I can still hear the radio playing the most popular music of 1976. All day long, the workers at the pool played music over the public address (PA) system, stopping only to make announcements like the hourly 15-minute break. Billboard’s Hot 100 that year included gems like Play That Funky Music (Wild Cherry), Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen), Love Hurts (Nazareth), and You Should Be Dancing (Bee Gees).
In 1976 our very rural, very small neighborhood provided a bus for the 20 minute ride to the public pool. It brought us in the morning and returned us home in the afternoon. I only remember the busing that one summer. Not too long after that, we moved to the town where the pool was and were able to walk there in the summer.
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The pool experience was not relaxing for me. It was packed with screaming kids clowning around in every section of the pool. For someone afraid of the water, like I was, there was no respite from the splashing, no place to chill. Even after my cousin had pushed me in the deep end of a KOA pool the summer before, getting me over my fear of water real quick, I was not much into the chaos of that pool.
Being the third of six kids ranging in age from 4 to 14, at eleven I was on-the-shelf relative to the local rite of passage - jumping off the high dive. The peer pressure was legendary - the stuff that turned coal into diamonds. While my sisters and their friends were diving, flipping, and doing the can opener all day long, I was hanging out between the 5-feet peering longingly at them and that infernal high dive. See, I hated getting water in my nose and what felt like straight up into my brain. The goading, the teasing, the coaxing was relentless but only made things worse.
Little did I know that I was subconsciously determined in this particular summer.
I started jumping off the side just outside the diving board area, which was roped off. I didn’t do anything fancy and I held my nose the entire time. Eventually I went off the low dive, just a few feet off the water. I held my nose and I jumped as far toward the side as possible, but I sunk and of course popped right back up to scurry to the side and climb out. That went on for a couple weeks, with me beaming from ear to ear every time I popped up and paddled out.
I wish I could remember the music that was playing the day I took the real plunge. The climb up the ladder to that high dive was the longest I’d ever taken, those ten ladder steps felt like me plodding doggedly through a curse from a nightmare. At the top, I remember looking out from the top of the ladder to the far end of that board with trepidation so overwhelming I felt faint. Heart pounding I stepped up onto the board. The cover pic for this post barely does justice to the point of view I recall when I peered over the end of that board at the water below, how it seemed to be just miles and miles away. I wanted to turn around and retreat as fast as my racing heart would take me. It was not to be, though, because the board was wildly popular and the line was already packed right up to the top, and there were no take-backs once your feet touched that board.
The lifeguard stared intently at me from almost directly across the pool, a young adult with serious concerns about the pool sissy being on that platform. No one cheered, everyone too busy to see or to understand my abject terror at realizing there was no going back. The lifeguard put his whistle in his mouth. He continued staring and took a deep breath. Like a slow-motion football replay, those nanoseconds hung on the air like dandelion fluff in the spring just passed. I knew deep in my hungry heart and in the teeny tiny scared places in my brain, that if he blew that whistle I was going to be chased back down off that board. Closing my eyes, taking my own huge inhale, I held my nose and took one step into thin air, into the unknown.
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Right up to that moment I’d never felt anything that miraculous in my life, because I dropped straight down like a lead balloon, plunging deep, deeper still until my feet sprung off the bottom driving me straight back up. Like a cork on good champagne, I exploded to the surface and, utterly high on success, swam to the side completely surprised to be alive.
Since that day, everything else in my life has been easier than that one step.
What’s your ‘high dive’ moment? Let’s talk…
Cover pic - credit Paper Dragon
Other inspirational stories from Bren’s Buzz:
Thieves of Joy
I don’t know exactly who ‘they’ are but as far back as I can recall in hindsight, they’ve been slipping in through the cracks, windows, and doors of my life and gently, imperceptibly chipping away at my core self, my creativity, my capacity to give and receive love, and my general zest for life which some call joy, and I’ve unconsciously allowed it. Tho…
I was holding my breath!
A true leap of faith, nothing feels better than overcoming our challenges. I can almost feel your beaming smile