(9) Approaching Autumn

I wake up to the smell of my Grandma's homemade bread and hear eggs sizzling on a frying pan. I can see the small kitchen from my bed because where Olivia and I are sleeping is a room just below the kitchen, with only the privacy of wrought iron stairs leading up to it.

My grandma comes down the steps and hovers over my bed where she pats my arm and whispers into my ear, even though 1 am already awake, " Are you still coming with me to the pool this morning?" I nod vigorously, only half awake but still positive that at six o clock in the morning in the summer at her house in Newton Mass., 1 want to go with my mom's mom to a public indoor pool down the road so she can go water walking.

She goes back upstairs to fix the rest of breakfast and 1 slowly fall out of bed to put my swimsuit on. I figure that if I am spending a weekend at her house, I might as well not waste one minute, including time to swim in a refreshing pool.
My grandma is one of the nicest ladies I know. She has curly light red, almost blonde, hair and large - glasses. She's pleasantly plump, not fat, just has the small grandmotherly bulge from having five children forty-five years ago. Her skin is fair and creamy white and always smells like Pond's lotion.

She is an expert seamstress, cook, Skipo player, and childspoiler. Her only problem is her hearing. I always have to remember to speak louder when I talk to her. And if she doesn't have her hearing aids in, it's almost a lost cause.

After I pull on my suit and put my hair up in a messy bun, I put on a pair of blue lacrosse shorts and my reef flip-flops. Still only half awake, 1 trudge up to the kitchen, down a piece of toast with a dollop of homemade strawberry jam, and a glass of orange juice. Grandma gets me a soft, clean towel and then we head to her car, the ancient old Volvo station wagon that has seen a lifetime of weekends at the Cape, driving my mother to and from college and a million trips to the supermarket -the old brick A&P where my mother worked one summer. It closed before 1 was born, but I have seen pictures of my mother in her checker's apron.

My grandmother and grandfather have never considered themselves rich or even terribly modern, really, for that matter. But they have been married for 52 years, and that in itself, is wealth beyond anything 1 have known in Darien. Everything in their comfortable little house is exactly as it was when my mom was a teenager. The bedrooms are the same, the wallpaper in the living room is the same golden yellow and the lamps have that kind of that 70's look to them. Sometimes I think 1 can feel what it would have been like to be my mom living with her family.

It's only minutes before we enter the driveway of Grandma's friend who comes with her to the pool. My grandma has always been known to make friends easily and I wasn't surprised that she found a good friend to swim with. Her friend is also nice and also has to speak into my grandma's ear. She has short gray hair and is slim.

My grandma tells me while we are waiting, that she has breast cancer and needs to go the pool for exercise. I stare out the window as they talk and brag about their families and their plans for the rest of the summer. Finally we arrive at the pool.
While still in the car, my grandma jokingly tells me that I want to get out of the pool to take my shower, because I not be ready to see a bunch ladies naked in the locker room.

When I actually jump pool, I realize what I have myself into. There are no people there under sixty and I have to remind myself why I have come in the first place - to spend time with my grandma.

As I watch my grandma across the pool in her dark blue swimsuit looking like a large blueberry, with her friend who is in sort of a ruffly pink suit, I feel kind of out of place. I don't want to stand there in the water, but I feel dumb just doing laps by myself. For the first time, I walk the pool.

After we have gotten in, my grandma's friend realizes the water is kind of murky with a slight whitish tint.
I think about maybe going up to tell the lifeguard who is a middle-aged, grim looking man. But I don't have to, because as he passes by our side of the pool, grandma's friend tells him about her discovery.

I watch the lifeguard closely not exactly impressed. He seems to treat these old ladies as if they are toddlers, speaking slowly to them and joking that are having a milk bath. I study him with narrowed eyes.

Would it be like this when I get old? Would people treat me as if I am only a little kid, having no knowledge of the real world, even though I have lived in it longer than they have? The thought saddens me.

After about an hour, I grow tired of walking constantly back and forth in the pool and decide to sit up on the bleachers and study the people. I watch the group of about fifteen or so seniors, three walking with my grandma, and others doing laps on the far side of the pool.

I am suddenly brought to the realization, as I watch each old person getting some exercise that each of them represent a sum of a life's experience...a story to tell. I wonder as I watch a delicate white-haired lady in a white and black checked bathing suit, if she was pretty when she was younger. Perhaps she was bombarded with boyfriends and spent her days lying in the sun and now her skin shows the years of sunshine she has lived. Then I look at a plump but handsome older man with a white mustache. Maybe he was class clown in his high school. He seems happy and content to be in the company of the other men. I sit there and immediately am overwhelmed with respect for all these strangers. Perhaps in the eyes of the lifeguards, they are just cantankerous pensioners but to me they are each a fascinating person, each the author of a book of life experiences and memories now approaching the autumn of their years.

One day I will no longer be hip and cool, but faded and lost in change. I hope to myself that I won't be overlooked and hustled like all of these senior swimmers seem to be. I make a mental note to be more aware of the elderly and to also take really good care of my own children someday. Its like a commercial I saw a few years ago that my dad worked on...You owe it to your parents because they brought you into the world, you owe it to your children because you did the same for them, and in either case you're sort of speechless when you look in those eyes, because in either case...you surely see your own, Summer, like the lives of my elderly swim mates, is waning.

Autumn and its changes will be here before I am ready for it.