The Raging Elitist

I’ve been through many iterations of morning swim practice in my life, each with its own particular mix of pain and pleasure. As a nervous six-year-old summer leaguer new to the lowcountry, I relished the wonderful early morning heat of mid-June at Wild Dunes Dolphins practices, so complete that a little kid could be outside in a Speedo without even the slightest shiver. As a teenaged year-rounder, I eschewed the warmth and comfort of my bed for harsh predawn wakeups and chilly 5 a.m. plunges, my synapses palpably flooding with dopamine when the end of a workout, sunrise, and the prospect of a massive fast-food breakfast coalesced into a cornucopia of relief and joy. As the coach of a neighborhood team in my thirties, I put down emailed complaints about camp schedules and beamed smiles at all the little wigglers learning how to side breathe, my own two children among them.

In swimming, we talk about “mornings” as something you do, as in, “Senior group does mornings Monday Wednesday Friday,” or, “We start mornings in June when school lets out.” Yes, we do afternoons too, but in a much more regular, workmanlike sense. Whereas the mention of afternoons conjures thoughts of the school day, ugly threshold sets, and nightfall, mornings are all Saturdays, sunup, and Sharks and Minnows, light dancing off the blue surface like it’s telling you God loves you. Even the most difficult mornings are circumscribed with a certain sense of hope, the promise of a new day ahead with a workout already under your belt. Morning practice is different, special. I’ve dreaded it, looked forward to it, loved it, hated it, sworn it off and come running back to it more than once. I still have dreams that I’m in training again, and I’m on the fence about whether or not I’ll commit to mornings.

 These days, morning practice takes me thirty minutes down I-26 and another five miles down a busy North Charleston thoroughfare to the 50-meter pool at the Aquatic Center, a brightly lit, chlorinated palace inside a hulking rectangle of concrete. Earlier in the season, when practice was still at the short course pool closer to home, eight-year-old Scotty tagged along, but now, with summer league championships over, and the age group state meet looming just a few weeks away, he stays home with his mom. Big brother Cartter, all of nine-years-old, is the only one making the trip out to the long course temple with me. He gets up before seven, puts his clothes on over his jammer, and, after a quick breakfast, throws his bag in the second row of the minivan, where he’s proud to sit without a booster.

Recently, we’ve been listening to golden oldies on the drive, songs from the sixties I used to hear while riding in the back of Mom’s station wagon enroute to school or practice. The habit started on a recent drive as we made our way out of the neighborhood when I saw Cartter’s face beneath a mop of blond hair in the rearview mirror, and a song played in my head.

I remember singing it to Anna Garrett when I was twenty-four and coaching the summer team at Hobcaw Yacht Club. It was my first coaching gig out of college and one of the happiest summers of my life. I would go in an hour early to put in the lane lines and get in a workout – a straight 3,000 freestyle to prep for the annual open water swim, 50’s for time to get my heartrate up, three 400 IM’s just because I could – For one beautiful hour early each morning, I owned this blue lagoon of a lap pool nestled into the marsh on the Wando River, with Live Oaks hanging over either end and the Ravenel Bridge towering in the distance. Then, in came the “big kids,” all groggy and reluctant at 8 a.m., and I’d haul myself out, drenched in endorphins, and merrily go about ushering them toward the start of their practice.

Anna was a plump 18-year-old with sandy blond hair and a natural pout that she wore like she’d taken a vow never to smile again. While I dried off and hollered at all the kids, she’d be perched in the shady corner of the raised wooden deck near the gate, staring at the ground, invariably the last person to yield to all my urging. I’d start singing that song “Good Morning Starshine” only I’d substitute my nickname for her – Sunshine: “Good Morning, Sunshine! The Earth says hello! You twinkle above us! We twinkle below!” How I loved seeing her crack and finally start making her way to the end of a pool, still a little kid trapped in an eighteen-year-old’s body, as ambivalent as I ever was about morning practice, and not about to let it go easily. She’d just graduated, and it was the last summer she got to swim. The next year, she coached with me. In a way she introduced me to my wife. “Who’s that?” I asked when I saw Danyelle at the pool one day. “Oh, that’s one of those Marosok girls,” she said, not without a little jealousy.

