Water, Water Everywhere

It's early spring, and already I'm reading about local boating or swimming accidents. I can't swim. I never learned to stay atop and move across the water. A most-frightful moment was at my seventh-grade class outing at a lake. My classmates and I were jammed on the pier, when someone accidentally bumped me off. Down I went some twenty feet, I think, into the lake, stunned, not knowing what to do. I had no idea that eventually I would float back to the top, so I in panic I thought that I would drown. When surprisingly I did surface, fighting to reach the nearby ladder, no one even noticed.

Thank goodness my cousin noticed my brother, who was 4 or 5 at the time, when he plunged into a very deep-water ditch after one of the heavy rains we used to get in our town of Aheadofrepoman. Cousin pulled Mike by the hair out of the ditch just before he began to drown.

I used to be unable to watch drowning scenes in movies. Being hit by a train---shot in the head---mangled in a farm thrasher? Piece of cake. But not drowning. (And it doesn't help that I'm listening now to the gripping, near-drowning story in Eric Clapton's blues song, "Floating Bridge.") Next time I go onto the water, it'll be with a life jacket and in an internal cabin in a 500-foot cruise ship. Oh, I forgot to add: I haven't had a drink of water in some 50 or so years now.

-Old Gargoyle