The Road Gets Longer If I Stop

By Rick Garvia

Rick Garvia is a writer, amateur landscaper, former professional homebuilder, traveler, yoga hack, reader, wine drinker, amateur photographer, boulder mover, dog lover, loud sneezer, spelling snob, coffee drinker, father, brother, son and a happily married regular guy facing growing older with equal amounts of frustration, amazement and aplomb. The Road Gets Longer If I Stop is a collection of short stories from his popular blog. Described as “out-of-the-box, insightful, humorous, and smart,” each story digs deeper yet barely scratches the surface of a life spent trying to figure things out. The colorful short stories, insightful musings and razor sharp dialogue will capture the reader’s imagination and curiosity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781300478652

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The Road Gets Longer If I Stop

The Road Gets Longer If I Stop

Rick Garvia

Copyright © 2013, Rick Garvia

Legal Disclaimer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website or broadcast.

I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories of them. The events in these stories are real. In order to maintain their anonymity in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places. I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence to protect privacy. This book is gluten-free but may contain tree nuts. Do not read while driving.

ISBN 978-1-300-47865-2

www.TheRoadGetsLongerIfIStop.com

Cover design: Alex Shortt

Dedication

For Marion and Stephanie.

In memory of my mother, Margaret Garvia.

I love you all.

Everybody in The Pool

OK everybody, listen up. Today you’ll learn how to swim in the deep end.

It was the summer of my seventh year and I’d never had the opportunity to swim in deep water before. Not any more. Here I was, a shivering, skinny kid staring down at what looked like a million gallons of water with no discernible bottom, waiting for my lessons on how not to drown in it. I can tell you right now without ruining the ending that I did not nor have I ever drowned, but I can also tell you that it was a rocky start.

Deep-water swimming just wasn’t available in our neighborhood. Oh sure, we had a rather large lake not far from our house, but on the few times we packed up and went to the beach, my mother never let us wander out much beyond a few feet. Mom was not a big fan of water and probably put the safety of recreational swimming right up there with skydiving or volcano spelunking.

She had slipped into the muddy waters of the Genesee River when she was a young girl and almost drowned, which tainted her view of water for any purpose besides bathing or watering plants. I know she didn’t like taking showers because the feeling of water on her face triggered a deeply rooted PTSD.

But we were in the suburbs now, and the creeping affluence that came with it meant swimming, even for a non-boating, non-swimming pool owning family. My water-phobic mother eventually had to admit that having her children learn how to swim was probably a good skill to have, albeit one that we would never, ever have to use.

As I mentioned, we didn’t have a swimming pool. Nobody did. Backyard swimming pools at the dawn of the 1960s would have been an extravagance beyond compare, right up there with two cars and a garage to put them in. The most anybody had was an inflatable wading pool or perhaps one that rolled out, unfolded and held about twelve inches of water. We would squat in these things like ducks and when the excitement of that wore off, we’d make sad little whirlpools. Right after dinner, one of us would push down the edge and wait as the day’s fun washed over our feet and the pool was put away before it killed the grass.

All of this changed when one day without warning, the bar got raised. Just two doors down from our house, the Spring family was putting in a four-foot pool! In our neighborhood! A swimming pool! Our excitement rose with the water level, but sadly, it was only days after this neighborhood milestone when the pool unexpectedly and with great drama, exploded.

This is what happened. Mr. Spring, an inveterate do-it-yourselfer, had installed the curved vertical support arms on the pool backwards. The pressure was soon too much for the thin steel beams and when they collectively gave way, it sent a suburban tsunami of four thousand gallons of water surging in all directions. It was the talk of the neighborhood for years with events being chronicled either by the day Kennedy was assassinated or by the night the Spring pool burst at the seams.

The nearest swimming pool after the flood was in Greece Olympia High School where, for a dime, a kid could go to the afternoon open swim and enjoy a gigantic pool with a hundred other kids without fear of being washed away in a vinyl and galvanized steel tidal wave. I spent almost every summer afternoon there.