When I got to the stoplight at the end of the neighborhood, the one that takes a full three-and-a-half minutes to change, I pulled up Anna’s song on my phone and played it through the car stereo for Cartter. He didn’t hide his smile in his lap the way she used to. I turned around and looked at him in the backseat, and his eyes shone with wonder and embarrassment, and his mouth spread out in a big toothy grin that he aimed right at my face. I remember that feeling of amazement, riding down Palm Boulevard to Wild Dunes practice on June mornings in my Dad’s Monte Carlo, back when I was in the sunrise of my life like he is now.

I worry about the boys getting too far along in the sport too soon, especially Cartter. I don’t want his mornings losing their shine. His eyes have grown more tired in the rearview mirror over the weeks, and now that he’s the only one making the trip with me to practice, he misses his brother. He’s one of those young kids with talent and focus enough to train, and as a result, he understands that having mornings to complain about is a point of pride, moaning and insisting on going in the same breath. “I keep forgetting he’s nine,” one of the coaches out at the Aquatic Center said to me while the two of us looked out to where he was cruising with the eleven-year-olds up and down lane six. “He’ll be ten soon,” I said, wishing it weren’t true.

Meanwhile, Scotty doesn’t know what to do with himself now that his season is over. “Do I have swim in the morning?” he asked the other night at bedtime. I told him no, so he asked, “What am I supposed to do then?”

The best I could come up with was, “Just have a fun Scotty day.” As soon as I said it, I figured he’d probably end up bored and restless at home, but at the same time, I felt a little twinge of jealousy. I wanted to have a fun Scotty day too. Alas, there are just a few mornings left.

Jealous

In addition to missing out on mornings at the Aquatic Center, Scotty also stayed home while Cartter and I went to Greenville for a swim meet on Father’s Day weekend. It was a quick trip, a session each on Saturday and Sunday separated by dinner at the Cracker Barrel and a night at the Fairfield Inn. Cartter and I roamed the hotel looking for roof access (We didn’t find it) and sat by the pool watching the clouds go from pink to purple-gray before retiring to our room where we were serenaded by the thumping music of a nearby Mexican restaurant. Scotty was noticeably jealous when we returned home.

He stayed mad all through the next day. That evening, I took him and Cartter out into the yard and did side toss with their five-gallon bucket of tennis balls. They complain about the drill, and I get no thanks for feeding them ball after ball while kneeling on the ground, my back and hamstrings tightening, but seeing them connect – swinging from the ground up and turning through the hips, the ping of the metal bat and the womp of the tennis ball compressing before it sails away on a line – that makes up for their lack of appreciation. Only on this day Scotty was hellbent on pouting, letting his whole body go limp and making weak flailing attempts accompanied by pitiful little grunts. He wouldn’t allow me the satisfaction of seeing him succeed.

Ironically, the thing that finally cheered him up was me making fun of him. I started in on his brother first. Cartter’s developed a habit of holding his index finger up in front of him and cheesing when he wants to be a little smug and contradictory. “Actually . . .” he might say. It’s really easy to imitate. My ribbing shifted to Scotty when he started asking about weird names and mentioned someone named “Haddie.”

“Is that your girlfriend?” I asked. “How pretty is she? . . . Do you wanna kiss her pretty face?” He was sitting at the kitchen table, and he had to cover his face in his hands to hide his blushing. Typically, Scotty tends to keep his smiles in his shirt pocket a la Anna Garret when the teasing is at his expense, so it was gratifying to see him unable to play it cool. After that, things went back to normal.

Summer League Champs

The “City Meet” and the “East Cooper League Chmpionships” were on the same weekend a day apart, and I went to both, to recruit for the year-round team at the former, and to support Cartter and Scotty at the latter. Even though I live in Mount Pleasant (East Cooper), I felt more at home at the city meet.

