So pronounced was the drought during spring and the first half of summer, that when an hours-long spell of rumbling thunder finally gave way to heavy drops one afternoon, Scotty yelled excitedly from the den, “It’s raining!” An eight-year-old boy thrilled by a little ordinary precipitation – that’s how dry (and scorchingly hot) it had been.
Now that we’re on the other side of the Fourth of July, plodding through summer’s lazy denouement, regular rainy afternoons have finally arrived, almost as if they’re announcing the nostalgia of the season. Once the clouds dump their payload and the cicadas make their final droning plea, Danyelle and the boys and I take a walk through the park, passing the neighborhood pool on our way. Every time we do, I can’t help but crane my neck to look over the fence and see which teenage lifeguards are closing up, kids I coached as elementary schoolers on swim team or certified with Red Cross. Seeing them slowly move around the pool so blue and empty and inviting, I always feel a little swell of disappointment that the summer league swim season is over. Just a few weeks ago was a whole different age. Then, we were at the beginning of something and now, a whole swath of our lives is over.
Soon, these evening walks will go the way of the summer league season. School, afternoon swim practices, and the fall time change will put an end to them in the coming months, and in the longer-term, God only knows how many more years Cartter and Scotty will still want to go with their mother and me. For now, when I see them run down the gravel strip at the boat landing in their crocs and venture out into the edge of the marsh, I remember when they toddled their way into little hiding spots in the spartina, inspecting every blade of grass and every little critter hole, and I think: it feels like this is all I’ve ever known.
And then there’s Sammy limping along behind them, crisscrossing her way from one favorite hunting spot to another. She remembers every place she ever sniffed out someone’s discarded fish guts or crunched a fiddler crab in her jaws and ate it. She stands in the mud and holds a forepaw in the air, pricking up her ears and staring at the ground with sharp doll eyes, searching for a target to come scurrying past. Standing that way, she’s like an adorable instrument of death, the perfect inverse of the dog who begs for food under the kitchen table. As the sun sets behind me, and I look at her poised to strike amid the slowly fading daylight, I have that thought again: it’s like I’ve lived here all my life . . . and all of it’s been with Sammy.
Lately, I’ve noticed the way Sammy scrambles to her feet when I walk toward the den, her paws sliding and clicking on the hardwood, her arthritic joints popping and no doubt smarting from the effort she exerts to keep her eyes on me. When I read on the couch, there she is on the floor next to me; when I sit at my makeshift desk on one end of the ping pong table, there she is underneath it; and when I pour myself a glass of water at the end of preparing a meal, there she is sighing and lying down in a heap, realizing that her chances are over. She knows my movements better than I know them myself.
I still tease her the same as ever. Hilariously to me, Danyelle has taken her off of carprofen, aka doggy Advil, and started her on a kind of hipster-dog drug regimen. Sammy’s responded well. When she walks out in front of me smiling at the end of her leash, pushing the pace with her little arthritic giddyup, I baby-talk her about having taken her new supplement – doggy CBD bones. Then, when we turn around, I hand her off to Cartter, and Danyelle and I go ahead. When I look back over my shoulder, she’s staring at me, still smiling with her ears laid back, walking stiffly next to Cartter and Scotty who loll this way and that with their eyes on the ground, lost in conversation. And suddenly, I realize that no matter how much I thought of my childhood dog and dwelt on Sammy’s death during her younger, more energetic years, and no matter how calloused I might think I am to her pain-in-the-ass old-dog existence, losing her is going to rock me in ways I don’t quite expect. In the same way the passing of summer’s early promise seems so impossibly quick during the dog days, somehow, I still can’t quite believe Sammy won’t live forever.
Drive
Cartter cried on the ride home from long course state meet. That’s what his mother told me anyway. He denies it. I wasn’t there to see it, because I was still at the pool coaching the older kids during Sunday evening’s finals session. Cartter went home with Danyelle and his brother after the ten-and-under session, his meet having concluded with a mediocre 100 back that had me shaking my head as I watched from the deck. “That’s not it,” I said to a colleague when he broke out at two-thirds tempo. Out in forty-three, back in forty-five, a far cry from the forties and forty-ones he’d been splitting in practice for weeks. After his poor race, he scoreboard-watched, expecting to end up in the top three like he had at short course champs. Instead, he was fifth. I felt him shrink standing next to me as he looked at the times on the board and realized he’d lost to kids he normally beats. “You gotta try,” I told him. He didn’t give any indication, but I knew it hurt. I felt it too.
