Today’s theme: Swimming
Colorful Living Tip of the Day …
• To heck with big sunken “cement ponds” owned by folks like the Trumps and the Clampetts. Keep a simple kiddie pool in your backyard to lie down in on scorching days so you can revel in the belly-deep cool. You won’t look like royalty, but you’ll feel like it.
Relatables …
• Teaching a kid to swim by throwing her in the water is like teaching her to fly by throwing her out of an airplane.
• A swim meet is an aquatic competition. A swim meat is an edible fish.
• The idea of car pooling the kids to swim practice strikes me as redundant, but maybe I'm just too literal.
• Today I'm driving six 8-year-olds to swim/trampoline/pizza party and if I'm not 100 % sober I'M the one who'll get in trouble.
• Otherwise great Chincoteague beach vacation marred only by incident initiated when kids asked if they could bury me in sand. Sure. I'm game. But when they had me completely immobilized, the little bastards stole my shoes & wallet. I should've known better. They weren't my kids.
Unrelated …
• The difference between my friends from church and my friends from the bar is my friends from church say they're sinners and they're really nice people and my friends from bars say they're sinners and brag about it.
• On most days, happiness and sadness are not emotions. They're decisions. Now, being an asshole, that's different. It's a pre-existing condition.
• I admire vegans, but the chances of me giving up meat are about the same as me resuming my virginity.
Zeitgust Word of the Week (a word I made up with the goal of getting it into an actual dictionary) …
Park Splug: A drowsy child who reaches a point of playground exhaustion and succumbs to an involuntary nap.
Related blog post …
“The Day-Long Swim Meet from Hell,” (April ‘17) …
It was an indicator of either my desperation or my depravity, but after five hours of confinement I began to feel a kinship with people who become refugees because of acts of war or acts of God.I’d lost all perspective.I’d equated my situation with those who’d lost their homes, their humanity and their hopes in cruel circumstances beyond their control. But, hey, that’s what five consecutive hours of the Chestnut Ridge Winter Swim Championships will do to a rational dad. Understand, at five hours we weren’t even half done. Oh, no.
Concluding thought …
• On this day in 1969, Fantasy Records released the Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Proud Mary." She's been rollin' on the river ever since. This leads me to believe not only was Mary proud, she was also quite buoyant.
• Author’s note …
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