SOUL SAP

Adventures of Aquababe

My mom is not a strong swimmer. In fact, she refuses to put her face in the water, and instead of taking her fear by the horns,  it's just easier to blame my dad. To this day, she claims she was taken against her will to see "Jaws" on the big screen back in 1975.  Not wanting to pass on her aquaphobia, my mom started me in swim lessons when I was the just a year old. So, I'm sure it was a bit of a shock when at four, I fell face down into Donner Lake and remained there, motionless.

My mom screamed for my dad to pull me out, but he was too far away. Luckily my brother was close enough to drag me out of the water by my ponytail, caveman style. To this day, we still aren't sure what happened. Maybe I clumsily fell in and got disoriented. Or perhaps it were the ghosts of the cannibalized settlers that were getting hungry.

I am sure my dad was scared at the prospect of his daughter drowning, but I can almost imagine him thinking, "Seriously? Well, that was money well-spent".

In second grade, swimming lessons became a mandatory activity for everyone at the school. Since I already had lessons, I was not afraid of the Osborn Aquatic Center, however, I was terrified of stripping down to my bathing suit and performing in front of others. I was at least a head taller than everyone else in school. I also had long Dallas-style hair, and huge plastic glasses that set me apart from the cute gals with their cute hair and cute clothes. Even at a young age, I was very aware of my differences, and I felt that standing side by side with all of the other girls in bathing suits would only highlight my freakishly long limbs.

Now, put those limbs in motion under water, and you've got a swamp boat buzzing through the Bayou. 

Eventually, I became a very strong swimmer, and since my birthday was in the summer, I always wanted my party to incorporate water somehow. Well, water and Stephen King movies. One year, I celebrated my birthday with my relatives in Arkansas. We all went to a water park, and it blew my little mind. They had water slides that were tubes! I had never seen such a thing. You could go head-first, feet-first, ass-first...the possibilities were endless.

After choosing a position, your body was hurled at Star Wars speed through a blue tube that winded, looped, dropped, and eventually spit your body out (unannounced) into a pool of screaming people. It was magic and I couldn't get enough. One time (which ended up being my last time), I decided I was going all out. Feet first, tummy down. I waved "good-bye" to my dad and watched the image of him get smaller and smaller until I was bouncing blindly around in a world of fiberglass.

The impact on my stomach made me barf up a little bit of my Taco Bell enchirito, but man was I flying. Somewhere between the ten foot mega drop and the sidewinder special, I felt a sharp pain in my big toe. I was completely distracted, and when the time came to toilet bowl me into the pool of on-lookers, I drank more than my fair share of pee water.

I immediately got out of the pool and saw that my entire big toenail was blue. However, it wasn't from bruising. A freak piece of blue fiberglass had pole vaulted its way underneath my nail, and it was not coming out without a fight. That evening, I shoved a rag in my mouth as my dad played operation with some tweezers. The first step was to trim the nail back, which only made my big toe look like an angry bald man.

Then, it was tweezer time. Every yank felt like he was sawing off a limb. Eventually, the stubborn piece of crap came out, and thus my nail fell off two days later. Even though I did not walk away from water tube wasteland unscathed, I maintained my love of the water.

When my daughter was a baby, I heard from a friend that her soon-to-be step children could not swim, and that was the first thing she was going to change after officially becoming their step mom. I applauded her take-action bravado, and decided to be proactive with my own child. At six months, I enrolled her in swim lessons. I had no idea what to expect, but I knew one thing: I needed a one-piece bathing suit pronto.