Hot out there and getting hotter. I am appreciating the air
conditioning and thinking back to the time fifty years and more gone when there
was none, at least where I lived. There was the odd air conditioned store in
the late fifties in my home town, but most offices and private homes were at
ambient temperature. And in Windsor (Ontario) in August, the ambient
temperature was usually in the (pre metric) 90’s. Or more.
My parents’ two storey brick house would be coolish in the
morning, but the heat would increase through the day and by evening the place
would be a large brick oven. There was an attic above the bedroom floor with a
hatch in the middle of the upstairs hall. My parents had a large fan installed
in the hatch and as soon as it started to cool off outside, this fan would be
turned on to pull cool air up into the bedrooms. And by 1:00 or 2:00 am, cool
air would indeed start to arrive. I recall lying in bed with the bed pulled as
close to the window as I could get it, both the bed linens and my body sticky with
sweat, waiting for that cool air.
As a young woman I was out in the heat, working as
a lifeguard in a pool in suburban Windsor. In weather like today’s we did a
half hour rotation, from guard stand (a high seat over the concrete at pool
edge), to walking the deck and then, praise be, to half an hour in the much
cooler office, checking swimmers in and
out. By 9:00 pm we would be exhausted from the heat and noise and the
concentration required to watch for any problems in the mass of heaving
children filling the pool. Our only relief was that we (quite illegally) dived
off the guard stand into the deep end at the end of the half hour there and got
wet enough to survive half an hour walking on the super-heated concrete of the
deck. I used to look forward to my days on ‘split shift’ when I worked 8:00 am to 12:00 pm
and 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm, missing the worst of the afternoon frying pan effect.
I loved life guarding, however, and it was good money for a
student as a summer job. We ran swimming lessons in the morning for children
from three to twelve. Afternoons there was the open swim and evenings was ‘family
swim’ in theory but mostly drew teenagers in fact. They were hell on wheels to
supervise and because I could handle them I drew evening duty a lot. I was the
biggest of the female staff and cultivated a reputation as really tough, right
up to frog-marching one of the worst offenders out of the pool enclosure in his
swim suit and tossing his clothes after him.
(No charges of assault ensued, lucky for me.)
What was the most fun, though, was the little kid lessons. The pool was new and had a very shallow section where most 3 to 5 year olds could
stand up and we ran classes every morning in this section for that age group.
The women got to teach these classes, mostly, because the littles responded
better to women than to most of the men. I had two classes, 9:00 to 9:30 and
9:30 to 10:00 am, mostly of three and four year olds. We didn’t do the pool clean until after these classes so as to keep the water warm and to allow for a lot
of pee getting into the water. And mostly what we taught them was pretty
simple. How to stand up if they fell, how to put their little faces in the
water and, once they were comfortable with that, a face down kick at increasing
distances. Some of them were desperately water-shy. I remember carrying one
kidlet on my back for most of the week until he finally got enough confidence
to step onto my knee and then into the pool.
This is a photograph that the local paper took to go with a story about how little kids could now have lessons if they were more than 36" tall. It is staged, of course, and shows me measuring some of my class with a yardstick. I think I was 19 at the time.
I have a fond memory of introducing my own daughters to
swimming. The ED was 2+, the YD 13 months old. ED spent most of the session
with her back pressed against the fence around the pool, shivering. I took YD
into the pool, lowered her into the water on her stomach with my hand under her
chest, and she dog paddled off my hand toward a friend who had her kids in the
water as well. I walked along with her, hands poised to grab if she went under,
and she got quite a way before she got tired enough to stop. However, both
girls had mandatory swimming lessons as soon as they were old enough to
qualify, around age four and five. I leaned on the ED to keep going until she
had at least an intermediate certificate and drown proofing. The YD became, in
her turn, a lifeguard and instructor and has loved boats and water all her life
so far. I have always understood why the ED did not enjoy swimming. She was a
slim ectomorph with low body fat and always freezing cold in even temperate water.
But I note with amusement that Miss G, her equally chronically cold daughter,
has had regular swimming lessons from an early age.
I suspect that even Miss G would take to the water today.
