It’s been a few months, but we finally hit the pool at the Foxboro YMCA.  Amazing how an hour playing with the kids in a pool changes them. They were wonderful children all day yesterday. Matter of fact, a good chunk of time spent interacting with them any day tends to produce the same effect. Sort of a poignant reminder that I haven’t been all that wonderful a dad for some time. Not terrible, just sort of there without fully being there for them as I got wrapped up in life’s niftier preoccupations of death, stifled ambition, finances, etc. It’s kind of lame that it took me so many months to realize this, but there are plenty of hours in the day to split between being a fun, engaging dad and one who broods over tight budgets and crushed dreams.  The kids will have good times, be better behaved and maybe still inherit a little of their old man’s cynical gild. 

   So, that’s a resolution I’m starting before 2010 and we’ll probably wind up at the Y again today. It’s easy enough to do and it’s a heck of a nice pool. Of course it’s cold as hell today, which is daunting even if the facilities are well heated. But what really fuels my procrastination is that the Y’s pool is ugliness unbound; a great, big cement-pond of the unpretty. The kids are generally homely, ranging from tykes with misshapen heads to teen girls with brushable mustaches. Men run the gamut from pasty, pimply runts with sunken chests to overweight bastards swaggering with breasts puffed high and arms held wide like fat pterodactyls.  Something in the simple, suburban male mind lets them believe that if they maintain a Mr. Universe posture the rest of us will actually see glistening blocks of muscle rather than greasy back hair and stacked bags of lard. I try to keep a low profile and have the decency to wear a surf shirt to lift my tits and hide the stretch marks. 

   And all the elderly too.  I truly hate to harp on older folks; after all, time is going to rob all of us of our pleasant features and younger generations will point and wince at me soon enough. But when I see all the grannies doing aqua-aerobics in their bathing caps and blue perms all I can think is Dammit, they’re gonna make the pool smell like Cream of Mushroom soup! Beyond a statute restricting elderly driving there needs to be one making it illegal for old men to wear Speedos. 

   As for the ladies of the Y pool, well, they just fill my head with questions. If your features have collapsed to the point where you’re barely more than a squishy pole of skin, why would you slip into a swimsuit designed for Tyra Banks? Why the hell can’t the bathing suit people come up with styles which fix all that? Some suits to add lift these girls’ fannies or collect the lipid flaps spreading around their torsos and reconcentrate them into distinct breast-like things?  And the moles…jeeeeesus! I know everybody has a wen or two and it ain’t so nice to point them out.  But there must be mole seeds in pool water because so many pool members are covered by vast populations of bubble-freckles and brown nubs.  Yesterday I kept swimming into one large mom whose face was a fester of swollen, translucent pink and orangey moles.  Swear I saw sea monkeys swimming in one or two of them…  

   Funny thing is that this is a wicked fancy YMCA.  The Y’s I grew up with were all dungeonesque, with moss sprouting from the walls of weight rooms and green pools lit by sick yellow light. In those places you’d expect to find all sorts of warts, goiters and club feet. This new Y does indeed have attractive members – you find them on treadmills and in Zumba classes…they just don’t swim.  So it must be an aquatic thing – only the gnarly or revolting utilize pool memberships. But the observation that only tragically unattractive people swim at the Y leads to this tragically unattractive conclusion:  We must be ugly as hell too. So there’ll be no more trips to the pool for anybody here.  Matter of fact we may never go anywhere again. We like to swim; we’re hideous.