O America you are great.
But you can also be boring.
Just three weeks ago, another team of teen lifeguards looked forward to a romantic summer on Lake Michigan, protecting people from their own horseplay and dicky-assing around. Baywatch babes have nothing on them. A week later, reality set in. You sit up on that chair, or out in that rowboat, and after an hour and a half, you switch. They switch beaches, too, running from among four or five little beaches in Rogers Park, for variety, but even then, it’s a tedious job out in weather, all kinds of weather, most of it hot weather. Today, pictured above, it’s foggy and chilly.
I remember being bored shitless as a lifeguard at the Jackson County Nixon Pool in Michigan for one long summer of 1977. How many times did I squawk, “No running!” through a beat-up megaphone? How many times did I use the skimmer to pull trash out of the pool? The one glorious moment I cherish from that summer was on August 16, 1977. I had just returned to the lifeguard tower after ten days at the Boy Scout National Jamboree in Pennsylvania, where it rained every day and my tentmate floated out in the night on his air mattress. That afternoon was lovely and there were families picnicking around the pool on a Tuesday—and the news was whispered to me by my boss: Elvis Presley had died on the toilet. I knew my mother was at work at that moment, weeping in her personnel office. Before asking permission, I got on the megaphone and boomed out with martial solemnity, “YOUR ATTENTION, YOUR ATTENTION: THE KING IS DEAD. THE KING IS DEAD. ELVIS ARON PRESLEY DIED TODAY, AGE 43.” There was a murmur, and, as if I had announced that the pool was closed, everybody packed up their towels and picnic baskets, and went home.
In 1984, I went into the bush of Alaska and taught Athabaskan kids how to swim in the glacier-fed Yukon, and they were fascinated by the hair on my chest and pulled it out while we were all numb in the water, and when I got out and warmed up, small dots of blood pricked out of my chest.
Now I am old and my lifeguard certificate has lapsed long ago, but I’ve lived longer than Elvis.
In Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality, a woman older even than me, once a beauty and still maintaining herself, is at the pool of a chic hotel:
“. . . She walked around the pool toward the exit. She passed the lifeguard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she turned her head, smiled, and waved to him. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly colored ball to her lover. That smile and that gesture had charm and elegance, while the face and the body no longer had any charm. It was the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body. But the woman, though she must of course have realized that she was no longer beautiful, forgot that for the moment. There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. In any case, the instant she turned, smiled, and waved to the young lifeguard (who couldn't control himself and burst out laughing), she was unaware of her age. The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved.”
Most of the day, I can live outside of time, and forget my own age, and I think, I could still sit up on that tower and blow my whistle all day, too—but if I were to do it at this age, I’d look like a perv. There is always a moment, a moment like the moment this woman experiences with the lifeguard, when it all comes crashing back. But oh, if I were young again, bored shitless high in a lifeguard chair at the Nixon Pool.
.
"Aron" (Sorry, pedantic.)
damn