Vic Socotra

25 August 2008

Talk Story

If you are anything like me, you are getting about ready to puke at the prospects of another whining story about how fast the summer has gone, and the fact that the little men are soon enough going to drag the yellow couchettes back down to the Lifeguard room in the basement.
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The Olympics are over, the Chinese has arrived, and I am shuddering with the prospects of what we will have to go through on the way to November. The closing ceremony of the Olympics was as spectacular as the opening, and the city of London and everyone that hosts the Games in the future is going to have their work cut out for them.

Since the Fall goes on forever here in northern Virginia, it would seem reasonable that the pool should accommodate our need for gossip and cardiovascular activity. It is a budget issue, like the Special Assessment the Board is going to try to sneak through the meeting on the edge of the Labor Day holiday this week.

It is just too damn bad. The Pool Group has got up to a full hour of treading water and swapping lies.

You can’t watch the clock, by the way. Watching the second hand creep around actually has the effect of slowing time.

“A watched clock never boils,” said Death Junior the other day, and I knew she was on to something.

You could never make it to the end of the workout if you watched the black industrial hands of the black-and-white industrial clock on the salmon pink brick wall on the west side of the pool.

Jakob the Czech has it down to a science, since the clock rules his life, eleven in the morning until nine at night, rain or shine. He ignores everything. In his mind, he is already in Las Vegas for his week-long vacation before Middle Europe calls him home.

We pass the cardio time in the same way they do in the Islands, where I used to live. The Hawaiians call the process “talk story,” and is different than just shooting-the-shit. It is constructing a linked narrative of shared observations that makes the tranquil days drift by in pleasant timelessness.

It helps if the story has slightly salacious details, nothing to scare the children, who blunder through the little floating circle, but that is not a requirement. Anything to keep the mind off the endless repetitive rhythm of the full arm -stroke and exaggerated bicycle kick that keeps the head out of the water.

Everyone likes that part, and talking keeps the tempo just about right.

But the key is having something to talk about. The obvious topic is the end of everything, which we try to avoid, though it keeps coming at you from all directions. We tamp it back down quickly.

Once, we spun out a visit to the Hellburger for nearly a half hour. We talked about every one of the shops in the store-front development at the top of the hill in Rosslyn, the institutional rudeness of the staff at the Raise the Steak chophouse, and the stoic demeanor of the old Vietnamese men at the Pho 75 restaurant next to it.

The debate about the side-orders at Hellburger took five minutes (stroke, stroke) since the notion of serving a watermelon instead of fried potatoes with that exception charred Black Angus beef seemed….well, outré, you know?

“So what did the order-taker wear?” I asked dreamily (stroke, stroke) and Sarah One (kick) said he was an average white guy in average polo shirt with a Hellburger logo on it, complexion not bad, for all that, mid-twenties, almost eligible, in a pedestrian sort of way.

“Prospects as a Suitor?” I asked (stroke, stroke)

“Not unless he is an owner, you know?”

“But tell me about the menu board. How many items were on it?”

By the time we got to the account of the first actual bite of burger, it was almost time to swim slowly to the side. The spinning-out of the tale is what counts.

We have been working with Circus Girl’s search for a job for two months, and know the menu at Steve’s Trenton, New Jersey, Marriott, where he spends the week.

We imagine all sorts of cardio activities we will do when the pool closes for the season.

I know the most likely one. The twelve-ounce curl is going to be my exercise of choice in the months of darkness. Seems a pity that we have all now got such nice color and tone, only to once again slowly turn soft and pasty-white like grubs.

“Living at Big Pink is like being at a resort all the time,” said Mary Margaret brightly. She is a wonderful woman, kind to a fault, and capable of finding the best in just about everything. When Ms Hamilton announced that she was getting married and moving to Manhattan with her handsome boyfriend, she immediately started planning the farewell party on the pool deck.

Some of the other women looked sideways at one another. This is going to open up the tanning competition for next season, something that has been about as hopeless as challenging the Chinese in platform diving while Ms Hamilton casually tuned brown as a nut, her toned abs glistening with oil.

It won’t be the same without her on the pool deck, but we have to close ranks and move on. The circle expands and contracts. Ludmilla the lovely Ukrainian is moving in as Ms Hamilton moves out. She got a relationship haircut over the weekend, a new look to start off a different path.

I don’t know what it is about women from the old Soviet empire. They have a beauty that is tinged with a distant sadness. Maybe it is a function of living in the high latitudes, or the secret knowledge of the heartbreak that is contained in the warm brevity of summer.

The new hairstyle suits her well, short enough to be impertinent and saucy, though soft enough to emphasize her rich cheekbones and soft brown eyes.

There are only five more weeknight swims this season. We are going to have to get serious.20There are careers to plan and relationships to work on.

Then we are going to have to turn to indoor sports, and you know what can happen in there, when the forced civility of public visibility is gone.

We will have to bear up and do the best we can. Lurching from the summer, and from the Olympics into the Conventions, it is going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I think it is something like 67 days until the election is behind us, and our collective fate is sealed. We'll see how it goes.

But what the hell are we going to talk about until that happens?

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