The Mock Dock

This past Saturday, my kids and I packed up our flippers, goggles, and dive-y sticks to enjoy the day at our community pool. Slathered in cocoa butter lotion, glistening in the sun, Holmes Jr. and Holmesita feverishly splished and splashed in the chlorine goodness of man’s attempt to thwart Mother Nature’s heat. I - needing to get my awesomely developed calf muscles in the pool as fast as possible to keep the throngs of horny lower-leg lovin’ ladies at bay - ran quickly, jumped, did a flip, and splooshed beneath the quiet depths of the pool’s surface.

With the freedom and frivolity being felt by me and my seed-bearers, I hadn’t taken time to notice the couple sitting and watching us from the deck chairs. As I taught Holmes, Jr. the best form for his backstroke and caught Holmesita time after time as she leaped to the safety of her daddy’s tattooed arms, a man of 45 years, slowly sat down on the edge of the pool, dangling his pasty feet in the ice-cold blue.

With daring audacity, this man’s wife approached me and in a sweet, tentative hush asked me if I could teach her husband how to swim. I was taken aback but am unwilling to not help another better his or her existence. And so it was that I found myself teaching Steve, a grown man who had almost drowned at age 10, how to float on his back and doggie paddle.

I spent my Saturday afternoon, with Holmes, Jr. on my right side, moving gracefully through the water perfecting multiple strokes that propel him like a tiny Irish dolphin, Sean O’Eeeeeeeeoooo. In front of me, flexing her petite legs and flinging her 4-year-old life into the water, to paddle her way to daddy, was Holmesita. And…on my left, ravenously flailing his middle-aged arms and legs - like Tom Cruise trying to film that hang-down scene from Mission Impossible with an ear ache - was Steve.

After a mere hour, Aquaman and his wife were pleased with his ability to doggie paddle enough to not go a-dyin’ in the water, so I wrangled my children and we left that space of the pool to play as a family again. It was only after this awkward and absurd situation that I knew it was the right thing to pass up the offers to don the red, Baywatch suit. For as a TV lifeguard, I would have been known only for my perfectly pouting breasts, and not my girthy heart.

Absurdly yours,

Holmes