The part that hurt me the most was how it surprised him, how he thought his poor effort was going to yield the result he wanted. Cartter told me later that he was trying to do just what he’d been doing in practice, which tracks: the race looked like a poor imitation of a practice swim. Instead of thinking about some specific stroke key or pace or just going out and racing, he was adding in another layer of mental bureaucracy. Whereas in practice he was focused on swimming well, in the race he was focused on the outcome he achieved in practice, hoping for a result instead of executing. Pressure will do that to inexperienced kids, scramble their motivation and leave them wondering what went wrong.
I wonder how much of the pressure Cartter felt leading up to that race was his own doing and how much of it was my fault. As the summer wore on and fatigue started setting in, I caught him whining a couple of times in practice. One day, I challenged the group at the end of a set of 50’s best stroke in the short course pool. “36 on this one!” I said to Cartter. “No!” he said, panic and indignation in his voice. When everyone had left, and I was straightening up the deck, I called him over to me. “Never do that again,” I told him.
On another occasion, I broke my rule of not bringing up swimming outside the pool. It happened after Cartter explained to me during our drive to a morning workout the feeling of bearing down on the back half of the 100 back at short course state and beating the kid next to him to take third place. The kid’s name was Witherspoon. Later, when we were having family game night at the house, I dropped the name Witherspoon into the hat. When I pulled it out, the explanation I offered Cartter was “The kid you’re afraid of . . . from Team Greenville . . .” He got it right away.
I’m not sure how much my stern rebuke or my teasing got in Cartter’s head. More than likely, the day-to-day of having me as his coach is a lot more impactful than those incidents, and regardless of whether his motivation is his own or derived from a desire to please his father, he is highly motivated. So far, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, even if it hurts to be part of a painful lesson. Cartter’s sensitive, but he’s tough enough to learn from disappointment too. I really admire that about him.
A couple weeks after the meet was over, he cried again, this time in front of me. It was during the last two chapters of The Art of Racing in the Rain, a book I read aloud to him and his brother. At the end, the dog (who’s also the narrator) dies. As I read about Enzo’s brave and noble death, I peeked over at Cartter, stifling tears of my own. My son hid half his face beneath a blanket, and the one eye I could see was bloodshot. “It’s okay,” I told him, “You can cry all you want.” I expected him to protest, to argue and tell me he wasn’t crying. Instead, he buried his face in the crook of his arm, turned away, and sobbed.
I gave him time to pull himself together and get ready for bed. Then, when I met him in his room, after I made sure he was okay, I teased him. Wouldn’t he be embarrassed when I told all the boys on swim team about him crying? The boys in his group, the ones just a little bit older than him, the ones he looks up to the most. Almost before he could tell me I better not do that, I told him it’s okay . . . I’ve seen them cry too.
“Really?” he asked. “Why?”
I thought of the young studs coming over after a race, crying into their goggles, trying and failing to hide it, their mouths squiggled up like characters from Peanuts. “They didn’t do as well as they wanted to,” I told Cartter.
“Like hundred back?” he said. Yep. Exactly like that.
Unburdened
Scotty remains relatively unburdened by the weight of expectations. Having his older brother carrying more of the load certainly works to his advantage, but his personality is such that he doesn’t place as much importance on pleasing others. He’d really rather have a good time.
He posed as a swimmer and snuck onto the deck on the last day of the Long Course State Meet, sitting in the bleachers with the handful of kids our team had in that session, shooting the bull with an assistant coach and wielding a stopwatch she gave him for entertainment. When we got back from vacation, and the boys had a “school of rock” performance, he donned a backwards hat, sunglasses that he wore over his prescription glasses, loafers, and the cous de gras – the giant taco top that he wore for the last two Halloweens. Up on stage he bounced up and down and tapped his foot while he banged away at chords.
The night Cartter was dealing with my Witherspoon joke in the fishbowl, Scotty slipped in a scrap of paper with “1987” written on it. When it got to the charades round, and he drew that slip, he started acting out a horse drawn carriage, because you know . . . that’s how people got around way back in 1987.
While the rest of us were crying over Enzo’s death, Scotty started getting restless, peering around at all of us from his spot on the couch. “Why’s everyone crying?” he asked.
“Why isn’t Scotty crying?” Danyelle answered to the room.
“Because he has no soul,” I said. “He’s a little demon baby.”
Muffled giggles ensued, and Cartter started to reemerge from his little cry hole. “Scotty’s birthday is the same day the Titanic sunk,” he said smiling through tears.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Cartter.
A pregnant pause filled the room, and Scotty, with a little grin on his face said, “That’s why I have no soul.”
The Raging Elitist 