Back to the 'Y'

I recently got myself a membership to the YMCA and, thinking I had forgotten my strokes, promptly signed myself up for adult swim classes. It's true that my brain had forgotten the details of the different strokes: kick from the hip (not the knee), alternate the arms and legs so you always have momentum from one or the other, make sure to breath with every stroke. Luckily I'm a muscle memory kind of person, so it was a bit like riding a bike. The hard part was finally getting myself back into the pool.

The unfortunate thing about this YMCA is that they seem to still be putting as much chlorine in the pool as they did back in 1986 at the YMCA in downtown Hazleton, PA.

I thought of that YMCA today as I was scrubbing myself silly trying to get rid of the chlorine smell. It was probably a beginners swim class that I was remembering and I would have been about six years old. My mom was washing and dressing us after class when we discovered that the bottle of electric green, Prell shampoo had leaked all over our bag. It had also leaked on the edge of the clean underwear that I was supposed to put on. I was six or seven at the time and was not wanting to be a baby or 'not normal' and go without my underwear.

By the end of the day the Prell shampoo residue left on those underwear gave me a rash all along the inside of my left left thigh. I remember the rash being vividly red and very painful. Not a pleasant thing to think about in a public shower where the warm wet air and puddle seems like a perfect breeding ground for a skin affliction.

It was that thought that I was thinking when both me and the woman directly across from me in the showers happened to throw open our shower curtains at the same time, fully naked and briskly trying to dry ourselves off, avoid eye contact and get the hell out of there.

In my last two weeks of showering at the 'Y' I've noticed some personality strategies people use for the locker room. There are the 'talkers' who seem to have the attitude that 'we're just two naked people gettin dressed together, might as well get to know eachother' and their opposite, the 'non talkers'. Similar to subway riders in NYC, 'Non talkers' prefer to avert their eyes and mostly pretend not to see the other naked people changing around them. The thought process for the 'non talkers', or at least this 'non talker', is that maybe if I pretend I can't see them and they pretend they can't see me then it's like there's nobody else there.....

That is until some lady throws her shower curtain open and you're stuck staring at her flip flops, which happen to be obnoxiously polk-a-doted just like your own shower flip flops. I wonder if she got them at the same CVS?

No matter. I'll never know and it really is better off that way.