Scenes from the Swimming Pool Bleachers

My sons were summer league swimmers, and my younger son also swam on his high school team. For fifteen years, I mostly shirked my swim-mom duties and let swim-dad own those responsibilities. You spend three to eight hours in the bleachers to see your child swim for a few minutes. That calculation might sound unmotherly to you, but let’s be honest, we’re all thinking about that undesirable ratio.

Plus, I’m pretty sure I am not the only one who cannot reliably identify my son in the pool. Once they have on the cap and goggles, we don’t have a lot of clues about which child is actually ours. A case in point: the middle photo above. Another parent on the team sent it to us. My husband and I were delighted with the quality of the shot. A true smile on our son. Except for one thing. That’s not our son. My husband liked the picture so much he sent it to his parents. It now hangs in their house. We didn’t have the heart to tell them that when our son saw it, he laughed and said, “That’s Benji!”

People-watching is a pretty good way to pass the time. I never realized how interesting the backs of people’s shirts are. For example, the grown man who has his shirt on inside-out (on the right in the photo). Or the woman who is wearing an Ivanka Trump branded shirt (on the left, only literally, not metaphorically). This is Boulder, blue-city capital of the world, and I bet she didn’t realize who she was advertising. But at least she kept distractible me entertained for a few moments.

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