Erin Simonds

Period 4 English

Monday, January 4^th, 1998

I did not have very many traumatic experiences in my childhood – maybe because I led the sheltered life of rural, upper-middle-class New England. There was one experience from my childhood, however, which I remember vividly, and consider to be probably the most frightening event of my life before age 10.

I was at a party at the house of some friends of our family. It was a flawless day in the middle of summer; there were people everywhere, music was playing, kids ran recklessly weaving through everyone and everything. The property was pristine: a beautiful house set upon the side of a grass-green hill, with wooden steps leading down to a perfectly Caribbean-blue pool. I was six, and at the time, one of those kids playing tag and running recklessly everywhere.

The chase soon made its way treacherously down the steps down to the pool area, and neither the chasers nor the chasee dared to slow. I found myself running carelessly across the concrete edge of the pool, trying to catch up to the child in the lead. I see the story as frames of memory in my mind, but what happened next skipped a frame. I didn’t realize I had slipped until I hit the water, but even then, there was nothing I could do. I could not swim, I was fully clothed, I had shoes on, and what little experience I did have in water, it was bad memories of the cold pool at the YMCA. I think the baby-swimming-lessons there must have made me hold my breath, but I had no knowledge of what to do next. It seems so calm now, as I slowly drifted down, watching the sunlight flicker from the ripples above, cascading light through the cloud of bubbles above me. I don’t think I struggled – the experience was new and mesmerizing.

The fascination was soon cut short, as I realized then that I was going deeper; I was not getting any more air; the sun was getting farther from me; the bubbles had fled, but I could not. Fascination became trauma, as I drifted deeper into the deep-end. The next frame is purely amazing. It is a picture, frozen in my memory, of a boy, probably no more than 15, swimming down from above to get me. I still remember him pulling me up, one hand under my arm, to the surface...

It didn’t end there, however. I had lost what air I had, and my instincts to breathe did not yet know a good reason not to. I remember the concrete coping scraping against my stomach as the boy pulled me up to land. He quickly brought me over to the ‘pool monitor’… the pool monitor, however, was occupied with an issue of Glamour, and for some reason, didn’t monitor me drowning. The boy brought me to her as quickly as he could, and I recall being put on her knee as she pounded on my back. My shallow coughs became deeper, and soon brought up mouthfuls of water. I found myself finally able to take a complete breath.

I didn’t do much for the rest of that day, and didn’t go in the pool much for about a year afterwards. I now live in a house with a pool, so I have had plenty of time to supercede my fears of diving into water, but the memories probably won’t go away.