Marilyn
On multi-generational friendships made poolside.
It’s as dark as dusk in my living room where I sit to write, and it is 8:49 AM. It’s been pouring rain for the past 4 days. The pool opened on Saturday, and every day since, I have played a game of dodgeball through the downpours. I am obsessively checking my weather apps, loading and reloading to make sure I have the most recent hourly forecast, which I know may not be correct for long.
Because of this, and because I cleared my schedule this weekend, I have been able to swim every day in the gloom, and it has been wonderful, even if it hasn’t been the blue skies I’ve wanted.
The water is chilled, and everyone who gets in remarks about the temperature out loud to those around them. The briskness of your first dip is nice, in its own rhythmic way, because you’re sharing the experience with strangers and people you vaguely recognize from summers at the pool past. In spite of the cold water, we still swim, because we’ve waited for this for months.
On my second day at the pool, my pool bestie shows up. This will be our third summer swimming together, me and Marilyn. She’s in her late 70s and wearing medical-grade sunglasses and has just come by to drop some towels off to her son and grandson, but she walks straight over to me first. At the end of last year’s pool season, on the last day, she wrote her phone number down on a receipt from her purse and put it in my bag while I was still in the water. I forgot, and when I got out, I put my wet towel in my bag, and her number was smudged beyond recognition and lost. I tried to get her information from the front desk at the pool, but I only had her complete life story, and not her last name. All I knew was that she was Marilyn.
When Marilyn sees me this year, her arms are wide open. She compliments me up and down, comes over to meet my husband, and asks how my winter has been. She tells me she’s recently had cataract surgery and that I wouldn’t believe how well she’s able to see now. She says she didn’t even know something was wrong with her vision. She walks me over to meet her son, who is very pleased to meet me. I tell him how much I love his mom.
I walk her to the door, because she’s got to go make dinner for her 95-year-old mom, who I learn is still doing really well. She asks me about the probate case and how my first winter without my mom was. She ends our interaction like she always does, the telltale sign that Marilyn is about to leave the pool: she asks me what I’m making for dinner. I tell her I’m not sure, but I’m making a Jalapeno Popper Potato Salad for a cookout the next day. We fall back in quick step with each other, just like old times.
She gives me her number, and I save it on my phone this time. I almost call her on the way home from the pool, but Tucker tells me she probably knows how to text. So I take a swing and text her. A full 24 hours later, I get a response: paragraph spacing, perfect spelling and punctuation, and an emoji at the end of every paragraph.
The pool is just this kind of place. If you go with regularity, you start to see the same characters, and you yourself become one. After a while, it only makes sense to say hello and make conversation. After a while, you find yourself with a group of pool friends. After a while, if you’re lucky, you might meet a Marilyn.
Yesterday I was sharing the lap lane with a friend I know from outside of the pool. In the middle of our conversation, the water aerobics instructor came over to give me a hard time in jest for not being in her class this week. We chat a little bit, and then she tells me, unprompted, that she knows the year anniversary of my mom’s passing is next week, and she knows this because her own birthday is a few days later. She lost her twin brother last year, a few weeks after I lost my mom, and in her own grief she made note of mine.
This is an intimacy I can’t quite put into words, that a casual acquaintance would earmark my grief day, as she remembers her own. It leaves me speechless, and I struggle even now to put into words what something like that means to me. I will keep it brief and just say it made me feel deeply loved and seen.
I don’t have to be anything other than what I am to my pool friends, many of whom are in their 70s and 80s. They have lost so many people that they aren’t remotely phased by my losses. They grieve with me because they feel the injustice of my mom being taken from me so early, and because once you’ve experienced big grief, you know what the portal feels like. They also make me feel like my grief is unspectacular, and so they are not phased by it. In the past year, I’ve needed space where my grief doesn’t suck the air out of the room desperately. It just is, at the pool. It’s an honor to witness any community, but I have seldom found one more alive than this one, made up of septuagenarians and octogenarians at the community center pool.
Before Marilyn leaves, I ask her to take a photo with me. She wears her cataract surgery glasses for the first one, and takes them off for the second one. In the second one, we are both beaming, sparkling even, like the pool behind us. It is a token I will hold dear for a long time. When she leaves I behave as if I’m starstruck, glazed over by the thrill of finding my friend again, without coordinating it, 8 months later.
Reading: At the pool I am reading a collection of essays by Amal El-Mohtar, who co-wrote This is How You Lose the Time War. The collection is called Seasons of Glass and Iron and I am really enjoying it. When I am swimming I’m listening to Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
Watching: Last night I watched Inherent Vice for the first time and I love Paul Thomas Anderson and his weird little movies.
Thinking about: How grief can cause long term brain fog that lasts for much longer than you’d expect. I have noticed issues with my recall and memory over the past year, and it’s been really difficult to handle. In the past week or so I’ve realized that the fog has started to lift and I am really, really glad about it.
Making: Last week I made a bunch of heart shaped buttons for a dear friends birthday. This week I’m going to make more to sell in the gift shop I work at once a week. I am also deciding on my first sew of the summer!
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This is lovely. Multi-generational friendships are so important!