Succinctly Yours Weeks 226 and 225: A-Maze-ing and Leap of Faith

Many thanks to Grandma of Grandma’s Goulash for hosting Succinctly Yours. Participants are invited to view the photo and take the plunge by constructing a story of 140 words or 140 characters or fewer to go with it. I am cheating this week by throwing in last week’s as well. My excuse is that I couldn't think of much for either week, so by doubling up, I hope at least to entertain you with multiple pictures. This week’s bonus word was “fraudulent.” Last week’s was “symbol.”

Anthropologists discovered that the ancient temple site was fraudulent. Their tip off was the cardboard stones.   96

Members of the Canonballical religion use the ritualistic plunge as a symbol. They don’t believe in self-sacrifice like their crueler sect, the Bellyflopites.  136

Get my swan costume ready.
~ Purported last words of Anna Pavlova, ballerina, d. 1931

Succinctly Yours Week 222: Hope Floats But Bikes Are a Drag

It’s time again for Succinctly Yours, a weekly meme made possible by the illustrious Grandma of Grandma’s Goulash. Grandma posts a photo each Sunday with the challenge to come up with a story of 140 words or 140 characters or fewer to go with it. The bonus word this week was “quantify.” I struggled with that word and confess that I may not have used it properly.

It was hard to quantify the boys’ stupidity. Ma told them to buy a boat for the fishing business, but their idea to switch modes of transportation didn’t hold water.  136

Gilbert thought water cycling would be a good idea. While his calculations allowed for the amount of water in a lake, he forgot to quantify the amount of mud.  129

It was impossible to quantify the boys’ love of James Bond. Unlike Bond’s vehicle, however, theirs did not become a submarine when it hit the lake, they discovered.   137

The bike thieves failed to quantify the Girl Scout’s moxie. That tough cookie had installed on-vehicle security that enabled remote navigation…into the lake.  135

We look out for ourselves and too often make the mistake of confusing reality with our limited perception of it.  ~Hal Urban

Succinctly Yours Week 205: Meoooops

Thank you to Grandma’s Goulash for hosting Succinctly Yours, a delightful little meme in which we scratch out a story of 140 words or 140 characters or fewer to accompany Grandma’s photo. The bonus word this week was “ideal.”

It wasn’t the ideal swimming pool, but swimming wasn’t their ideal activity, either.  72

“Take a skinny dip wiz me, ma petite chaton,” Meowrice purred. “I do not know,” Mewsette hung back. “Zees ees not my ideal—dipping wiz zee floating June bugs!”  132

Oh, how they loved their bouncy house! Until the next day, when they found out why inflatables aren’t ideal homes for cats.  102

Jim:  Uh, believe it or not, Kevin, firecrackers are in the 'Don’t' column.

Kevin:  So, you’re going to provide them, then?

Jim:  No, this is a firecracker-free wedding.

Kevin:  Oh, what the hell?
~“Niagara.” The Office. NBC. 04 June, 2005. Television.

Succinctly Yours #177: Lapped

Thank you to Grandma’s Goulash for hosting Succinctly Yours! The idea of this meme is to retrieve a story from the picture and dock that tale until it's 140 words or 140 characters or fewer. This week’s bonus word was “zone.”

Although Zeke was nothin’ but a hound dog, he practiced daily to become a water spaniel. Whenever in the water, he was in the zone.  107

Bri was in the zone when she did her daily laps in the pool. The elliptical trainer just didn’t give her as satisfying a workout, and frankly, Pilates has gone to the dogs.  140

Ginger was in the zone when she fetched the gold medal for diving. But how shocking that they tried to make her wear it instead of throwing it back in for another go!  134

There is meaing in focus, concentration, attention. ~Anne Lamott, Stitches

When Last We Meet

 My children have been involved in the neighborhood swim team since they were practically toddlers. The wonderful coaches taught them to swim. Amazing to me that I have now watched them grow up to be lifeguards and coaches themselves.

Monday night was our last regular meet. As in, last ever. Of course I’ll miss it. I’ll miss the way the pool goes from blue to fluorescent turquoise at night and the way splashes briefly explode against the evening lights like liquid fireworks. I’ll miss the lazy background lull of cicadas and the smell of chlorine and the spidery brown children with bleached hair. I’ll miss the familiar chant of the starter, “Timers clear your watches. Swimmers take your mark. Go.”

Now that we’ve come full circle, I can’t help but notice how our worlds kept widening like ripples from a water droplet in a pool. When my children were little, I cheered for them. Then I learned to cheer for the ones on our team. Lately I’ve found myself cheering for all of them—especially the ones who need cheering the most. At some point I stopped noticing who was on what team.

Lo and behold, all those years I was growing up, too. And now I have the real prize—I learned in the end what winning really is.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.~Epictetus

Summer’s Submerged Treasure

When I was a kid, my friends and I spent every summer up at the neighborhood pool. We’d get up in the morning, swim till we went home for lunch, and then go back. I can remember being so sore-eyed and sunburned and freckled and worn out that I’d go home and fall asleep in the afternoons on top of my bedspread and a tangle of wet, chlorine-bleached hair.

Now my kids are involved with our subdivision’s swim team. When we first got started, my then four-year-old struggled down his lane looking more like he was drowning than swimming. I had to fight the urge to jump in and save him with each bob of his little head.

He grew up to be a lifeguard as a teenager and now runs that same swim team as head coach.

A few years later my daughter decided she wanted to be on the team because her big brother was. You had to be able to swim the length of the pool in order to join. So with her characteristic, iron-willed determination crammed into a preschool body, she plunged in and swam the fastest, funniest little dog paddle I’ve ever seen. Now also a teenaged lifeguard, she seems to slip through the pool with the long-legged ease of a water nymph.

Swim meets last a long, long time. So long that my survival depended on learning to love it all—from the bullhorn to the banners to the warm, heavy honeysuckle musk of sultry summer night air.

But here’s my little secret: it’s the properties of pool water that I really love. It’s weird, I know, but I am mesmerized by the shifting shimmers of color, the shivers of light, the sparkle of a silver splash. I was horrible as a stroke judge. Everything was okay in the beginning of those Monday night meets when I could remain transfixed by the fluidity of movement. But as the sky darkened, I had to fight the hypnotic draw of the movement of fluid instead.

Because the most exotic magic happens at night when the sky turns to cobalt and the pool lights up in that molten-turquoise glow with streams of golden bubbles. Oh, those bubbles! Silver in the day but gold at night—there and then gone, a precious treasure, alchemy of air, champagne of summer nights.

Art, aching to be born, will find a way! ~Karen Greene