Out at the Aquatic Center, I saw scores of kids who I coach, parents of those kids, and coaches of summer teams who remember me from all the way back when I swam. My coworkers were out there too, and seemingly everyone wanted to say hello. All Cartter and Scotty’s little buddies from Sharks were at the meet, cheering each other and swimming fast, and I wondered if maybe my boys are swimming in the wrong league.

At the East Cooper meet five minutes from our house, I might have known a tenth as many people, probably less. I got stuck timing at the beginning of the meet, and my lane partner talked to me like I was an idiot who didn’t know what a touch pad was. A team rep from Hamlin who once accused me of cheating at a dual meet came by yelling and dripping sweat and made no acknowledgement that we knew each other. Another team rep asked me why we couldn’t have the meet at the Aquatic Center. I was tempted to tell her, “Because you and the other stupid ladies who run this league treat people like shit, and nobody wants to deal with you.” For whatever reason, I loathe pushy, self-important swim moms. Go figure.

Scotty’s jealousy cropped up again at the East Cooper Champs. He swam poorly in backstroke where he was seeded in the final heat, adding two seconds and falling over ten places in the results. Afterwards, sitting in a chair in a shady spot that Danyelle and I had staked out, he moped and asked why he was doing so bad. Also, “Why is Cartter so fast? . . . Why does he always win?” Anything I said in response, he met with a mumbled “I don’t want to talk about it,” until suddenly, he popped up and was fine again. Done with his break from having fun, he rejoined Cartter and his teammates in the little popup tent, eventually bounding off to line up for butterfly. He swam great in that event, winning his heat, which earned him a little rubber ducky, and taking fourth overall. Big brother Cartter won all three of his individual events, wrapping up an undefeated summer league season.

Points

We had a late dinner after the summer team’s end of season party, and with both Danyelle and I feeling tired and lazy, scorekeeping as pertains to the division of household labor came to light. “Are you gonna do the dishes?” Danyelle said with an evil little smile.

“Are you gonna put the kids down?” I said. Then, bent over the kitchen sink, hearing the kids emerging from their rooms where they’d been reading and noticing Danyelle pulling out her phone on the couch, I urged her: “They’re loosing themselves,” I said. You really want to keep them contained at bedtime.

I once thought Danyelle and I were above such points-tracking. My older cousin Ben explained to me that he’d struck a deal with his wife that if she cleaned up all the poop, he’d handle the vomit. A fair deal, because vomit is a much more long-term commitment, he said. I said Danyelle and I just got things done however we needed. He said no way. There are deals being struck, and one day I’d realize it. Turns out he was right.

It took morning practice for me to discover it. Over the last few months, I’ve been carting the boys away most days and freeing up Danyelle’s mornings. At the same time, I’ve been helping a lot less with making dinner and cleaning up dishes than I could. I guess I figured I was ahead.

Birthday

Cartter likes to skip Thursday practice, and this week was no exception, even though he didn’t have the golf lesson that he and Scotty have had for much of the summer. With Friday practice looming the next morning, he asked me at bedtime about what he’d missed. “What were the strokes today?” he wanted to know.

“It was easy,” I said. “A lot of choice.”

I could tell this unsettled him a little. “What are the strokes tomorrow?” was his follow up.

“All of them,” I said. I was in a good mood, swaying in the middle of his room between his bed and the door, wanting to make my exit without giving too much away and worrying him. He’s too smart, though.

“IM?” he asked lying on his side under the covers.

“Yeah, IM,” I answered.

“Dang it!” he said. I thought of Friday afternoon workouts on my old team, sure to be IM, and sure to be awful.

Scotty, who didn’t have practice the next morning, was keyed in on the fact that it would be my birthday. He tried to be sly about it. “If Mommy could make you any kind of breakfast what would you want?” he said.

I tried to think of something really elaborate, but at the last second, I went in the complete opposite direction. “Cereal,” I said.

“Cereal?!” he said, sitting up a little and watching me drift out into the hallway. “What kind of cereal?”