Swimming Lessons

 This was definitely not what the doctor ordered.

I stood in the lake, the water just about chest high. I was there for the sole purpose of protecting one little person learning the fine art of kicking her feet and moving her arms while trying not to swallow a fish. Or something like that.

But of course, me unfortunately being me, giving all my focus to one almost four year old guppie was not sufficient. And so I began to attract other similarly aged diminutive persons with swimmies, all who happened to be friends with my ward.

And soon, I was a being with ten arms and legs, charged with giving free rides into the shore line, or spinning the bodies in circles of those who used me as home base or even searching in vain for the whereabouts of those who attached themselves to the side of me I could not see.

Oh yes, about my doctor. He had, slightly less than half a year in my rear view mirror, put my left shoulder back together again, with the warning that Humpty Dumpty should not try to test the outer limits of what his artistry was capable. Kind of forever, but definitely well beyond the present tense.

On the shoreline, I am certain that my wife chalked up my stupidity to, well my stupidity. As to the people who birthed my expanded appendages and stood watching the show, they must have come to the unavoidable conclusion that Papa was more than a few cards short of a full deck.

After an extended while I noticed that the one who I had begun this exercise with was either doing morse code with her teeth or was in full shiver. And so I excused myself from the others to whom I had become so attached, and headed to the beckoning towel.

My daughter, who had left her first born in the care of Papa and crew, soon received numerous messages from those who had witnessed the attack on me, worried that my doctor and I would, in the immediate aftermath of this undertaking, be having a serious discussion about whether I had ever advanced beyond the emotional maturity of the guppies with whom I had interacted.

Luckily, today I can still lift my arm above my head and also remain quite capable of taking a poor fake golf swing without incident.

Which only goes to show that stupidity is not necessarily fatal. Just incurable.

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