Maybe He's Sleeping With the Fishes...

Sun Valley Beach. They have one in California and they used to have one in Powder Springs, Georgia. It was half a mile from our house, made from a lake that had morphed over time into a beach. Years of work and thousands of yards of sand and concrete were poured into the coolest place we kids had ever seen. It was truly a concrete pond. When I was twelve, I started working there in the summers, teaching swimming lessons. This was apparently before child labor laws and background checks. We worked our fannies off so we could get free entrance to the park. The juke box played the top 40 all day and you could buy a frozen Snickers at the snack bar. Heaven.

One summer in high school, I decided to take the plunge and become a full-blown lifeguard. The owner at the time, Murray Homan, put us through our classes at night, after our extracurricular school activities. The final test included making my jeans into a flotation device and hauling a football player a quarter mile through chilly black water. I somehow passed. Then I entered the world of lifeguarding, where most of it is boring. But when it's not, it's truly epic. 

There were only a few times that I came close to saving lives -- one was a set of twin toddlers who were drowning each other in four feet of water. A simple enough rescue: I jumped in and picked them both up. Another was a fellow who had stupidly tied the rope for the Tarzan swing around his ankle and then missed the next rope, leaving him hanging upside down with his head under water. That one was not so simple. I loved cooling off and swimming through my entire 15 minute break every hour. We lifeguards thought we were the best thing since sliced bread, but we didn't care much for the head lifeguard, Stan. He was old, to us, something like 24 and obsessed with his feet. He was redheaded, freckled, and constantly sunburned, so ministrations to those feet were paramount to him. The jokes were endless.

One day, I happened to be at the snack bar, picking up my (very meager) check. I heard a commotion down near the water. There was a large crowd gathered, hollering and pointing towards the middle of the lake. Murray (the owner) ran like the wind and dashed into the water, yelling for someone to call an ambulance. He swam furiously to the dock, dove under and then hauled a man all the way to the side, where it appeared he gave him CPR. The man was revived and soon an ambulance drove up and he was whisked away. Murray turned back from the ambulance, exhausted, to see the head lifeguard, sitting up on the stand, dutifully rubbing his feet. Stan had missed the entire drama while he was preoccupied with said phalanges. 

I never saw Stan again. 'Nuff said.