At the beginning of last summer, our son could not swim. It’s not that he wouldn’t get in the water or didn’t have a blind enthusiasm for getting wet. But if he wasn’t holding on to his mom or me, or us to him, he would drop to the bottom of the pool faster than a bowling ball coated in Crisco (That’s a theoretical observation. We never actually tested it with our son.)
As a kid (at least according to Mom History), I was a fish. I went straight from womb to swimming pool. My tan was so deep, it would be considered child abuse today (hey, it was the 70s).
The fact that Squirts (don’t worry, that’s not the name on his birth certificate) was three-and-a-half-years old, the end of summer was near and he still hadn’t learned to swim naturally made me feel like a neglectful father. It’s not his fault either. We’d barely given him the opportunity to try. We don’t have a swimming pool of our own, and our summer schedule hadn’t allowed us to visit our community pool even one time.
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