This pool was insanely huge as it was built for competitions, and had a twelve-foot deep end and a diving board. One dip into the cool, sanitized water and a kid would smell like chlorine for a week. They must have pumped in the chemicals by the tanker truck because we could start to feel our eyes burn the moment we opened the doors to the school.

Any visitor to our neighborhood who glanced at all the straw haired, bleached out, red-eyed kids running around would swear that this was the largest cluster of albinism in the world, but we were simply kids who knew that the best way to spend a dime was to soak in the chemically pure water at Greece Olympia.

This summertime fun was not without flaws. Cutting rudely across the pool somewhere around the middle was a thick sisal rope with floatation bulbs threaded over it and unless a kid was a certified deep-water swimmer, that rope may as well have been the Berlin Wall.

Even so, the water was four-feet deep at the rope, which was forehead high for most kids anyway, so we’d bounce on our tiptoes towards the rope, flirting with disaster or worse - the lifeguard’s whistle and expulsion from the pool.

Expulsion from the pool meant sitting on the tile benches for a few minutes and watching while everybody else had fun. It was the penalty box of open swim and when the whistle blew again and the lifeguard pointed at you, a quick walk (no running!) and a cannonball later, and we were back in heaven. By the time we left the pool for good, we looked like we were made out of corduroy.

This was great, but I was growing tired of swimming with the little kids and the old ladies with the tight rubber bathing caps and their flouncy patterned swimsuits. This simply would not do. I needed to legally cross that dividing line. I needed to swim with the big kids, dive for the rubber brick and oh my God, belly flop off that diving board. I wanted to hold my breath and see if I could swim underwater from one end to the other and back again. I was through with the baby end, but I had to persuade my mother to cough up the fee for swim classes and worse - to let me, no, encourage me, to swim in deep water. I had my speech carefully planned, but in hindsight, my sales pitch could have used a little work.

OK, Mom. Mom. Mom. If I learn how to swim in deep water, then I can … Mom. Mom. Mom … ride my bike to the lake and swim for free. We can save a bunch of dimes!!

*crickets*

The Lake was Lake Ontario, 7340 square miles of open water that went all the way over to Canada and down 802 feet. It tied into the Atlantic Ocean and off to Europe, and I wanted her permission to ride my bike twelve miles one way to go swim in it to save ten cents. I could see the tears welling up in her eyes, as her head was about to explode as she imagined me being dragged across the rocks by dolphins with a French accent.

I’m not going to pay to have you drown. You could have been killed when the Spring’s pool exploded you know.

OK, maybe that was a bad way to start but she eventually agreed and signed me up. The irony was that we could go to the open swim without an adult, but lessons had to have an adult in the bleachers. She would have to sit and watch this thing for however many weeks it took before I got my deep-water card. I may as well have asked her to watch me train lions.

So here I was.

With a little over a half dozen years under my elastic waistband, I was on the edge of manhood, waiting on the penalty bench with a group of kids who were probably able to sell this without bringing their mothers to tears.

Hey you, you’re up. Get over here, the clipboard guy shouted. I must not have heard him at first. I was too busy waving my hand crazily from side to side like a hyperkinetic metronome at my mom. I needed her full attention when I dove into the water like Johnny Weissmuller. Maybe I’d try a jackknife or perhaps a forward dive in a pike position. I had never done either, but it looked easy enough. Mom would see this natural excellence and realize that her fears were unfounded. She would probably contemplate an Olympic future for me. Meanwhile, I was already trying to figure out where to hang the gold medals and which cereal to endorse. Frosted Flakes, I think.

This is when it happened. In 1961, a kid learned how to swim in deep water one way and one way only - by being shoved into twelve feet of water by a hairy-handed guy in a Banlon shirt. BAM! Just like that, ass over teakettle into the water. Since I had the buoyancy of an oven, I immediately sank twelve feet straight down, eight of them over my head.

So this is what the deep end looks like? Pri-ty cool. I could actually feel the pressure as I looked around. It felt weird. Kind of an all around pressure at first, then more localized. Like poking. Not what I expected, but OK.

H-m-m-m-m. There it was again. Poke. Poke. Poke. What the heck? Then my arm caught the pole and I was yanked to the surface so fast my ears popped.

