as the pool turns

My gang from the pool had lunch yesterday. It was wonderful.

There were many conversations, lots of planning. What were we doing? We hardly know one another. Several days a week (Kay is the only one of us who swims every single day, me I swim every day when I am hitting with all my pistons, hint: I haven't been hitting with all my pistons lately, I skip days and I hate myself when I do, c'est la vie? I am hating myself for skipping today), we greet one another while we wait for the gate to open. Most folks have busy lives. If the gate opens at 10:30, they arrive at 10:20 or, even, later. This is where our friendships have grown, in these few minutes.

Some of the women knit more ties in the locker room. I imagine some of the men knit more ties in their locker room. Just the other day, Flattop Jack told me that Pete is the biggest talker he's ever known. I was so happy Jack told me this about Pete because Pete has implied that I talk too much. I have always suspected Pete is also a great raconteur, like me. Ah ha! Jack says that Pete will stick around the locker room talking for as much, and sometimes more, time than he spends in the pool. This is a lot of talk time because Pete swims for an hour. So does Jack swim an hour. And I also do. I never talked for an hour in the locker room!

I do chatter a lot at the gate, probably more than anyone but Pete. I have had a sense that people enjoy my conversation, for the most part. I have been me a long time, right? I know that my chatter often warms people up. I have honed this gift. And it is a gift, to talk in a manner that invites others to feel safe enough to reveal pieces of themselves that they would not otherwise reveal.  I am not always delightful but now and again, I hit it just right.

I don't know exactly where I stand on what I want to get from this. I am actually very weary of having all kinds of delightful, shallow connections. I want to go deep, and then deeper, with a few friends. I have some amazing friends and I think I might have more deep, intimate friendships than the average bear. But I want more. I want more depth. I don't want so much the shallow stuff but I can,when I am happy, create this kind of connection almost effortlessly. It is fun. It is more fun than standing quietly with a few humans for a few minutes at the pool gate, standing quietly day after day, year after year, close to these few humans but unconnected. Each person has a right to be private, of course. I guess I believe many humans seek more connection and I guess I see it as some of my work to create some warm human connectivity whenever, and as ever, I can.

That's what I've been doing at my pool. Let me give you a timeline for how I work.

I showed up at the Mountain View pools in October 2006. I didn't talk to anyone until someone spoke to me. I nodded hello when I arrived, for the first few months. I might have said hello if someone said hello to me. But I did not introduce myself. I waited to see what the commons wanted.

I could recount the early steps of how I began to knit myself into relationship with these folks. And, let's face it, I probably will, I write about everything that happens in my life, sooner or later. Today, I just want to give you an idea: I began my relationship to the pool crowd in October 2006.

I am shy. People that think they know me, they think I am not shy. I talk a lot. I am a good storyteller. I tell many intimate stories. I think the intimacy of my stories give people the false impression that I am not shy. Maybe? I am not sure how people see me.

I stayed at the very front of the line and limited my chatter to the other three or four people at the front of the line for over a year. I ignored guys like Pete. Partly I ignored Pete cause he is very attractive. Pete is a gorgeous man. And he gives off the air of being very prosperous and very, very confident and secure. I nabbed him as a 'ladies man', a 'playboy', a man not worth my time. Besides, he was never in the front of the line. He swims MWF. Whenever he would arrive, I noted that he was always greeted warmly. I saw that other folks in the line liked and loved him. I gradually realized he'd been coming a long time (ten years? longer?). Yup, some of these folks have been swimming together over ten years.

Over the winter, less people swim. This winter was hard on us swimmers. It was colder than last year, plus we had to swim in the crummy pool. The good pool was renovated (it just reopened, which we used as the occasion to go out to lunch). The 'bad' pool is not heated well. Factor in a colder winter, a colder pool: less people showed up.

So, over this winter, the people I was used to chattering with faded out. Suddenly, Pete was at the front of the line. We began to bond.

It turns out that he is a wonderful man. Wise. Mature. He calls himself a Buddhist. Who knows what that means for Pete, but, still, it suggests he wants to be a good person.

Almost everyone does want to be a good person. I wish I could get myself to assume that. Then I wouldn't have to wait a year to pay attention to good guys like Pete.

I was out of town for two weeks in January. During this time, a new swimmer showed up. Michael. When I am not at the pool, Michael shares the lane with Kay. I was able to warm up to Michael quickly because, gosh, if Kay liked sharing a lane with him, he had to be all right.

Kay and I always share, whenever we can, which is almost always. It makes such a difference to be with someone you know.

When Kay was recently in Bangkok for two weeks, I shared with Michael. He is great to share with.

Quite a lot of swimmers are awful to share with.

What is our criteria? Almost anyone is okay to share with if they smile. Almost no one who fails to smile feels okay to me and Kay. Quite a lot of people think nothing of coming to our lane, asking us to circle (it is part of the etiquette to ask, to let the other swimmers know you need to circle) without giving us a human greeting. Most of the time, when someone asks us to swim without smiling, we don't like them but they are pretty easy for us to accept because at least they asked. It would be so much easier if they smiled. If, however, someone gets in and starts swimming without first letting us know we need to circle AND they don't even smile or acknowledge us in anyway, it is awful to swim with these folks. Keep in mind such people are not being actively offensive. The absence of a tiny bit of human warmth, though, is huge.

I think all human circles have such subtle signals, don't you? Perhaps it is just my imagination, but these subtle cues seem even more subtle to me in the pool. They seem much more important. We are, after all, relatively vulnerable in a swimming pool. We are almost naked.

