Swimming Lessons

To the left is a really bad picture of Garion's first day of swimming lessons for this summer. Garion is the barely visible blob just to the left of the ladder. This is Garion's third summer of swimming lessons. Up until now, he has hated every second of them. I didn't even tell him he was starting swimming lessons this summer until about 4:00 yesterday afternoon (the lesson started at 5:00). Surprisingly, this tactic seemed to work. Garion gave me five minutes of the usual "I REALLY don't want to take swimming lessons." I have him a thirty second answer that boiled down to: tough pattooties, you're going and we're not discussing it anymore. He then asked me how many swimming lessons he had to take and I told him when he could show me that he could swim across the pool by himself, without touching the bottom and without a life jacket, he would be done. He seemed to be heartened by the fact that he might not have to take swimming lessons every summer for the rest of his life, and pretty much sucked it up. I was very proud. Then, miracle of all miracles, I think he actually had fun during his lesson. Whew!

We arrived at the pool about 15 minutes early because I have still not adjusted to the fact that Flagstaff is small and you can get all the way to the other side of town in 10 minutes. While we were sitting there, I told Garion that this was the pool where I learned to swim.

"Really?" he asked. And then eying a group of teachers in the corner, "Which teacher did you have?"
Me: "Well, it was a long time ago, so I didn't have any of those teachers."
Garion: "Because none of them were even alive yet?"

I started to say, "no." Then I stopped and looked again at the group of teachers. They all appeared to be maybe between 18 and 20 years old--college aged. I think I was 12 the last summer I took swimming lessons.....about 20 years ago.

Me in the agony of the realization of the passage of time: "Well.....yes, I guess they probably were not alive yet."
Garion, very helpfully: "Or they were babies."