Friday, June 27, 2003

Kids At The Pool

Summertime has been a challenge for our children. During the school year we had them, and, consequently, ourselves too, on tight schedules – up by 7:00 a.m., a bowl of Cyber-Oat Crunchies and a chilly glass of pulp-free juice by 7:30, hair and teeth brushed and they were off to school by 8:00, back for an after-school snack by 3:00, alternating play date or music lesson most afternoons until 5:00, dinner around 5:30, brushing and minty flossing by 7:15, then reading aloud the latest installment of The Adventures of the Brave and Talented Family – we’re on volume 9, in which The Brave and Talented Family goes to Greece and solves a mystery on the Acropolis. Oh, that rascally dog of theirs! Then, finally, lights out by 8:00 p.m. Don’t tell the kids, but after eight we might cut loose and watch a situation comedy before reading in bed ourselves.

Liberated from all that structure now, the children have struggled a bit. It was, I think, sometime late in the very first morning of summer vacation that my oldest child came up to me and said, “Dad, I’m bored.” Even though as a boy I also knew the terrible boredom of summer, I’m afraid I wasn’t very sympathetic to her plight. I take my adult attitude toward boredom from the mother of John Berryman’s quirky and ungrammatical hero Henry. In a poem called Dream Song 14, Henry has this to say about her: “my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no // Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no / inner resources, because I am heavy bored.” That’s what Henry says, and it’s good enough for me. To help my children discover their inner resources, I offer them a choice: find something fun to do or go clean the basement. I can’t remember where I learned this subtle parenting strategy – maybe from our vintage copy of How to Raise Children at Home in Your Spare Time – but I can tell you the strategy has paid off. Now, a slender two weeks later, I no longer hear my children saying that they are bored.

It doesn’t hurt that the neighborhood pool is open and the water is no longer as chilly as our good morning orange juice. I took the kids and two of their friends there after dinner the other day, and within a few minutes they were leaping from the edge, swimming under water, and generally living it up. While the patrons were slowly leaving for the day, the on-duty lifeguard and the off-duty lifeguard vanquished their boredom by flirting with each other – he almost pushed her in, she almost pulled him in – and the children created their own version of the Wide World of Sports. One child, standing on the side, announced the judging categories, like the smallest splash by an athlete jumping from the edge of the pool. The other three took turns leaping in, and then scores were announced: maybe 8.9 for the first athlete, 8.8 for the second, and a suspenseful 9.0 for the third. Pretty soon they realized that the youngest greatly enjoyed the thrill of victory but could hardly endure the agony of defeat. So they changed the game, and now every contestant won a prize in each round of competition. From then on, from my green plastic chair, I heard the nine-year old judge awarding prizes for such things as the most wacky dive, the most realistic dive, and overall cuteness. With categories like that, how can any athlete feel left out?

The whistle blew for adult swim. For the children this nearly endless 15 minute period is made tolerable only by the presence of the snack bar. Soon the kids were in the pool again, and the two lifeguards brought another teenager into their flirty game. In a triangle of quickly shifting alliances, two of them would try to toss the girl with the dry hair into the pool, but a moment later it would be the boy with the dry shirt who was struggling to stay out of the water. Seeing them play this way, suddenly I remembered a particular day long ago when I had been exactly that young.

Soon the sun was nothing more than a peachy splash of color behind the western clouds, and the children were playing one last game. They ran in slow-motion through the darkening water, their arms turning, their mouths groaning open to indicate passionate athletic activity, and the fourth child, my daughter the judge, stood on the side of the pool singing the Chariots of Fire melody as her friends made their way with great goofy drama across the pool. It was a lovely moment of playful striving, as our part of the world slowly turned away from the sun.

For Michiana Chronicles, hoping you’ve found your inner resources, this is Ken Smith.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on June 27, 2003
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