"Simple Happiness"

Tuesday July 25 2006 Tucson AZ

The Girl Lifeguard at Randolph Pool

It is a sweet early morning. I saw the golden sun peeping over the mountains to the East when I went out to open the windows on the truck (and put a towel over the steering wheel) and the air is soft and pleasant.


Caren’s huge green diesel truck is gone from her driveway, so I guess she has moved to Mexico. She rented a room in a friend’s house in San Carlos, and rented out her room in her big Tucson house next door to us. All her other rooms are rented out too. Now that her brother has moved back to Tucson I guess he will be in charge of her house. Occasionally we see him drive up and he says hi in a very warm way. He and Bill are friends from before Caren rented out all her rooms to boarders. Back then she only rented out one room and had plenty of room for Jack to stay with her when his life had nose-dived. Bill does not think Caren will stick it out in her new life in San Carlos and will return in the Fall. I don’t know. She has a lot of plans for her new San Carlos life. She started out by renting a room, but she plans to sell real estate there, and I am sure she plans to expand from one room. She invited me and Bill to visit her there and said there is a nice bus which goes there.


If I knew Caren better I would know what precipitated this move, but I have no idea. All I know is 3 months ago she arrived at our door with huge shopping bag filled with bottles of vitamins and shampoo and conditioner and said “I am moving to Mexico, would you like this stuff?” She told us she would be moving in mid-July, which is exactly what she did. She said San Carlos is on the beach but it is hot and humid in summer, altho nice the rest of the year. All things considered it is a stunningly adventurous thing she has done. When I see Jack next time I think I will ask him if she took her computer and if she is on email. I would like to write and ask her how things are there. I am curious about her great adventure.


Caren’s great adventure is in marked contrast to my life now which seems like pure monotony. I am ashamed about the sameness of my days, and think there must be something wrong with me to live this way. And when I wake up in the morning and first open my eyes to new day, I don’t know whether it’s the hot stickiness on my skin or the monotony of my days, which makes me think ‘o no another day.’

It scares me this lack of enthusiasm. I think something must be wrong. But really how can I judge my life? I can observe that I am not waking up enthusiastically, but beyond that I don’t know anything. I can say it is the fault of the weather, or the fault of how I spend my time. I do not know. It could come from something else for all I know. It could be residue of feeling left from where my mind has been the whole time I have been asleep in my bed. I can say it means I am doing everything wrong in my life, or it could mean I am going thru a purification process and I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. I don’t know anything. But I jump to a lot of harsh judgments and frighten myself. And that changes my mind from lack of enthusiasm about new day to cauldron of all kinds of upset thoughts. Then I think maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all, and it is just mist in my mind which needs to be burned off as day starts up. And then I get scared I will project it all onto Bill and the day will be spent in tantrums about monotonous life. I guess it is best that I keep the thoughts in my own mind and deal with them there, projecting them makes them worse.


There does seem like a vast emptiness but I don’t know what that means either. It could just be a big clearing out. And I don’t even know what vast emptiness means. I do not know what goes into my days, how I fill my time, exactly what it is I do.


I know I read a book for part of yesterday, I think in the afternoon and evening before I went to bed. “Teacherman” by Frank McCourt. And it was fascinating reading about his life as highschool teacher in New York City, and spending my time back in New York City, also back in the school system of New York City. There were echoes from my father’s life as school teacher at Seward Park High School and my own brief career as school teacher. And all the landmarks in book are familiar to me. Every place he mentions, I know that place. It was totally pleasant escape from my life and sometimes it was very funny, and it gave me something to think about in the swimming pool, I thought about Frank McCourt. And it inspires me about writing and makes me wonder if I should have stayed a school teacher.


It is two huge things to have shared with someone, teaching and writing; the two most meaningful things in my life are his life. He stuck out teaching and had a glorious career of it, and when he became a writer at the end of it he had a great success. Altho I don’t know what great success means in real life. He did write 3 great books tho, books which are changing my life, which is the highest accomplishment for a writer. I don’t understand his personal life very much. He hasn’t had a kind word to say about his wife. Maybe his life went into his classroom; it is the students he related to and poured his heart out to; and their love which enriched him. And when the 30 years in classroom ended he sat down and wrote these 3 glorious books. I am very impressed with his accomplishments.


