Learning to Swim

The swim school is located in a questionable neighborhood of Burbank where safety notices are left on our car by the Burbank police department, and the neighborhood is populated with apartment buildings noted for their dilapidated tan stucco and names such as “The Sea Breeze” or the “Paradise Palms,” but the only part of the names that are accurate are the palms rising up from the parking medians, which serve to remind us that this is, after all, southern California. Yet you’ll find no sign of sea, breeze, or paradise here as summer tries to suffocate Burbank in its smoldering grip.

But once you walk in through the gate of the Lucile Cowle Swim School, all the oppression melts away. Fountains burble, and Canna Lilies bloom from planters. The smell of sun screen permeates the air. Phil Collins drifts out from speakers dotting the stone walls, and parents with cameras sit under large canvas umbrellas as instructors coax children of all ages to become just a little bit less human and a little bit more aquatic. We come every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the aquariums— a small pool for the babies and a larger pool for the big kids— are teeming with everything from the tiniest minnows to nearly full-grown fish. Some instructors have four-year-olds floating on their backs like otters. Other instructors are cheering on five-year-olds learning to tuck into a dive like penguins in goggles. I watch my son, just four-years-old, leap unafraid off the white diving board into the eight-foot deep water. It is a great and terrifying moment.

According to an article on Slate, Drowning is the number two cause of death in children under the age of fifteen, and the Instinctive Drowning Response doesn't look like drowning. It looks like a person pushing down against the surface of the water, unable to speak, and struggling to breathe. I have a close friend who knows a woman who lost a child to drowning. My brother was on a field trip in high school, and one of his classmates drowned in a pool they were all swimming in when it happened. I read a poem once about drowned twins: five-year-olds clasping hands at the bottom of a neighbor's pool. It's no wonder that some of us parents coach from the sides of the pool. 

My memories of swimming begin in my grandparent’s pool on Fremont Street, when all the neighborhood kids would come over on the hot days to play. I floated around in the kind of orange life-vest you wear on boats, but floating around wasn’t enough for my mother. My swimming lessons were held in the mornings, before summer camp, when the air was still cold. The pools were never heated, and my strongest memories of learning to swim are visceral: gripping a kick board, legs churning, teeth chattering. When the lessons were done, and I was dressed for the day and finally warmed up, I felt a little wrung out and rubbed down by the cold water.

Now I watch my son as he tries to learn how to push off the wall of the pool and glide to his instructor, who offers him the appropriate high-fives when he follows instructions. I watch him kick his legs wildly as his arms flail at the water when he forgets about “big arms and scooping hands.” Every time we visit the pools, he does a little bit better. But sometimes he pushes off the wall, and instead of gliding to his instructor, he goes under. His head is gone, just like that. But then he sputters, laughs, and once again tries to execute the glide, scoop, and kick that constitutes swimming. 

In the rippling oasis of Lucile Cowle’s swim school, I watch some kids sink as their instructors lift them back up to the surface. I watch tiny, blond girls in frilly swimsuits whose spastic movements look like ecstatic drowning, but really it's swimming without coordination, and it's a delightful thing to see. When my son is done with his lesson, I change him into dry clothes and he picks out a red lollipop, which glows in the sun on the way back to our car where a notice about carjacking is pinned under the wiper. 

My Grandfather's Last Supper

It was vintage Da Vinci, framed and hung in a deco kitchen on Fremont Street. Jesus and his disciples chatting and blessing at their long table, watching me pull cheese from my baked ziti at our oval, Formica one. Here was a masterpiece configured for suburban consumption: The Last Supper lined and numbered on a cardboard canvas accompanied by burnt umber, say, corresponding to the number six blobs, carmine to those numbered with tens. The kit, like the kitchen table, was from the fifties, the kitchen set firmly in the seventies of my mind. The paint-by-numbers composition made an impressionist of Da Vinci-- all lines of realism removed, the faces and robes, the plates and food, the dining room figured out of pigment changes and articulations of shadow and light. Every hand of every man gesticulating like my Italian relatives gathered for holy day meals, all talking at once and trying to be heard.

What did my grandfather know of Da Vinci? He knew Catholicism, having converted to it when he married my grandmother. What did he know about making art? He made things as a craftsman makes things. After the Second Great War, he left the navy to build houses. When his heart condition sent him into early retirement, he made vast gardens of vegetables and flowers. He made screened-in porches. He made huge vats of sauce and meatballs for Sundays with family, and he made Easter Pies by the dozen-- ham and ricotta with thick, buttery crusts-- for every aunt and uncle. He was always either making or tipped back in his leather recliner, nursing a hernia or bad back. He was always the color of red ochre, too tan for his fairness, always bent over some project in the backyard, sweat beading on his lower back, a square nitroglycerin patch stuck somewhere on his torso.

As early as 1517, the Da Vinci original began to flake. Some of the earliest attempts at restoration began in the eighteenth century, first by Michelangelo Bellotti, then by Giuseppe Mazza. In the nineteenth century Stefani Barezzi tried to restore it, and in the early 20th century, Luigi Cavenaghi and Oreste Silvestri continued the effort of preservation. In the 1950s, when the paint-by-number version was released, another cleaning and restoration was undertaken by Mauro Pelliccioli. By the 1970s, when I became cognizant of the painting only through my grandfather's version, the original was seriously deteriorated. However, from 1978 to 1999, Pinin Brambilla Barcilon attempted stabilization and tried to reverse the damage caused by dirt, pollution, and the misguided 18th and 19th century restoration attempts.

The last time I saw the Last Supper, it was slumped and mildewed against the wall of the alcove leading to my mother's basement. Prior to that, it hung from its hallowed spot in my grandmother's kitchen, offering benediction above a wooden Sears table that increasingly became cluttered with mail, pill minders, and occasional mouse scat. Age had finally taken the care out of my grandmother so that the painting hung askew from its faux gold-leaf frame, and the patina of greasy dust grew thicker every dwindling year of her life. The Last Supper was a movable feast, from kitchens of the seventies and through the decades; it moved from Fremont Street to Cold Spring to Patricia Gardens to Smith Street, which was my grandfather's last house, until it finally landed just a few thoughtless actions away from becoming trash, a few steps from the mounds of forgotten detritus that live in my mother's basement. All the years of my grandfather's absence-- more than thirty years now-- allowed us to making nothing much of the hours he must have put into the painting. So much for preservation. 

So I like to picture him laying out the supplies and getting to work: the board, about two feet by three feet; the many small pots of paint required for a kit this size; the several tiny brushes: all spread out on a vinyl table cloth under the circular fluorescent ceiling lamp, switched on with a pull string. But it's added for extra illumination because he's painting in the afternoon, sun coming in through the casement windows, the tassels of his planted corn waving to him from the backyard. He has his reading glasses on, and his white hair is combed back, still with a little fifties pomp. He's dressed in his usual polo shirt and laborer pants. The only things moving are his right hand, which dips, paints, rinses, and repeats and his French Blue eyes, which flick around the canvas looking for numerals. He takes great care with the feet, small toes and slim straps of sandals requiring a steady hand. The image of Jesus's final meal assembling like a jigsaw puzzle as Connie Francis and Hank Williams click through their eight tracks on the stereo.