I watch and I analyze.  What are they doing?

• She’s either afraid to put her face in the water or her hair in the water.  I wonder if anyone's ever worked with her on that?
• Oh I see his problem.  He doesn’t think the water can support him, so he’s thrashing his arms from one end of the pool to the other.  It's so exhausting that he has to rest for minutes at each end.  
• You know, her stroke would be so much better if she stretched her arms and glided like a swan. What’s the rush?  I could teach her how to do that. 
• Hey muscle man, stop boxing with the water!  This isn't Taekwondo.

Of course, I never say these things out loud, but I want to.  I want to walk over and say, “Dude, let me help.  I can help.”  But that’s hard.  Most men would tell me to butt out.  Plus the dumbest thing in the world to do is make a guy uncomfortable who works out regularly and with whom you share a locker room.  And with a woman, how do you not make it sound like a bad pickup line?  What they’d hear is, “Hey baby, let me show you how to stroke.”

So until I get a swimming instructor job, I’ll just keep my mouth shut, my body in hot water and my thoughts on swimming.  But hey, if you know of a part-time swim instructor job opening, I live in the Boston North Shore area.  And I won’t even insist that the pool have a hot tub.  But it wouldn’t hurt.

Water When You Don't Want It

Mid-City YWCA in 1954 (before I was born)

As I've stated earlier in my blog posts, I grew up in a swimming family. This was made possible in part by my swimming instructor mother.  But since she worked at the YWCA in downtown Philly, we had a number of advantages made possible by the Y. Swimming was just one. My mother was always scanning the Y class list, looking for things that I might want to take. They included judo, aikido, French, and fencing. I can't remember if I took French before or after fencing, but I do remember that my fencing teacher was French and I couldn't understand a word the guy said. But since he was holding a long pointy stick and was better at wielding it than I was, I paid more attention to him than any other teacher in my life. No drifting off in this guy's class.

But the other class or really group activity at the Y that we availed ourselves of was the ski club. Now being an African American kid on the ski slopes in the late 60's and early 70's meant that I was more than a minority - I was a super minority. I could have worn a cape. I was so rare on the ski slopes that the only way I could have been more of a minority was if I came down the slopes playing hockey and carrying a golf club... wearing a yarmulke. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I probably caused a few cases of whiplash. “Whoa, is that kid lost?”

We didn't go skiing every weekend in the winter. We couldn't afford it. Even back then skiing was expensive. There were the lift tickets, the rental of boots, skis and poles, then the gas to drive from the city to what ever northeast ski resort was within a 4 hour radius. The closer the better. People don't generally think of New Jersey as a Mecca of downhill skiing - and it isn't. Think Atlantic City with a vertical drop; a small vertical drop. Those aren’t bare patches, those are top soil pylons; this is the Garden State. Just go around ‘em!

From about age 10 to 13, five or six times a year I would go with my mom on YWCA ski group trips to Elk Mountain, PA, Big Bear, NY, or some cheesy hill in New Jersey. Hey, if we could afford it, we would go. Sometimes I would go without her, just me and some kind woman skier from the Y. And at that age I didn't even care that I was spending the day with a cute single young woman with a car. All I cared about was going down hill fast, catching some air on the moguls, and doing it as many times as I could before the time and the calories from my multiple flattened peanut butter and jelly sandwiches ran out.

I stopped skiing when I was 13 because... who knows why. Perhaps it was because my mother stopped working at the Y and dropped down from working two jobs to just working at her full-time school district social work job. Perhaps it was because my interests drifted to skateboarding, or math & science, or swimming. Or perhaps it was because I was more interested in paying attention to all the girls who were ignoring me. One of those.

I didn't ski again until I was 17. I was a senior in high school and on the swim team. The competitive swim season was coming to a close in the spring and I had serious senior-itis. That was when the announcement came down that the senior trip for my predominantly black high school was going to be a day on the ski slopes. This will be something new they'll remember, I'm sure the administration thought. We went to a hill that didn't have a noble animal name like Elk or Bear. It was in the Pocono mountains – the Alps of the Keystone State. Now if one wouldn’t necessarily consider Pennsylvania the Mecca of skiing, then Pennsylvania in April is like the anti-Mecca. Picnics perhaps – but skiing?  Not so much.   I wouldn't call it snow that was on the ground. There were rocks, there was slush, and there was water. We could have done some chilly laps in the pond at the bottom of the only active slope on the hill. Strange that they had a pond in front of the ski lodge. Was it always there? If we were smart, that would have been a red flag.

Imagine a couple bus loads of black teenagers from the city, at the base of a mountain of barely frozen water, getting fitted for boots and skis. "Hey, has anybody ever done this before? I never skied before. How do you walk in these things." Keep your mouth shut, Kevin. You're just the geek that swims. That's how they know you. Just be cool. Ok, perhaps you could just suggest one thing… "Try carrying the skies until you get to the snow."

(not me)

Imagine two bus loads of black teenagers on a rope tow for the first time. I've seen WWII movies with less carnage. Bodies all up and down the slope.

"Kevin, you ever done this before?"

"Yeah, a couple times, a long time ago. It's been years, really. So long ago that I doubt I remember how."

That was the juiciest half lie I had ever told. It's true that it had been years - about 4. Did I remember how to ski? Hell yeah! What's to forget? Stand up, point the skies down hill, snowplow all the way down with a little Jean-Claude Killy ain’t-no-big-thang slide turn at the bottom. Hell yeah! "Hey, Kevin's skiing!" It took an hour to get back up through the rope tow carnage and down I went again, with two bus loads of classmates staring at me, the geek. Now it is true that the cooler and more athletic of my classmates did eventually get it. And hats off to them for learning to snow ski in a downhill water ski zone. But I was the only student who really knew how. True, I discovered that I wasn't the only person who knew how. I think it was an assistant principal who went down faster than lightening. Clearly he was one of those noble animal ski slope people who actually pay real money to ski in the winter – on actual snow.