For me who had such huge calling to be a teacher, and then discovered another calling to be a writer, it is very meaningful to find these books by a man who shared the same callings as me, and to read the fulfillment of his callings. He was a great teacher and he became a great writer. It makes his books particularly meaningful because it is two-way street for me. It is not two-way street in real life. Yesterday afternoon, before we went to swim pool, I dozed off while reading his book. And in the dream I met him, and I was tongue-tied. I was too shy to say anything to him, it was excruciating to even get out a few words. So the two-way street just occurs in my responsiveness to every word he writes and every experience he tells about.


He opens up this book about his teaching experiences by saying “before my first book was a best seller I was invisible.” His book became a best seller when he was 66 years old. I didn’t know what he meant by “invisible” at first, but now I realize he is referring to the life the rest of us lead. He means the life he had before he was interviewed on television and famous people called him and congratulated him, and he won prestigious awards and went on fancy junkets to Rome, before he had the life of a very famous successful writer. It is odd he would call a life of not being famous “invisible”. It is the life we all lead and we are not invisible.


Bill went to the workout gym at Randolph Pool and said “after my work-out I want to take a quick dip, so stay in the pool and I will be there in one hour.”

I gamboled in the water for an hour. I don’t know if what I do is called swimming. It is more like dipping into deep water and resurfacing, over and over, from one side of pool to other. I swim deep touch bottom and come up, then go down again come up, half the time my legs are in the air. I like standing on my hands in the water. I did that for almost an hour. When I started to get a little bored I thought about Frank McCourt. It was interesting to have someone to think about. And I started to pick up my head up a lot and look around for Bill, it was now an hour.


Then I heard the lifeguard on the stand, the beautiful girl blond lifeguard, say in a loud voice to the guy lifeguard in the water, “go into my wallet open up the zipper and take out all the money.” That was such an odd thing to call out in such a loud voice. I couldn’t imagine what she meant, it seemed unusual to trust someone so much to tell them to go into their wallet and take out all their money.

And then the next thing she called out in a loud voice, “I have nothing anymore, I have no boyfriend, my boyfriend cheated on me, I have no money.” Then she called out “go into my wallet and take out my card and step on it.” And then I heard something about wanting her money back. I had no idea what went on? Her boyfriend cheated on her and someone took her money ??? Everyone was in the water clustered around her, it was clear she was someone loved. The blond young man lifeguard loved her.


He was the one she was directing her comments to. There was a little girl who loved her too, and another lifeguard with black hair and dark skin. I came close too, I wanted to hear more. But when I arrived the topic had changed.

The little girl asked her “what does P.S. mean,” and the lifeguard said “post script.” And someone said “ASAP means as soon as possible” and the little girl said “I know that.” And the beautiful blond high up in lifeguard chair said “pps means post post script which doesn’t make any sense.” And the little girl said “what does RSVP mean?” And the blond man lifeguard in water called out “respondez s’il vous plait” in an exquisite musical French accent. I was floored. Suddenly beautiful French was spoken around me.


And then the girl lifeguard’s shift was up, and she dived in the water with the blond man lifeguard and they played in the water together and I wondered if he was in love with her, it kept looking like he wanted to put his arms around her.


And then Bill arrived and I said “it is one hour and 25 minutes,” and he said “I didn’t know you were strict about time.” And he floated on his back, and at the other side he said “girl in gym told me Reed Park” (Randolph pool is in Reed Park) “has another pool, it is new pool, it just opened, it has tent over it.” And the man in next lane said “it is the Edith Ball Pool and it has a tent over it for people who don’t want to be out in the sun.” I didn’t know if I wanted to swim in a pool with tent over it, but at least it was outside. Bill said “when I come back on my bicycle to finish my work-out, I will ride over and check it out.” “Good!” I said “and get their schedule, it will be fun to find a new pool.”


I had woken up at very bad odds and ends yesterday morning, much worse than the mere lack of enthusiasm for day today that I woke up with this morning, and a whole hour and 25 minutes swimming underwater and then moving close to hear the beautiful blond lifeguard call out “I don’t have a boyfriend anymore, he cheated on me” and “go into my wallet open up the zipper and take out all my money,” and hanging out in pool for another 15 minutes while Bill drifted back and forth on his back. Somehow the whole combination had immensely soothing effect on me. Instead of my life feeling like a puzzle where all the pieces were scattered, all the pieces came back together. I guess this is called simple happiness....