29 May 2006

Thing of Wonder

I was in motion, on foot and by train. I was not paying much attention to Barry Bonds and his quest to pass Babe Ruth on the home run list. I was pointedly not thinking about the reason the long holiday weekend had been created.  I decided to reserve my thoughts for the Lost and the Missing for The Day itself, wondering why it was them and not me who paid the price. It was so arbitrary. Almost capricious.

I went out of town on a lark with my sons, a lightning trip to Philadelphia and the NCAA Men's Lacrosse championship series.

It turned out to have several things to wonder about. The downtown Marriott was filled to capacity with peppy Lacrosse fans and an African American Family re-union. Hundreds of kids walked around in athletic jerseys, carrying Lacrosse sticks. Some of them wore  t-shirts proclaiming the innocence of the Duke Lacrosse players who are accused of awful crimes against an African American woman.

I waited for something unpleasant to happen, but the throng adopted an oil-and-water attitude, each of the groups seeming to successfully imagine that the other did not exist.

We did the games on Saturday, and the pilgrimage to South Philly to dine on a bench outside Geno's, home of the original Philly Cheese Steak sandwich, a culinary thing of wonder.

We each had one of the $7 dollar torpedoes, ordered exactly as it appears on the menu: sliced steak with Cheese Whiz and sautéed onions, pronounced “Steak, Whiz, wit'.”

We rolled downtown later, to South Street, and saw the vibrant street life there. Come the morning we decided to get out of town. We caught an early train from the magnificent 30th Street station. Philly was a remarkable city once, and it might be still. Perhaps if I let it grow on me. But there was no time. We had things to do, and people to see.

When we rolled up to Big Pink just before lunch, we saw it too was in motion. The boys let me off on the west end of the building, near the pool. It is Opening Weekend, and there was already a big crowd in the enclosure by the glittering blue water.

I was eager to join them, wondering what I had missed on the first day. I missed being the first one in the pool this year, first time in three years. I was fiercely competitive about that, but I kept my record a secret, no wanting any competition. First or not, the early train had returned me to town with plenty of time to fry my skin.

I collected my mail, and dumped my bags upstairs as I jumped into my pool uniform, t-shirt and baggy shorts. I threw things into the tote bag I will carry for the summer: cell phone, cigarettes, lighter, a bag of pretzels, some peanuts. The iPod and headset. A diet Coke with a screw top. Three New Yorker magazines. The pool-pass in water resistant plastic cover.

Then down the stairs and out into the fresh new season.

Our new lifeguard is a plump young man from the Czech Republic, here on a legal working visa. His name is Igor, and he seems like a jolly fellow, a little uncertain in his English, and not at all like the fierce and angular guard of last year. We will have to break him in gently, allowing him to learn who is who, and what violations of the rules we expect as our right.

We will comply with the ban on glassware on the pool deck, of course; that is a safety issue. I will get him accustomed to the fact that I will burst from the lower unit with ten minutes to go before closing each night, and even if no one is there for three hours after dinner, I expect him at his place until the last possible minute.

Igor was an eager beaver, requiring us to present our pool passes, our documents, which he kept organized in a little plastic box at his desk under the beach umbrella next to the gate. He looked at mine, and reached out to take it.

I demurred. “I keep my pass,” I said. “Later in the season when the winds come before the storm the box will blow over and the passes will scatter all along the pool deck and be ruined.”

“I don't think so” he responded doubtfully. The air was still, and he has not yet experienced the wild swirl of air as the thunderstorms roll in from the West. Still, he allowed me to pass, since there was no regulation to enforce.

I had battled his predecessor with wily skill all the previous season. I presented no documents after the first day last season, and did what I wanted, appearing minutes before closing for a final plunge, watching to the last possible moment as he was ready to pad-lock the enclosure and ride away on his bicycle into the night.

I complained bitterly to management the first few nights he closed early, thinking that no one else was left to come.

Ivan got even with me by humiliating my guests when I was not around.  He grew dark with the exposure to the elements on his existential twelve hour shifts in the merciless moist heat, no one to guard but a few retired ladies doing their water aerobics in the morning, then a long slow afternoon, the deck empty, until the working folks came home from the city. A flurry of exercise, and then a painful slow period to closing: a few aged lap-swimmers breaking the silence, and then of course my last-minute eruption into the night, the loud splash.

We watched Igor prowl the deck, testing the water with his little chemical kit, It will take him a few weeks to settle into the rhythm of the pool, and he will find a corner where he can speak endlessly on his cell phone, arranging whatever it is that the middle-Europeans do in their twelve hours away from the pools across Arlington. His skin will grow darker by the week, shackled by obligation to the open gate, reading Dostoyevski, wondering when the season will end.

We evaluated him for potential as we huddled in our accustomed place, wondering how long it will take to break him to our will.

The regulars were all there: Uncle Willie, the Union organizer, and Mrs. Hitler and Biggie the pension fund manager. Mrs. Hitler was scanning the pool deck for infractions of The Rules. Lester was there, of course, gazing at the children with that unsettling attention.

The Professor and his baggy Speedos did not appear, and there was general relief on the part of the women on sunny side of the pool deck. They hate being reminded of his personal parts, and actually purchased him a new set of modest swim trunks last year. He only wore them once, to be nice, and then want back to his briefs. The women were dismayed.

Ms. Hamilton is starting the season strong, with a good mahogany base tan. Maggie 2 said she had gone to the doctor a few weeks before and he didn't like the look of some moles. She was wearing last year's tiny bikini that does not leave much to the imagination. She covered up the small incision where the suspect mole had been removed with a band-aide.

We checked out the new faces, the ones who had moved in over the dark months when the pool was covered by the green tarp and we all stayed inside, huddled for warmth, wondering when the spring and the warmth would come again.

Big Pink's infirm tend not to spend much time in the pool, so it was only by the influx of the new faces that we could derive how many of them had died since the pool closed last year, opening up their units for sale to the newcomers.

Based on the number of new people, it had been a sickly season.

It took hours to catch up on the gossip, find out who was feuding with whom, By the time I felt I was pretty much on top of things, Leslie remarked that I was beginning to look like a lobster.

“You have to start with a good base,” I said. “Really burn it in.”

Maggie 2 picked at the band-aide over the place where her bsala carcinoma had been removed. “And remember to see your Dermatologist,” she said.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window