Lifeguard on Duty
My wise friend, Sid. The lifeguard.
Chapter 14
My closest friend in high school was Sid.
His family moved to my town the summer before our junior year in high school. Sid and I met on the first day of school and clicked instantly.
Sid was fun. He was adventurous. He had curly hair and the whitest teeth of any human I’d ever known. He also had the biggest smile and an infectious laugh.
Sid was also a swimmer. He had a swimmer’s build, a swimmer’s tan, and a swimmer’s carefree attitude.
So, he pretty much was everything I was not.
Sid exposed me to things that were totally foreign. His father owned a car dealership, so we often would hang out there doing odd jobs like washing cars or running errands to other dealerships.
Sid drove a Jeep. And I spent hundreds of hours as his passenger driving around and talking.
He had an intense passion for everything in his life. He also brought a simplistic insight to the many issues bouncing around our teenage heads.
Sid was the first friend I had whom I considered wise. He was an observer of life and people and I could always count on him to cut to the chase and bring a realistic and practical perspective to any situation.
He was also the first peer of mine to ever ask me what it was like to lose my mother.
“So, what’s it like to have your mom die?” he asked me out of the blue one day.
No friend of mine, other than Sid, could have traveled with me for the next two hours as I shared things with him I didn’t even understand myself.
It was a rite of passage for me in many ways because that was the first time I experienced the depth of a friend’s compassion. Even a sixteen-year-old friend.
The summer after we graduated from high school, Sid was the head lifeguard at a local pool. It was the perfect job—for him, and for me because I’d hang out there most days.
And because I didn’t have a job of my own, I’d help out whenever I was needed. I learned how to check the water chemistry and clean the filters. I became pretty proficient in using the skimmer bag to clean off the top of the water, too. I quickly learned all the mundane aspects of pool maintenance.
I also learned what it meant to be a lifeguard.
Sid was about to enter the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and I was about to move to Seattle to enroll in the University of Washington. While my school didn’t start until the middle of September, Sid had to leave for school around the third week of August, leaving the pool short a lifeguard for about three weeks until the last day of the season, which was Labor Day.
“Jim, you gotta be the lifeguard,” Sid begged.
Me? Lifeguard?
I wasn’t lifeguard material. I was just the lifeguard’s sidekick.
But somehow it happened. I became a lifeguard, if only for a few weeks.
I was really excited on the first day on the job. I had a new yellow bathing suit and thought I was at least doing a respectable job of looking like a lifeguard.
More than anything, I was prepared for fun in the sun.
Until the second day on duty, that is. That would be the day Chuck, a family friend who was probably six or seven years old, appeared on the diving board early that memorable afternoon.
I hadn’t recalled seeing Chuck in the deep end of the pool during the summer. But I was sure he wouldn’t be on the diving board if he shouldn’t be there.
He wouldn’t do anything stupid, I thought to myself.
So, I waved to him as he jumped.
And Chuck smiled at me with his toothless smile. He was still smiling as he went under the water.
And under the water he stayed.
No more than ten seconds elapsed from the time Chuck jumped off the diving board to the time I pulled him from the bottom of the pool. I couldn’t even think fast enough to use any of the lifesaving skills I had learned in my lifeguarding crash course a couple weeks earlier.
“Chuck, what were you thinking!” I screamed at his no-longer-smiling face.
“I dunno. Am I in trouble?”
Funny. I was asking the same question of myself at that moment.
And it was at exactly that moment that being a lifeguard took on a whole new meaning for me.
The majority of my healing after surgery took place outside by our pool.
I’d wake up most days, put on a bathing suit, and basically hang out poolside as much as possible. Aside from having had my insides Roto-Rootered, and a few tubes hanging off of me, you’d think I was enjoying a resort getaway in the Riviera. The truth was, the sun felt incredible.
Building this pool a few years earlier was either the dumbest thing I had ever done or the smartest. I had rationalized putting it in by convincing myself I’d use it to swim laps.
The laps lasted about a week.
But the pool quickly became the centerpiece of our family life. It’s where everyone would congregate throughout the craziness of our days.
Over the years, while my sons and daughter could often be found in the pool with friends, I was the one who tended to walk around the pool in a bathing suit. Patrolling. Throwing stray balls back into the water. Tinkering with the pool equipment. Testing the water. Watching.
I became, in actuality, the lifeguard. After all, I had a certificate!
After surgery, my poolside perch also became the hangout for the nightly army of friends who brought dinner to our family for weeks.
This became an instrumental part of my healing. Not the food. The people.
Virtually every afternoon, late in the day, I’d get to see someone different. Some days it might be people who were part of our family’s inner circle. Other days—most days, in fact—it would be people who were casual acquaintances. Maybe from church. Friends of friends. Neighbors who lived two blocks down and three houses in. They were the people in all of our lives who we had passed by knowingly without allowing any kind of connection.
But cancer helps break down those barriers.
“Come on, sit down. Join us!” I’d say to them after thanking them for their culinary kindness.
Almost every one of them sat. And almost every one of them, I could tell, had squeezed the “Higley Dinner” into a very busy personal schedule.
And almost every one of them stayed for longer than the initial time frame they had allowed themselves.
“Just a few minutes” turned into twenty.
“Ten minutes” transformed into forty-five.
“I don’t want to intrude” became a second glass of wine, dinner, and a call to the rest of their family to come over for a swim.
They brought food to nourish and fill us. But what they ultimately brought was so much more.
They brought us the nourishment of themselves. They simply needed to be asked. For me, having the chance to stop and talk with people was such an enlightening part of my summer. It was my daily reminder that everyone has a story. Hardships. Pain. Everyone. Yet, somehow we are all intrinsically connected to each other in very tangible ways.
These people seasoned my days with their stories. They warmed my heart with their own struggles. They gave me ziplock bags of compassion. And they prepared those ingredients in a slow cooker. Not in a microwave.
And in doing so, they not only were our chefs for a day.
They became something far more valuable.
They were our lifeguards.