The Deep End of Embarrassment by Tim Bulone

I noticed that the Belmont Pool has reopened. My wife and mother-in-law enjoy swimming there. I have yet to dip my toe in. I love to swim though, a throwback to hours and hours spent at a place called Hawaiian Village. It was a social club of sorts near my boyhood home in Anaheim. It had a clubhouse and a pool and a volleyball court and my family joined when I was a young teenager.

The summers were great there. We took swimming lessons and then in the afternoon the pool had open swimming and it seems like we never left the water. They sold hot dogs and potato chips and Cactus Coolers so, for the entire day, there was never a reason to go home. There was nothing upscale about the place, I remember cracked vinyl on the clubhouse floor and helping re-web the pool chairs. Everything was done by volunteers, including us, conscripted children and teens. The entire property took up the space of about three suburban homes but it was a world unto itself.

I was at an age when the female form became a thing of tremendous interest and curiosity to me. One such female was the oldest daughter of a rather large family that came regularly. She must have been 18 or so and I thought she was absolutely the loveliest creature I had ever seen in a swimsuit, and she was a sweet soul too. There was also a very blond life guard who had freckles in the most interesting places. For the most part though, I was content just to swim and splash and goof around.

Possibly the single most embarrassing moment of my young life happened in the pool there one summer morning. We were swimming laps during swim team practice. My age division commanded one lane of the pool and that lane was wide enough to allow swimmers going in both directions like two lanes of a highway. The trick was to be able to do a flip turn at the end of the lap and move over sufficiently to not run into oncoming traffic.

A nice girl who I knew from school, Odette, was behind me when I made my flip turn and as I pushed off the pool wall and began my first stroke, my right arm came out of the water in a wide arc and dived right into her bathing suit top! Well, of course, we became somewhat entangled as I hurriedly removed my arm from her suit and fumbled with a weak and nervous apology and, of course, there was a "traffic jam" as others in the lane were suddenly forced to change directions to avoid collisions and wondered what had happened and you know, if the coach was yelling I never heard it, because I was so mortally embarrassed about the whole event I just wanted to drown or skulk off somewhere and hide until I was so old no one would recognize me.

If Odette had been embarrassed, she never let on. She hadn't seemed fazed by the event and soon went back to her swimming. She  was a year behind me at school so we didn't run in the same circles and I think it was a moment we would have both liked to forget.

My family maintained its membership after I left home but eventually the club closed for reasons I do not know. Eventually the property was sold and the clubhouse became someone's home. The pool was filled in and two more homes were built on the property and now, when I drive by it, it is indistinguishable from the rest of the homes in that suburban neighborhood. I still love to swim and I still have a tremendous appreciation for the female form, but my youthful awkwardness, I am mostly happy to report, has diminished (because I am old now).

Tim Bulone is an ardent observer of life on the swirling blue marble. He works at Davis Group Consulting and creates fine art and canvas prints which he likes to sell from time to time at http://www.MyFamilyArt.com He is an early morning pedestrian in Belmont Shore, where he resides with his wife.