Since high school I've only skied once or twice. It's fun, but just way too expensive. When I finished grad school and got a job, I took my kids skiing for a day. Spent a fortune! More than I had ever spent on an outing with them. I recently saw an ad for a masters swim club in my area, where you pay for a membership for 4 months at a time. Each 4 month period costs the same as taking my kids skiing for just 3 days. Damn that’s a lot of money! And it’s just for me.  But sorry kids, this one I might do. So if you want to ski again, start saving!

It's not a magic toboggan.  Come back
 in the winter when there's snow.

No Water

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No Water
On Saturday May 1, 2010, just over a week ago, a collar connecting two pieces of a water supply main broke in Weston, MA.  The numbers associated with this failure are impressive:  64 million gallons of water was lost, 30 communities equaling 700, 000 households or some 2 million people were affected.  We were told that the water was unsafe to drink and we had to boil it for at least one minute before drinking it.  The stores suddenly became barren of bottled water.  People panicked.  The unofficial “man on the street” opinion was that it was going to take weeks to fix.

When I found out, I was on a highway heading south west in Connecticut to visit a friend.  I got the call, “Yeah, we’re in a boil water order.”  OK.  “Just thought you should know.”  OK.  Have fun with that.  See you tomorrow when I get back.

In Connecticut I bought a case of 6 gallons of water at Costco, because why not.  If this was going to be weeks, then let’s get this party started.
By Tuesday, the water main was fixed and the water was tested safe.  We had to run the cold water in the sink for a minute and run the hot water for 15 minutes – though a couple warm showers I think also did the trick.

We had no water for 3 days – 2 for me since I was going away to see a friend.  Not really a big hardship.  No major sacrifice.  No big loss.  To many, not having potable water was hardship, but that wasn’t hardship.  That was nothing close to hardship.  Hardship is when you don’t have a choice of 5 brands of bottled water and 5 more brands of carbonated bottled water in your local supermarket, which are EVERYWHERE.  Hardship is when you don’t have food on the table or even the hope of food on or near the table.  Hardship is when water, any water, is scarce. 

We were not in hardship.  We were in “wait and see.”  We were in, “Well I’m glad we have the best water supply in the world.”  We were in, “We are lucky to have what we have.”

I’ve decided that I like the occasional drought.  It can be a good teacher.  I like water, but I can appreciate it even more when it’s not as convenient to get it. 

Awesome

Our kids were pretty young when we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area back to the east coast, specifically to the Boston area. When they started school here, even though they were just in the first grade they were amused by the quaint colloquial use of language by Boston area natives. “Wicked” meant good. It had nothing to do with a witch. “We had a wicked time” was a good thing and saying it, even if they were just repeating something they heard some kid at school say, brought a smile to their faces.

The other term that came into use around the house was “awesome.” And to be fair, popular media as well as the cultural influence of the area was to blame for this one. “Awesome” meant yes, or all right, or that would do, or thank you. “Hey, can you pass the salt? Awesome.” But there was no awe in this awesome. All of the natural authentic awe was replaced by a cosmetic stand-in awe, expressed only in the tonality in which the word was delivered. “That was AWESOME!” No that was just salt. Get over it.

Few things are actually awesome. If one has a personal experience with their creator, that might constitute as awesome. Seeing a child born, especially if it’s your child, most especially if it’s your grandchild, that could be described as truly awesome. Ask any grandparent.

Water is awesome. Sip it and it will give you life. Harness it and it will support life. Ignore it at the wrong time and it will take life away. Here are some examples.

I’ve started on a new diet. One of these popular ones that includes a hell of a lot of exercise and a particular form of eating. The diet makes sense. For the most part it doesn’t make unreasonable demands and it explains the reasoning behind its tenets. One of those tenets has to do with drinking water – massive amounts of un-carbonated water. I like to swim in it, shower in it, and sit in a hot bubbling soup of it, but drinking a lot of it is hard for me. If I successfully start to regularly drink a half gallon of water per day, I will be filled with awe between my frequent trips to the bathroom. Though I do occasionally employ the whinny form awe, that being aw. “Kevin, put down the coffee and drink some water.” Aw!

From spending so much time at the beach, I’m used to the power of waves as they barrel into shore, finishing their reach onto dry land with a thin film that glides over the sand until it stops and recedes. The waves are gentle and almost predicable. We lay bets on whether a sand castle will stand up to repeated thin gliding reaches of the waves. But when those waves are inspired by seismic activity way out in the ocean, it is another matter. I always envisioned a tsunami as a giant wall of water hundreds of feet high that hits the coast and wipes everything out in one fell swoop. But that’s not the case. That’s not water’s power. Nature does not have to be big to be powerful.

Instead, a tsunami is a scaled up version of that thin film that glides over the sand. But in a tsunami, the water glides in and just doesn’t stop. Instead of receding, it proceeds, forward, inward, picking up whatever is not anchored to the ground, as well as many things that are – or were. The power of water here is not just that it can destroy and kill, but also that it delivers perspective; a special form of vision that gets overshadowed by the desperation and fear the event triggers in the citizenry. Perhaps for the first time, one might see how close to sea level they live and work, and how tenuous their coexistence is and always has been with the ocean, river, stream, lake or damn. Water has a way of quickly communicating its relationship with your life and sometimes that relationship is not good.

Water inspires real awe. Nothing cosmetic about it.