Cripes, are you OK, kid? Banlon man asked.

I was coughing a little but I turned and pumped my bony little arms in the air. Deep end! Deep end! Whoo-hoo! Meanwhile, my mother was very likely having a heart attack.

That was the first lesson and it had nothing at all to do with swimming. Conquer your fears. That’s the lesson, boy. Tomorrow, we’ll concentrate on how not to sink to the bottom and how to actually swim. We learned how to tread water too, which was awesome. They timed us, but I could have read a book flapping around in there.

It took a few weeks to get certified, but when I got my card, I was set. The card was just a formality because now my name went on the list and I was cleared to dive, jump, and hold my breath from one end to the other and back again.

"Are you on … the list? the dime lady would ask as I skated on the slippery tile out of the locker room. Why yes I am," I boasted. All that was missing was the velvet rope being parted while I passed through to the exclusive deep end.

My mom never forgot that first day though, the day she claimed I almost drowned. Tomato, tomahto, I always thought.

The years went by and as an adult, I went diving whenever we went someplace tropical. I told Mom about this once, and I could see her face blanch. I never told her again. Some memories just don’t need to be rehashed. In her mind, I was still that little kid who had to be dragged out of the water with a rescue pole. In my mind, I was just sightseeing on the bottom of the pool. Tomato, tomahto.

I thought about this the other day when it was excruciatingly hot. My wife and I used to have a pool at our old house with a deep end and a diving board. Our daughter grew up around water, had lessons and competed at a state level when she was a little girl. She was and is a good swimmer.

One lazy afternoon when Miss G. was a teenager, she and I were snorkeling together while on vacation, just having fun, looking at the pretty fish. The water was no more than twenty feet deep but suddenly dropped off a shelf to a few hundred feet straight down. I turned to point out some big fish and she wasn’t next to me. I turned again, and she wasn’t there either. I began to panic, which is not a good thing to do in hundreds of feet of ocean water. She was unintentionally turning when I turned so for just a few seconds, she was out of my line of vision.

For those brief seconds, I knew what my mom must have felt when I sank like a stone to the bottom of the deep end, and those were the longest seconds a parent can ever feel.

Epilogue

I did indeed ride my bike many times down to Lake Ontario, but one would have to go out fairly far to get into really deep water. Besides, Lake Ontario isn’t for swimming. It’s for splashing around and lying on the beach. It’s a big, dirty puddle with sand.

Our family never did get a backyard pool, but the Spring family replaced theirs shortly after #1 exploded and I was able to use that one once in a while. Eventually, a few of my friends got pools so there was always a steady supply of swimming available. These days, swimming pools dot every neighborhood so I can’t imagine a kid not being able to find someplace close to swim.

I’ve had my share of swimming in all sorts of places, and have seen some amazing things underwater, but the best memory I’ll ever have is rolling my bathing suit in a thin white towel, cramming it between the bars of my bike and riding to Greece Olympia High School for the ten cent open swim, and if I close my eyelids really hard, I think my eyes still burn a little.

Fits me to a T

M-m-m-m. M-m-m. M-m. This is good.

I love a piping hot cup of coffee first thing in the morning, another one around midday and one after dinner. We have one of those environmentally disastrous single cup brewers (sorry, Earth) that churns out a perfect cup of 192º coffee whenever I want one in less than forty-five seconds. I’m sipping a cup now and when this one is gone, I may just have another one.

The health benefits of coffee have swayed with the whims of culture for decades, but it’s back in vogue again as a healthful beverage. For a while though, people were encouraged to cut back or eliminate coffee altogether and drink something more beneficial. We were encouraged to drink tea.

I, in spite of being health conscious, opposed this from the standpoint that tea is an astringent and it makes my tongue feel like I just drank a cup of chalk dust. By the time I finished adding enough sugar and milk to the tea to make it palatable, it had all the health benefits of a Twinkie smoothie.

That’s not even the worst of it. There’s a whole ceremony that goes with tea preparation and tea purists will sniff at people who don’t appreciate this.

First, you have to unfurl the teabag and place it in the cup so that the little string thingie and the tag doesn’t go into the cup when the hot water goes in. Mine always does that, giving me a cup of tea that tastes like chalk dust, kite string and staples.

