Making the Transition

I kick off the covers, roll to my side and sit up, feel every joint and muscle begin a chorus of complaints.  When I stand up, which is more a slow-motion conflict between gravity and body parts trying to resist, a memory of a long-ago yoga class slithers through my mind and exits with a dark look at my lumpy physique.  Oh, things have changed.

One little insistent memory cell sings out the word:  Coffee.  I respond with automatic shuffling to the kitchen and find the pot.  Coffee, darling coffee, lovely coffee.  I love thee and thy dark heart.  I am smiling now.

After more automatic movements, I find myself in the bathroom dressing.  A look in the mirror is, shall we say, unfortunate.  I have to look away.  The mirror trembles but remains whole, thank god.  

More coffee.  I am moving more smoothly now, but not much.

My swim bag finds its way to my hand as do my keys and a few necessities for errands.  Out the door into the bracing cool foggy air of Pacific Grove.  I feel like I need my goggles on in this cold thick atmosphere.  It is not the kind of weather where your mind shouts, "Let's go for a swim!" Nuh uh.

My mind is shouting, "More coffee!"  It will have to wait now.  I'm driving across town, and the car knows the way, has known it for more than ten years.

Okay, body, out of the car.  Hey, I''m having an out-of-car experience, I joke to myself weakly.  I blame it on the cold fog, the time of day.  I hoist the swim bag and walk.  I feel like a homing pigeon, looking for the bird seed, the familiar roost.  Instead I am a landlubbing swimmer looking for my pool.

I find myself with toes curled over the edge of the old pool.  One friend has already begun her laps with her peculiar weed-whacker stroke pattern; she swims hard but it is not pretty.  Other friends emerge from the locker room and eye the rectangle of chlorinated liquid before them.  It's obvious the pool is a kind of respected adversary to most, a thing to be overcome.  To me, it's just wet.  I am going to have to get wet, and at first it will be cool on my neck and my back, and that is not appealing to me.

I think - peculiarly - only a half hour ago I was stumbling around in the privacy of my own home, not thinking of getting into a wet environment at all, and now I am.  How quickly things change in an hour.

The hardest part of getting in is, well, getting in.  Another friend gets into the pool by easing her thin body very, very slowly down into the water with a look of extreme discomfort etched on her face.  I turn away, unable to watch the slow, painful-looking process continue.

Okay, pool, it's time.  Well, maybe not...

There is always a point when I have stopped mentally drifting around and run out of resistance to the idea of getting wet and just finally get the hell into the water.  I have seen hundreds of swimmers, maybe thousands, look the same way I do.  It's the approach, the staring at the water and the other swimmers moving around in there, contemplating nothing in particular, but then the settling in of the idea of a swim.  All that seems more uncomfortable than you might imagine for someone like me who loves to swim.

Then, on no cue that I can ever recall, I just jump in.  I'm in, I'm swimming, and that's the end of the agony.  And the beginning of another kind...