Here we find ourselves, late in the long, wandering summer, and like many parents, I’ve been waiting for my grade-school daughters to grow weary of the season’s yawning entropy so that school – so close now you can smell the chalk dust – will seem an appealing alternative to unstructured boredom. But, nothin’ doing. These kids demonstrate an admirable tolerance for empty time, even after an exceptionally lazy summer in which the key activity has been whiling away the hours reading library books while twisting slowly on our tree swing, tracing circles on the grass with bare toes. And, we have expended endless afternoon hours at our local swimming pool.
The pool milestone for me this year is that I am no longer needed in the water. I’ve graduated, with mixed reluctance and gratitude, from the admirable ranks of those game, spunky mothers who spend long afternoons standing in 3 feet of cold water, shoulders burning in the sun, averting sunglasses and hair from splashes as they feign enthusiasm for catching squealing youngsters jumping into the pool for the hundredth time. These days, I can bring my sunhat and a bookbag full of work and settle smugly into a pool-side lawn chair for the afternoon ... but I rarely accomplish much. I confess to wasting hours, just watching the kids in the deep end of the pool. Not the diving-board hotdogs, mind you; I’m mesmerized by the kids who while away the time in the deep water, suspending themselves below the surface in twelve feet of cool turquoise. How well I remember the appeal.
I have watched dozens of kids play this way, hoisting themselves up, straight-armed, onto the pool’s slick concrete edge, just as we used to do, counting to three, and then plunging below the surface – perhaps to arrow down to touch the bottom, or perhaps to mouth underwater messages to one another that warped sound waves and exploding bubbles of laughter make impossible to translate. But mostly, as we used to do, they just hang in mid-water, suspended, gratefully, like untethered astronauts in an altered atmosphere in which adult voices are muffled and vision is comfortingly blurred. It brings to mind the enigmatic quote from the wildly popular kids’ book series by Lemony Snicket: “The world is quiet here.” The deep end of the pool is a pocket of cool stillness in a world that, as kids know too well, is deeply unquiet.
How poignantly youthful those well-spent hours in the deep end seem – marked by an understandable wish, not for oblivion, really, but for a dream state of safe suspension ... to hang in a constant present, marked only by the beating of one’s heart and the slow release of bubbles that reminds us that any time in an artificially perfect environment is necessarily limited. We will always have to surface – and not just because we need to breathe. At the pool, there’s the additional pending threat that at any moment the ideal world below the water’s surface will be shattered by the whistle-blow that signals the horror known as Adult Swim. All kids: OUT.
I think of those hallmark scenes in the film The Graduate, in which the camera follows Dustin Hoffman, as the befuddled Benjamin Braddock, as he plunges below the surface of his parents’ pool, wanting nothing more than to hang, muffled, in the cool safety of the water. He fears that what awaits him when he breaks the surface is an adult world captured in “One word: Plastics.” Who doesn’t understand that impulse to avoid Adult Swim? But, of course, it’s only when he breaks the surface that he can begin to determine his own fate, swimming against the current in a way that truly marks his passage into adulthood.
Watching the kids in the deep end of the pool who want nothing more than to stay underwater, in that perfect, temporarily tranquility, I’m reminded uneasily of the behavior of many grown-ups in this election season. How many of us would rather hang out, suspended in the artificial environment of congenial opinion, muffling ourselves against voices that we do not want to hear? I know I haven’t had a single conversation about Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, with anyone who doesn’t already agree with me (indeed, the crowded theater we saw it in was a chorus of the converted). Nor have I gone out of my way to talk with those whose yard signs stake out viewpoints that oppose my own. Instead, like childhood pals telegraphing underwater messages to one another that don’t much matter because we already know we agree, we fail to have clear conversations that might challenge our own perspectives.
As the election nears, though, the sharp whistle of reality is blowing, and it’s no longer enough to suspend ourselves in the coolly comfortable element of shared opinions. It’s time to break the surface. In short, friends, it is time for Adult Swim.