Back in my day, summer break was the time when you spent every waking moment away from your own home. As soon as the sun peaked out over the horizon you dressed, donned your Keds or Chuck Taylors, slurped down a bowl of Coco Puffs and bolted. Nobody even had to make a phone call. We all knew where we were going. Not that there was only one place to go, mind you, there were several awesome places to go, but there was a critical decision metric for choice of destination. The weather. If it was sunny but cool, you went to the school playground for games of Pinnies, and to attempt to not break your arm while flinging yourself off the monkey bars. In case you don’t know what Pinnies is it’s a game where you fling a rubber baseball against the ground near a wall with all your might and hope that the ball will carom off the wall in a grand arcing parabola, go over the kids in the fields heads and have that be declared a “home run”. Alternate strategies were to throw the ball at a shallow angle and go for singles, doubles, and triples. I believe the children nowadays are calling this game “Wall Ball”. I prefer the less descriptive, less alliterative, and more childish moniker, myself.
At our school playground there was additional fun because, at some point, we found a way to shinny up the drain pipe onto the low roof area of the school. It was our version of an immigrant’s kid’s neighborhood tree house. We’d go up there and play all kinds of pretend and imagination games. “Protect the Fort” “Spy” and “Spit and Suck” were just a few of the games that were roof-top staples. You can probably figure out the idea behind the first two, but just in case you are unfamiliar with “Spit and Suck” this is a game where you lay on the roof face down with your head just over the end of the roof line, work up some saliva, attempt to allow the saliva to drool down out of your mouth as far as it could go without falling, and then - yes, you guessed it - suck it back up! Remember, these were the days before hover boards.
If it was going to be a hot, sunny day, we dressed directly into our bathing suits and went to the community pool. Maple Pool. Maple Pool was in Maple Park, of course, and obviously that means that it was located on Maple avenue. Creative city planners, right!!? On days that you actually did need to make plans with a friend, say on a day where the weather was indeterminate, like “cloudy”, you would have to be clear and specific about which Maple Park you would be going to because there were three of them. There was “Big Maple”, “Little Maple”, and “Oak Park Maple”. Yep. Berwyn had two Maple Parks (‘cause, again, super-creative city planners) and the next town over had one, too. Big Maple and Little Maple were across town from one another, so you only made that mistake once on your bike, that’s for sure. It wasn’t often that Oak Park Maple came into play unless you wanted to get Parky’s hot dogs for lunch. But for hot, sunny days, it was always the pool at “Little Maple”.
We would hang out all day sitting on our towels getting tanned (without sunscreen and with baby oil rubbed in) and jump into the pool when we got hot. We played Marco Polo and sharks and minnows and, on really hot days “biggest splash off the high-dive”. This particular game was encouraged by the lifeguards when it got to be over 90 degrees as the best of the participants could get them soaked and, therefore, cooled off. It seemed so cool to be a lifeguard! Sitting in a position of authority. Lording over your fiefdom that included “the shallow end” or, alternatively, “the deep end”. You even got to police the decks and blow a whistle at people behaving badly (ei. Running, teasing others, eating outside the snack area or splashing those outside the pool). We revered the lifeguards as though they were Kings and Queens! Yes, indeed, Berwyn had it’s very own royal family.
And I wanted to be a part of it. As soon as I was 16 years old I became a lifeguard. But the municipal pool was already staffed and so I got a job at a county pool. The county pool was located in a forest preserve with lots of land. This, it turned out, was where the entire population of a new brand of immigrant hung out. Mexicans. Mexicans were just like Italians only with even larger families. And they one-upped us by having their Mariachi bands in full traditional dress! The Mexicans loved the guards, too. They fed us the MOST delicious tamales and roasted corn. That was the first time I had tried an elota - a hot corn-on-the-cob-on-a-stick slathered with Mayo and spices! One cute hunk of a man even let me wear his sombrero one crazy-hot, sunny day as I sat in the guard's chair. It was so big it completely shaded me. I loved those people! But the thing about Mexicans is that they were often NOT in the “light-blue” collar jobs. Theirs were “plain-old-blue-collar”. Which meant that none of them had any extra cash laying around to send their kids to swimming lessons the way us “light-blue collar” folk had. Which meant that, very often, they and their children did not know how to swim. I did not know this when I took the job.
