Again and again he made her jump into the deep water off the diving board. She was scared. She loved the water and she wanted to be in the pool playing at the shallow end or making her way around the edge hanging on and occasionally letting go challenge herself.
She didn’t know how to swim. She didn’t know how to blow out from her nose to avoid the implosion of water into her brain where she felt like she was drowning. She held her breath and her nose.
“Ha, ha, ha!” he laughed as he finally caught her and brought her to the surface. He played that vicious game with her every summer.
At the beach when she was nine, she learned how to swim by herself. The salt water helped her float and she stuck the tips of her fingers into imaginary crab holes in the sand below the surface to keep her balance in the waves until suddenly she was floating! She dog paddled furiously. She practiced all weekend at the beach.
Back at the pool in Ojai, she was finally able to kick, float, crawl, and paddle across the pool. Even though her style was chaotic at best, it did give her the freedom from her father’s yearly torment.
(First published 6/21/11)
