For better or worse, my parents hadn’t had any idea at all what to expect from my first swimming race. I biked to the pool every day for practice and playtime and to my friends’ houses for our various summertime activities. My mother hadn’t seen me swim since that first abortive tryout more than a month prior. My father had to that point never seen me swim. They hadn’t witnessed the weeks of hard work I’d been putting in with those bamboo sticks, nor were they thinking about the changes that four weeks of constant swimming, cycling, and summer activity can have on a dedicated ten-year-old’s body. They probably thought I’d be lucky just to finish. When I got third, they were blown away. My sudden success blindsided them. Decades later, my mother still talked about the time I got third place in my very first swimming race ever.
Out of four swimmers.
 |
| The orange Jeep CJ-7 that my father thought a Marine infantry officer ought to drive. This was taken when he was a Basic Training Company Commander at MCRD, San Diego. |
My folks were ecstatic for a week, but though I tried to share in their joy, I simply could not understand what the big deal was. I’d beaten my friend Chris, but everyone knew that his best stroke was backstroke, and in my circle of friends, no one thought that this was weird—or even worth mentioning. It didn’t matter at all except that we were teammates, that we’d swum together and cheered together, and that this was our lives.
Changes came quickly after that. By the next week’s meet, I’d switched from the 50 Breaststroke to the 50 Butterfly, and if I didn’t win that first 50 Fly, then I surely got second. I also picked up the butterfly leg of our ten-year-old relay team. Chris swam back, David swam breast, I swam butterfly, and Cass swam freestyle. The medley relay soon became the best part of the meet for me, not least because my friends and I almost always brought home the blue ribbon. Between that and the 50 Fly, I soon had enough race ribbons to line one wall of my room from end to end.
My folks flat didn’t know what to make of any of this. Their joy turned quickly to frustration, however, as my success in the pool failed to translate into success at other sports. I was riding in the old beat-up orange jeep that my father thought a tough-guy Marine infantry officer ought to drive when he finally lost his patience with me. We were driving home from yet another lackluster elementary school soccer effort, and I could tell that my father had something on his mind. The tension built inexorably until it popped, coming out as a sudden burst of hard, unexpected anger.
“Why don’t you care about soccer?” Dad asked hotly. He refused even to look at me, though I could see how hard he was gripping the steering wheel of his Jeep.
“What?” I replied, both baffled and suddenly defensive. “I do care about soccer.”
“No you don’t!” Dad yelled. His voice took on the deep, parade ground tones that had terrified generations of recruits at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. “You don’t even try out there,” he sneered. “You look like you don’t care at all. We never see you work. Your best effort, your adrenaline… we only ever see that when you’re swimming. Why don’t you care about soccer?”
I felt myself go quiet, and for a long moment, I didn’t say anything.
“Answer me!” Dad yelled.
“I do love soccer,” I said quickly. I knew that this wouldn’t suffice, so I tried to put some conviction into it. “I do!”
“You do not!”
“I do! I love soccer! I love it!”
Dad looked at me with hard eyes. He could see through me but still didn’t know what to do. I disgusted him, but he knew that if he pressed, I would just go quiet again. I wasn’t some Marine, after all, nor was I the hard-charging tough-guy kind of boy that he would have preferred. I was the kind of ten-year-old who liked to read and play Dungeons and Dragons. He could yell at me, intimidate me, even bully me, but none of that would turn me into a smaller version of himself.
Dad was a gifted athlete. He was hit by a car his freshman year of college, and this cut his collegiate running career short, but he still went on to run two marathons and countless half-marathons and 10k road races. He took my Boy Scout troop on an almost seventy mile bicycling trip up the C&O Canal when we were twelve, and as a captain, he’d played competition-level volleyball on a Marine Corps intramural team in San Diego. He could bump and dig with the very best of them, and with his six-foot, five-inch frame, he was more than capable of dominating the net. About the only sport that my father couldn’t do—at all—was swimming. He was awkward and ungainly in the water, and it was weird to see it in comparison with the grace and power that he brought to pretty much every other physical activity that I ever saw him attempt.
My father wasn’t exactly unhappy that I was swimming. I knew that. He was plenty happy that I was good in the pool. He just didn’t understand why I wasn’t equally good on the soccer field or the baseball diamond, and sometimes his disappointment with my reality was more than he could bear.
At length, Dad took a breath and let it out. I too sighed with relief. Neither of us spoke again until long after we got home.
This post an excerpt from my memoir Swim, Bike, Run, Live, Love, Repeat. It is a story of swimming, family, and belonging. The project itself is archived by chapter in the #SBRLLR tab of this blog.
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment