By Dave Ellis

I love to swim. It’s one of the few places on earth, short of a cargo plane doing a nose dive at thirty thousand feet, where I’m practically weightless. I love that feeling. The pool, that is.

There’s so much freedom in water. I can dive, flip, float and eat krill all day long. Those feelings are hard to duplicate on land, except the krill part, which can be duplicated at an all-you-can-eat shrimp festival.

I remember the beginning of my swimming career around my fourth birthday, when my mom took me to the Air Force base pool for my first swimming lesson. She held onto me and walked around the pool. Then she would carefully stretch me farther away from her, let go and I’d swim back to her. Next she’d take a few steps back as I swam towards her, then more and more steps back until I could swim on my own.

The final lesson was her letting go and as I swam to her she’d climb out of the pool, walk backwards to the car and drive in reverse all the way home with me chasing after her. I never did understand that part of the lesson, but it’s not my place to question.

Now that I’m a dad (licensed and bonded, se habla español) I enjoy taking my kids for a swim at the local recreation center. The older two kids are pretty good swimmers while the younger two hang on to me like cute little leeches.

I spend most of the pool time releasing their choke-hold off my neck and asking them, politely, to not use my love handles as steps. They also jab their little pointy toes into my flabby areas like they’re looking for a foothold on an iceberg. I could make some kind of joke about crevices here but I’m too classy for that.

What’s great about our recreation center is in the summer they open the outdoor pool. It has a graduated entry, like the ocean, which means the water goes from one inch to three feet deep. This pool works out great for the younger kids, they get to run around in waist deep water and I get to lie down and flip water up on my tusks.
It’s a win-win. The only problem with the pool is that it’s too much fun and we do have to leave at some point.

Getting four kids out of a pool is as hard as getting four cats into a pool. These are the same kids who don’t want to take a bath mind you. My poor wife has the hardest part; she has to take all of four of the girls into the locker room whereas I just take the boy with me.

I don’t care where you go, I’ve yet to find a good smelling locker room. That’s probably why they don’t make an air freshener by the same name. I spend most of the time keeping my son off of the bare floor while he looks around the room at the other men changing and asks loud questions about them. I’ll spare you the details.

By the time we get home everyone is exhausted. We shuffle the kids off to bed, smelling of chlorine and sunscreen, to dream of our next pool trip. My bedtime story to the kids is a little melodious number known to oceanographers as “Whale Call.”