Speedos
I love my Dad so very much. Ask anyone who knows me and they can attest we have a great relationship and I am a bit of a daddy’s girl. I say that to preface this story which my Dad and I were just laughing over, though at the time I was slightly embarrassed.
My father is a great swimmer and diver, he gave me my long, lanky limbs and he knew how to use them to swim way faster than I ever could and to also dive like a pro. He swam for his high school and college teams, leaving records standing for decades at each. He also coached high school girls swimming for a number of years. A story that is often shared from those years is when my brother Ry was little, he would join the girls in the pool for their workout. Except, rather than workout Ry was more like one of those floating chlorine containers you leave in the pool with the little weight at the bottom, bobbing around. My parents would put the appropriate floatation devices on him and drop him in the pool during some practices. The girls would swim around him or stop to play with him and everyone was happy. Ry also loved when my dad would plunk him off the diving board, and then he would pop up and bob around some more.
Flash forward several years to when I was swimming for my high school team. My dad had always helped me out with swimming, coaching me just a bit and offering tips. At one point he offered to tape me in one of my meets so I could see where I needed to improve. This is the first time I had ever seen myself in my Speedo and at a meet as a teenager. I was momentarily embarrassed for the girl in lane 6, bent over on the starting block, who seemed to be all gangly arms and legs, until my dad pointed out that I was the girl in lane 6. Then I was mortified.
Anyway, in addition to helping me out and offering some advice my dad offered to help out one of our more talented divers on my team. My high school swim team had gone through quite a few coaches and though there were several girls with talent on the team, it was hard to get the best out of them with so many coaching changes. So my dad offered to help one of our divers, who was also the number one gymnast in the state, to see if she could also be the best diver in the state.
When we finally decided on a date when my dad would come in, I began to panic just a little bit. Remember the first part of the story where I say my Dad was a swimmer himself years past? Well, as a result of that he got pretty comfortable practicing and racing and 30 years later, that remained unchanged. In this story I am 16, and everything is embarrassing when you are 16, and this was no exception. I had dealt with this issue in years past when my parents would take friends and I to the beach, and my dad would bust out his Speedo to go swimming. I eventually got over it because these were my friends, and they new my dad was a great, very normal guy, who liked Speedos because of his swimming background. But now the whole team would see my dad in a Speedo.
Finally the day comes for my dad to go with me to practice and I remind him to bring something to put on over his Speedo when he is not in the pool. I have come to terms with the Speedo wearing, but not the Speedo wearing while coaching. My dad was a great help, and he did eventually get on the diving board to show the diver a thing or too. For a moment I was so overwhelmingly proud of my 49 year old dad showing this high school athlete how it’s done, that I forgot I was trying to block out the memory.
Finally the pool portion of instruction was done. I reminded my dad to put on what he brought to cover up and he did.
He pulled out and put on his powder blue corduroy shorts, that he had cut himself from a pair of powder blue corduroy pants that had seen better days. You win this round. Bruce.
I love my Dad.
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