While working at this pool, we lifeguards literally put hash marks on a chalkboard next to our names tallying the number of saves we had. It counted as a save if you had to go into the pool and pull someone who had begun to drown to safety. Merely descending the chair and using the pole to drag them to the side from the deck did not count. It was not uncommon for us to average 40 saves each by the end of the summer. Every Fourth of July weekend was a madhouse. Sometimes a guard would make as many as ten saves a day for those two days. And the newbie guards who didn’t know enough to try to take that weekend off bore the brunt of some seriously stressful sits. That, of course, was me at sixteen years old. Now. Up until this point I have neglected to mention that I am currently 5’1" tall and weigh about 110 pounds. Back then, I was 5’2” tall and weighed about 95 lbs. Grown men would begin to drown in front of me and I would, without really thinking about it, proceed to dive in, swim to their location in the pool, put them in the requisite body lock, and swim to the side of the pool with them in tow. They would invariably thank me in the best English they could conjure or just say “Muchas Gracias” and cross themselves with a novina as I tried to explain that they should stay in the shallow ends of the pool. No problem. Except for that one time on my first Fourth of July weekend, of course.
Yep. A gigantic hunk of a beautiful Latino man was carrying his very lovely female companion across the pool. Unbeknownst to him, the deep “end” was in the middle of the pool. Neither one of them could swim. It was super busy but, as a highly trained professional with a whole month of experience, I saw this coming from a mile away. I blew my whistle with the gentle “tweet - tweet” that is akin to the “toot” you give to a driver in front of you to let them know that the traffic light has turned green. The, “hey, there… it’s time for you to do something” toot. This is the typical lifeguard tweet. I tried to get their attention and to have the Mexican version of the Greek demi-god Daphnis put his sweetheart’s feet on the bottom of the pool and redirect them to the shallow end. To no effect. I tried a louder and longer tweet. Nothing. Lastly, the I tried the “you have angered the lifeguard” double-tweet that is loud enough for the whole pool to hear. These tweets are “referee-at-a-football-game” loud. All heads snapped toward me. Except Daphnis’ and Chloe’s. The bottom of this pool was designed by some idiot who hated lifeguards. The bottom quickly dove to a depth of 12 feet at a steep incline and so Daphnis suddenly found himself drowning and proceeded to alternately hold Chloe out of the water and attempt to use her as a flotation device. With the cat-like reflexes and the utter lack of forethought that comes with being 16.5 years or age, I dove in. My thoughts, if you can call that jumble of panic in my brain thoughts, were to get Daphnis feeling like he was safe so that he would stop drowning Chloe and reassess from there. My plan was to get them in a train formation and drag them both to the shallow water. I grabbed Daphnis under his arm and tried to elevate his upper body so that he would feel like his face was out of water and so that I could reassure and talk to him. Yeah… that was my plan, anyway. Daphnis instantly put both of his arms around my neck latching on for dear life, which turned out to be a death grip on me. He let go of Chloe who instantly sank below the surface. Daphnis was strangling me and pushing me under in a total panic at this point. I was remarkably calm. In pain and unable to breathe, but calm. So I did the only thing I could do. I grabbed his testicles and squeezed a bit. He immediately let go and suddenly found himself able to dog paddle the 20 feet to the shallow water. In the meantime, one of the other sitting guards had seen what was happening and had dove in, grabbed Chloe, and was proceeding to swim with her to the shallow water.
After it was all said and done, everyone talked and laughed heartily about my nearly being drowned by a guy who was obviously over 200 pounds. They also totally made fun of the fact that, in the end, I didn’t even get a chalk mark. Daphnis had saved himself and another guard had gotten the save for Chloe. The only conciliatory thing about it was that I had gotten to grab a guy’s junk.
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