Twice a week, after dropping my daughter off at the bus and before beginning my day of working from home, I swim laps at the YMCA. I started this routine in September, motivated by seeking an evidenced-based reply to my daughter’s whines that swim team practice was terrible because the water was “tooooooooooooooooooo coooooooooold.”
Once I started swimming, I remembered that I really like swimming. Well, not entirely. After my first attempt at lap swimming since I swam laps with Katie before she was born, I was exhausted. Spent. And cold, not that I will tell Katie that.
As my lung capacity grew, I felt in the water a calm I imagine people feel when deep in meditation or in prayer. I thought of what my friend and former lifeguard compadre, Matthew Rieck, used to say about swimming laps at the Avon Lake Municipal Pool: “When you swim, you can either think of everything, or think of nothing.”
I find that sentiment to be true, and fluctuating on a lap by lap basis. This morning, for example, one lap was about my to-do list for the day; the next was about what I was going to give up for Lent; the next was trying to figure out what song was playing for the water aerobics class on the other side of the pool; and then back the other way amazed that I’d actually heard the Irish tune “I’ll tell me ma” as part of a water aerobics class.
After swimming and navigating the women’s locker room, where the conversations overheard remind that girls, with their gossip and cattiness, will be girls, even the ones getting ready for the Silver Sneakers class.
Then, the highlight of the whole Y experience — the cup of cappuccino from the vend-o-matic coffee machine (free until 10:00 a.m.).
And, there they sit, holding court on the couches adjacent to this magical fountain of caffeine, two bad-joke-telling, world-event-grousing, free-coffee-drinking, grumpy old men. They are Statler and Waldorf, except instead of watching the Muppets, they are forced to watch Fox News (more is the pity for them!).
I have no idea what time they arrive each day, nor do I know when they leave (although I suspect about 10:01, when the free coffee train ends). They know everyone who walks by, which I suppose makes sense since they sit there for hours a day. They actually begin sentences with the phrase “Did you hear the one about…” They tease and pontificate, bloviate and cajole.
They make for good entertainment while I await my free coffee and I am glad that Y, with its comings and goings, gives them a community to listen to/be a source for their comments and bad jokes. I don’t even mind when their jokes are directed at me, like today when they called me “Sherlock,” because of that hat I was wearing.
No matter. I have always preferred a good/bad joke or political argument to talking about people, so I will take a thousand jokes from the Y Statler and Waldorf over even one more gossipy klatch of the Silver Sneaker set. Plus, Statler and Waldorf are closer to the coffee.
Kitchen Table Stories 