Juxtaposing parallels

When you have enough time to think, you begin to notice a kaleidoscope of parallels that shape your life. Some make sense while others are just forced connections so that you don’t forget…

I went swimming today. As I eased myself into the cool turquoise, chlorinated water and adjusted my goggles, I glanced around the pool. Girls and boys, all running around in swim suites laughing, screaming and making splashing noises, while parents chit chat on the side. Guys and gals, throwing flirtatious looks at their skimpy outfits, as lifeguards hover over the mass of H2O. I plunged my head under water muffling the outside cacophony and pushed off from the side feeling the warm, smooth, all-encompassing, mass around me.

Swimming back and forth is a fairly mindless activity, so of course the mind wanders elsewhere. On this particular day, as on many others, my overpowering, vivacious memory unleashed its specimens acting like a time machine transporting me back to a far off place that I left but seven months ago. Before I knew it, I was back in China standing at the edge of some communist-built public swimming pool in the city of Kunming one October afternoon.

Upon asking whether there was a nearby swimming pool, my Chinese host mother delightedly took me to her college outdoor pool where she walked me through a grey concrete block and pointed to the left with a huge smile and told me she would pick my up later. Half nervous, half excited about exercising and getting some fresh air, I changed and to my horror, walked out to find a dark green, male dominate swimming pool. Slowly, all eyes turned to the fiercely white, tall, busty foreigner wrapped in a large towel looking lost and confused. Having no other choice, I walked to the edge of the basin and peered at the greenish mass floating below me. Weighing the pros and cons, I decided to take a chance and I quietly slid in. Tense as a board and half choking, I waded through the water half expecting some Asian sea monster to swallow me up, half dreading that some dead body would float to the surface as I swam across the deep end. The water was so thickly green, that you couldn’t see the bottom. This however, turned out to be an advantage as it shielded my half naked body from the gaze of the Chinese men unabashedly watching me. After several laps, I decided I had had enough and I hopped out to meet my host mother. She seemed non plused when I told her the water was green to which she proudly responded that it was actually rain water from the next-door soccer field, which drained into the swimming pool. “That’s why it is green. See, we recycle things too!”.

As my head broke through the clear, blue, chlorinate surfaces of Des Moines water, I paused just for a second and I tried to suppress a smile followed by the heart wrenching feeling of only one who has been involuntarily removed from a long loved place.