I think I learn more about how humans behave in the commons at the pool than in any venue I have ever been in. And keep in mind that, for the most part, I never speak to most of these people. Our entire relationship consists of a very few cues when they enter the pool and when one person needs to accomodate the swimming pace of another (sometimes a slower swimmer needs to let a faster swimmer pass).

Pete, Michael, Kay and I, we don't talk about too much outside of our pool experience. We have debated, in two-minute segments, over the winter months, pool etiquette. We have make up names for people. This name thing is a lot of fun. It reminds me of my first year in law school.

In law school, you are in huge classes for most first-year courses. A typical Contracts class lasts the entire first year, two full semesters. You are assigned to a seat so the professor can call on you at random. You sit in the same formation with maybe 100 other law students three times a week for two semesters but you don't really bond with many of them. You get your seat assignments in the first few days of class when you don't know anyone. So just because you ended up on the seating chart next to a particular person, that doesn't mean you have a personal connection. You're stuck all year, good or bad. But then, as humans are wont to do, you do find your tribe, you find your kindred spirits.

I never really found kindred spirits in law school. I didn't belong there. I never 'got' law students. They seemed to like to talk about the law all the time. Boring. Boring for me. Gee, I was so young when I went to law school. I can't tell you how many times I thought "These people are the most boring people I have ever met." Then I would have a teeny, tiny awareness that maybe I was in the wrong place, that maybe I had set the course of my life to go in a direction where, gee, all the people were boring. I would begin to have the faintest glimmer of doubt that perhaps the law was the wrong path for me. But I had invested so much in law schoo.l. And I didn't know what else to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a writer but I had internalized a belief that I could not be a writer, because writers starve. Grown ups had always advised me to figure out what I wanted to be and then to work for that goal but they had also always told me my goal, to be a writer, was the wrong goal. Around and around I spun. Law school seemed like a lifevest. So, when I had moments of doubting my choice, as I chafed at the way my fellow law students seemed to love talking about legal reasoning, analyzing ad nauseum the stilted legal analysis of famous legal opinions, I would sometimes feel sick to my stomach but I would shake this off and I actually told myself, many times "Law students are boring but lawyers will be interesting."

Up in my high corner of the classrooms (I always sat to the right of the lectern, as high up as I could go, so I could daydream in peace), I had names for all the people I didn't really know but that were a part of my life all day, five days a week.

I haven't made up silly names for the surrounding community since law school.

Michael brings a bracing approach to his names. He gets all upset about the woman he calls 'silly cow'. If you read my blog (I don't think anyone does, except maybe Cathy in Halifax), you know the kinds of names I use. Bangkok Kay, Flattop Jack, Stanford Pam, Little Pam (I haven't talked about the Pams in my blog but these are the kinds of names I use). There is Japanese guy (many asians swim with us but 'Japanese guy' doesn't seem to understand one single word of English and definitely does not understand the concept of pool etiquette, which we can't convey to him since he has convinced us he does not understand a single word of English).

I don't like Michael's names.

I like Michael. And I am glad he likes me, that I am in with him. But the fact that he comes up with negative names for the people who irritate him (well, sometimes I come up with negative names but I like to think my choices have some warmth if not poetry). I would hate it if he called me silly cow.

Pete does names a lot like I do. He calls Ada, for example, London. She is Chinese but she grew up in London and speaks with a British accent. London is a nice name, I think.

I think yesterday's lunch got started because Pete asked Kay out to lunch. I think she was interested but uncertain. I think I came up with the group plan to give her a chance to see Pete in a different light. But maybe I didn't come up with anything. Maybe Kay came up with the whole thing and skillfully got me to be the mouthpiece. Who knows?

Kay showed up looking gorgeous. She is an attractive woman, always. But she wears no makeup at the pool and most folks have never seen her in street clothes, with her hair groomed. She is attractive without makeup, in her sweatsuit, then in her bikini. On the street, she is a hottie. She is strikingly beautiful, with the kind of beauty that turns heads. She wears lots of jewelry, all of it real, she assures.

I've seen her in her public persona before. But yesterday, she outdid herself. She was smoking. She is nearly unrecognizable, compared to her pool persona. I like this. It is exciting. I bet if i were a guy and I saw this contrast, it would be even more exciting.

We have a large, round table for six. Pete chose to sit next to Kay. I thought that was a good sign. Of course, if Kay wants Pete, I want her to have him. If Pete wants Kay, I want him to have her.

I don't really know if our group lunch was a commons effort to help Pete and Kay consider each other but I like imagining that it was.

I asked Pete a couple weeks ago if he was interested in Kay. He said "I did ask her to have lunch with me." I waited for more. He added "As to whether or not I am interested in her, it is none of your business." I said he was right, that it was none of my business. Then he added "I will say this. There is always ambiguity between men and women." I liked that exchange. I like Pete. I am so glad I have begun to see him.

So there we were, all at lunch. There was talk of making it a monthly thing, a standing opportunity for any regular swimmer at our pool to socialize. I can support the idea but I am unlikely to go to many such lunches. Like I have written, maybe elsewhere, I am full up on casual acquaintances. I love them but I don't get fed by them.

As I continue to lose weight, I become more and more aware of the various ways in which I need to be fed. The way in which I most need to be fed is relationship. I need a partner. There is a case to be made that I might increase the odds of finding such a partner by expanding my casual, delightful networks of wonderful people. My man, he'll show up. I don't have to be out there looking. He'll show up.