The Pool Where We Learned to Float

The summer of 1962, the community pool was everything. My best friend Sarah and I spent every afternoon there, our fingers pruning until they looked like raisins. We'd practice our dives, competing to see who could make the smallest splash, our mothers watching from beneath the shade of the palm trees that lined the chain-link fence.

"Your father says cable television will never catch on," Sarah's mom would say, fanning herself with a folded newspaper. "Who'd pay for TV when it's free?"

We're eighty now, Sarah and I. She calls every morning at seven, our ritual unchanged by decades. "Did you take your vitamin D?" she asks today, the same question she's asked since her husband died five years ago and she became relentless about my health.

"I did," I lie, opening the cabinet where the orange bottle sits unopened. Some truths don't need telling between friends who've shared sixty years.

My grandson visited yesterday, trailing cables and gadgets, trying to "get me connected" to something called the cloud. He stared at my television antenna like it was an artifact from a museum.

"You still get five channels," he said, marveling.

"Seven if the weather's right," I corrected. "And the picture doesn't disappear when it rains."

He laughed, not understanding. Youth never does — not until they realize that the ache of missing someone never really leaves, it just learns to coexist with joy.

Sarah and I sit by the pool now at the assisted living facility, the water too chlorinated, the palm trees artificial. But we're still those girls, our fingers still pruning, still diving into conversations that span half a century. She knows about the vitamins I don't take. I know about the letters she writes to her dead husband every Sunday.

"Remember," she says, squeezing my hand, her palm warm against mine, "we learned to float in that pool because we stopped fighting the water. Life's the same."

The cable guy comes tomorrow to install something modern. Sarah will call at seven to ask about my vitamins. And somewhere, in the space between memory and now, we are still fourteen, jumping into water that sparkled like diamonds, unafraid of anything that waited beneath the surface.