My wife solved this issue by getting some fancy pyramid shaped tea bags that have a stiff string attached to a little paper leaf. The square base lets the bag sit on the bottom of the cup and the leaf provides a nifty handle to grab when it’s time to take the thing out. ta-DA! Problem solved. The tea goes commando inside of a stiff pyramidal mesh bag and comes in flavors like pear infused ginger Chablis or nutmeg African rooibos with seductive merlot truffle. I tried a cup and while it was tasty, I could feel myself yearning to bear a child and read Fifty Shades of Grey in a bubble bath.

As good as those may be, here is where the controversy begins. Tea purists frown upon bags, even fancy bags, and insist that loose tea is the only way to properly brew tea.

Loose tea has to be put in a tea ball or spooned into a tea sieve, where water can then be poured over it. Never dunk your tea into hot water, they say. You may as well steep it in the toilet because - oh my - it will ruin the flavor if the tea isn’t shocked by the sudden downpour of water. If you could see my face right now, it would look incredulous at this notion of unwavering tea preparation.

The water process is baffling too. Each type of tea - and there are as many varieties of tea as there are stars in the Milky Way - needs its own unique water temperature. I always figured the water was the right temperature when the steam from the kettle started to warp the lumber in the house, but this is not so.

Oolong tea needs water at precisely 190ºF, while green tea likes it at 150ºF and white tea needs a stubborn 180ºF. If you don’t have a water thermometer, don’t worry. According to a snooty tea website, You can tell the water temperature by watching the bubbles. Small bubbles will float to the surface of the water when water is around 160ºF-170ºF. You'll see strings of bubbles from the bottom of the kettle at 180ºF-190º F. After that, you'll have a full rolling boil.

OK, so now I’m expected to somehow peer down the tiny teakettle blowhole and count bubbles. I tried that, thinking that I could kill two birds with one stone and get the right water temperature plus steam out the wrinkles from around my eyes. This did not work.

Then there’s the whole steeping issue. Too short and you deprive the tea of reaching its full flavor potential. Too long and you ruin the flavor completely. I could have had a dozen perfect cups of coffee by now. Who has time for this nonsense? No wonder the British always look annoyed. They ARE annoyed.

Well-meaning folks like Dr. Oz tell us that tea, especially green tea, is loaded with antioxidants and that it fights cancer, lowers cholesterol, burns fat, prevents diabetes, prevents strokes, prevents dementia, rotates your car tires, does your taxes and folds your laundry. It’s a miracle beverage.

It also tastes like somebody scraped off the underside of a lawnmower and soaked the grassy clots in tepid water. Nobody wants to admit that, though. I know green tea is probably good for me, but I just can’t get past the taste. I drink it begrudgingly.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) there is a huge variety in tea world.

We’ll go through tea kicks in our household, and our cupboard reflects those whims. There are at least ten boxes of teas in various colors, each one claiming to be some sort of magical potion and each box more than half full.

Besides the aforementioned green tea benefits, we have teas that promise to coat throats, ease cramping, ease hot flashes, prevent colds and make colds feel better if you have one already. We have teas that make you sleepy and teas that energize you. We have zingers, both red and lemon. We can soothe stomachs, smooth moves and support the female system. I’ve always wanted to combine all of these just to see what would happen because I think that’s how Superman got his powers.

I will admit that I have had some tea that I really like. I like the tea they serve in Chinese restaurants that I drink out of those tiny handle-less cups. That’s good. I can also tolerate something called gunpowder green. If asked, I would say it wasn’t awful but that’s hardly a glowing review.

Once though, once, I did have a really, really good tea.

Mrs. G. and I were in the mall, where they have a specialty store that sells hand mixed varieties of tea and tea related knick-knacks. They always have a sample vessel out front with little tiny cups, so my wife poured herself some tea. Rick, you have to try this! she said.

No. It’s tea. Let me guess - it’s fruity.

Yes it is, but really, you have to try it.

So I did. Not bad. Actually, it’s quite good, I said.

I’m going to get some, she said enthusiastically.

So she