Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 9, 1993 TAG: 9309080251
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Beth Macy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
These are the dog days of swimming-pool lifeguards, the days when a dip in the water between shifts doesn't do anything to cool you off, and if you have to blow the whistle at Chad Seeberg for trying to drown his brother one more time you are going to spontaneously combust - Speedo one-piece, flip-flops and all.
It doesn't matter that I haven't stepped up on one of those lifeguard platforms in nine years, I still know the routine.
I still can't see a kid running on wet cement without getting this uncontrollable urge to shout, "WALK!!"
I still can't dive into chlorinated water without remembering the time I rescued someone - but lost one of my contacts.
And I still can't get a whiff of that Hawaiian Tropic coconut oil without instantly replaying a certain Billy Idol song from the summer of '84, when the 12-year-olds in the grass behind me would play, then rewind, then play again a certain maddening refrain ("I'm on a bus/on a psychedelic trip/reading murder books/trying to stay hip. . .). By the 137th time I was ready to toss that boom box into the 12-feet-deep water, their treasured Billy Idol tape forming a celluloid cesspool at my feet.
It's the time of year now when you don't even care about your tan. You just want it to rain so you can shut down the pool and go home, college-savings-fund be damned.
At the beginning of summer - this was back before the skin-cancer scare - the lifeguards where I worked would embark on this unspoken competition to see who could turn the richest shade of brown, without actually burning or peeling.
The hard-core tanners, myself included, would slip a few drops of iodine in their baby-oil bottles, which would supposedly enhance the effects of the slather-till-you-lather application ritual.
Now I don't walk outdoors in winter without having first applied my SPF-15 Faces foundation. The ozone's rotting up there, you know, not to mention the havoc that sun spots and eye lines can wreak on a rapidly aging face.
I did a lot of growing up around the perimeter of the Urbana City Pool. I can remember the first day I worked there, my very first eight-hour shift anywhere, and how good it felt when I collapsed into the living-room chair afterward, trying to explain to my mom just how tiring it was being on my feet that many hours in a row.
I can picture us now: my mom, the factory worker, smiling and nodding her head as I, the 15-year-old expert, tried to tell her what the real world was all about.
Free concession junk food and a key so you could swim after-hours at night. We were the envy of every teen-ager in town.
We even got our first real taste of power. We got to sit kids out against the concrete wall for spitting water or cussing - and then we got to pretend we didn't notice when they flipped us off behind our backs.
We cleaned toilets and fetched the skimmer when a not-quite-potty-trained person had an accident in the baby pool. We picked up lipstick-smeared cigarette butts and Snickers wrappers from the chlorine-drenched grass.
We watched for our boyfriends' cars to drive up outside the fence and then shared our adolescent angst when they picked us up from work late, or not at all.
One of the charms of four seasons is that by the time one ends you can't wait for the next to begin. And so each Labor Day weekend I imagine lifeguards everywhere turning their whistles in and heading back to school from that first summer job - tired, tanned and with a little bit better grasp of what 60 minutes' worth of work will net.
Where I'm from the corn is eye-high now, the J.C. Penney back-to-school underwear sales in full gear. You can tell I get a little nostalgic about it all, even though it's been ages since I had a real tan, and I can't swim the butterfly anymore without a certain muscle spasm flaring up in my back.
Free concession junk food and a key so you could swim after-hours at night. No cellulite. No deadlines.
Occasionally I still catch myself humming that awful Billy Idol song, thinking of bright blue water lapping beneath my feet.
\ Beth Macy, a features department staff writer, still believes August is the best month to buy underwear and new shoes. Her column runs Thursdays.
by CNB