Impressions of My Hometown

It was easier to organize concisely my impressions of my husband's hometown than it is to do the same for mine, much like it is easier to describe the moment when you watch someone else walk through a spider's web and flail around than it is to recall the details when it is you walking through said cobweb. The best I can do with my own rear-view mirror is to make a collage...a place with no neat borders where one picture lurches into another with no correspondence until you move back and look at the whole. Actually, it is neither a triptych nor a collage; it is more like something by Monet, one of those pieces that hangs at one end of a long hall and you stand at the other end so that your eyes are at the proper distance to perceive and maybe even appreciate the image. Am I finally at such a distance?

One impression in this study hit me strongly at my hometown swimming pool. I took my own offspring, their cousins, a neighborhood street urchin, and when we arrived at the pool I picked up the governance of a few more kids. Standing in line, a high school babysitter with a nice figure but horrible buck teeth told me how spoiled her charge was. She looked down at the little girl and set up the senario for her own vicarious bragging. "Tell her what you got for your birthday. Go on, tell her." I was thinking, did I ask about this? I was then told by the little blonde girl with the wild curls that she got an "amp-3 player" and 200 dollars. She delivered all this with the rolling eyes of a bragger who walks around in skin five times her age and a thousand times her wealth. I wondred at these minimum-requirements for boasting status. It was a thought that clung to me like the humidity in the air. But for the moment, I mostly just felt like the default Pied Piper of the Pool.

Once inside, I drug a chair to the shallow end, near the place where my youngest played. I tried to relax in the sun. Once upon a time, I couldn't relax in the sun because I worried how my tan was coming. I don't tan well. My skin color doesn't make bright clothes "glow" against me. So I worried about my tan. Now, I wasn't worried about a tan, but I still couldn't relax.

"Aunt Debbie, can you give me some of my money for the snack bar?" Grunting, sitting back up, digging for the money. Reclining again. Eyes closed. "Debbie, can I borrow your son's ball?" One eye open. "Nolan, would you loan these boys your ball?" Nolan, amazed to have even been consulted in this, readily agrees. Both eyes closed again. "Debbie, will you keep the rest of this candy for me until the next break?" Finally, the one that got me out of my chair. "Mommy, will you take me to get something to eat?"

We made our way over to the snack bar, and on the way I passed a drain that has a distinctive odor, one that has been there forever...which means it was there when I myself swam as a young teen. It is not a good smell...something like the smell of the elephant cages at the zoo just after a good hosing...honestly, that's the only other place I've found that smell. Because of its uniqueness, that smell connected with my olfactory memory (which I hear makes a stronger memory trigger than other senses do.) My prior relationship with this pool came rushing back at me, back in the days when I didn't tan and cared about it, back in the early days of my blooming femininity.

In those days, I and my friends would roam the pool deck, furtively studying to see if the young boys were noticing this newly bloomed femininity. (Of course, we girls hit this a little earlier than the boys were ready to notice. They weren't yet coming to the pool to ogle the life guard; they were still more interested in seeing if they could splash her up in her chair when they ran off the end of the diving board. This sort of challenge had nothing to do with the cut of her bikini yet.) I remembered the things that were important to me then. How comparative and fluid were relationship between girls. We each had to have something we felt was a "best" feature, something that did not encroach on someone else's best feature, and these didn't even have to all be physical features, especially for those of us who had little to offer in that arena... like me. If such encroachments were made, the friendship would turn into a cat fight fueled by a subconscious fear that someone would manage to take away that one advantage we each had in getting the world (aka that boy over there) to accept us. And when your body is still changing, navigating through this stage of self-actualization can be quite treacherous. It is a wonder females are friends at all until the bloom is off the rose.

I looked around now seeing others in various stages of this progression. The girl with the turquois bikini that someone has been wearing around here since 1970. The child who has the sexiest walk at the pool, all the sexier because she is too young to mean it and therefore needed nothing as a response to it. The one who stood at the water's edge pointing her toe to her leg's best advantage as she poked at the water with it, pretending not to notice the boys playing ball right in front of her. The other girl splashing in the water, completely unnoticed by either the "pretty" girl or the boys. She'd given up on being recognized as a beauty, yet she carried the bone structure and the eyes and the smile to foretell that one day she'd leave them all in a cloud of the dust of her mature beauty. I saw the lifeguard, the one that when we were young we felt was automatically full of appeal simply because of her position. And lifeguards always have to be beautiful. That is confirmed before they are ever even offered the job. I looked at her, popping her gum and swinging her leg. Where did I get such fanciful images as a youngster? The girl in the water, the future-beauty. How did we not see what her future held compared to the life-guard, who had already hit the apex of her beauty, and so young as to leave many years of decline behind it. But we were young, with a Logan's Run mentality. You mean things will still matter to us after we're 30? Impossible!

We sat at the concession stand--me and my two wet, squirmy saddle bags--and I watched the girl who worked the stand. She had the tan of a pool worker and the body of a linebacker. She came out when no one was at the window and picked up candy wrappers and loose cheetos off the ground. She didn't complain, she didn't gripe at the kids.

How funny, the broadness and diversity in your environment when you take your eyes off yourself and stop spending all your energies and observations to assess the benefits you will glean/disasters that may strike you, you, you! I still have tendencies to look too long at myself, trying to find the carrot that I assume should be at the end of my nose, but I think I am a little less self-absorbed in this respect.

One evidence of this is that I have moved into the realm of the invisible and don't really mind it too much. I'm not old, and not young. I'm not ravishing, and not horrifying. I'm not obese, but I'm not svelte. I'm not fashionable, but I'm not bizarre. I'm not connected, but I'm not a hermit (no matter how hard I try to be one.) My days of seeking the better side of these noticeable contrasts have been abandoned, but not because of some bitter resignation to the prospect of never achieving greatness. No, it has dropped off gradually, like losing eyesight a little at a time. One day your vision is changed enough that you get glasses, and then you go out and look at a tree. You are amazed at the detail you'd been missing. This is what I saw at the pool. Vanity and fear of acknowledging change keep some from getting glasses, hearing aids, etc. But a lot of clarity can be found, a lot of what was missed can be seen and heard (and smelled) when an external influence (in this larger analysis, I'd be speaking of the influence of God) is allowed to work its magic on your own flawed part.