Unfinished draft of memoir: Near Death, Going Under and Emerging

 Mother couldn’t watch me every second, but she remembers seeing me, standing there on the edge of the Dreamland public pool in Ceredo.  She even noticed me watching the bigger kids diving from the circular slab of cement which rose from the center of the pool. Maybe she turned her attention to my little sister.  Maybe she was chatting for a minute with another pool mom.  Whatever the reason for her distraction, she didn’t see me make my way to the center ring and she missed my first dive.  The only thing she saw was my body tumbling under the water tinted with the cool blue of the painted pool bottom.  Because I was too young to remember, I too missed my first dive. No remembered images leap to mind when my mother retells the tale of my near-drowning.  I can’t recall the actual leap… just sensations of being in water.  Though my mother saw me going under, I only remember feeling like I was rising on a waterspout.  I was being lifted.  It just occurs to me that perhaps my memory is of being pulled from the water, not falling in.  This incident scared my mother so much that she vowed never to take my sister and me to the pool again unless my father came along to help her keep an eye on us.  The result of this vow?  I never learned to swim properly.
 For me, my short submersion is only a sliver of a memory with no conscious fear attached. I don’t remember enough about the occurrence to consider it a childhood trauma.  Still, I have always been a little leery of water.  Especially murky, hard to see through water where you don’t know what’s lurking in the depths. Once, in the jellyfish infested waters off Buckaro Beach, I upset a woman on a raft trying to save myself from being stung.  And, in ocean waters, when I have passed the point where my feet can touch bottom, I have found the “Jaws” theme song running through my head and have felt the accompanying urge to return to shore.  It isn’t water that has frightened me so much as the strange slimy creatures that glide noiselessly through it.  More than the creatures themselves, it is the harm they might cause me.  And at the root of my fear is my awareness that I can be harmed, that I am vulnerable to all the dangers the world presents. 

Of course, all humans are, and I know this. But I try to give this awareness just a little sliver of my memory. It isn’t pleasant to think about. (446).

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