Culling the Past

           As private eye Carlotta Carlyle, in Linda Barnes' A Trouble of Fools, pokes through a crime scene of vandalization created by the bad guys and already tossed by the police, she comments,

          The day after I covered by first homicide as a cop, I went home and scoured my bedroom. Threw out all that embarrassing junk Id hoarded, marveling at the bizarre items I'd thoughtlessly shoved into the bottom drawer…. 

          If the cops come and toss my room tomorrow, they won't find much of a personal nature.

Hm, I thought. Not bad advice.

            Moving twice in three years proved the type of exercise Carlotta advises. I hired a dumpster for the first move, the one from our family home. Between a huge workshop and a cottage, we had way too much storage space, and apparently we had discarded nothing in fourteen years. In addition to the unsalvageables that went into the dumpster, I gave furniture away and threw out diaries and piles of school papers. My new house, my solo house, as the boys were both away at college and no longer came home except to visit, had a small attic that I swore I would not fill. I was saved even from the possibility when the AC/heating unit was installed in that space, completely filling it up.

            The morning after my first night in my new home, I drove maniacally back to the family home to get there before the trash collector and pulled all the bags of school papers out of the garbage can. My diaries from grade school and high school could go, but my boys' school papers? I sat straddle-legged on the back deck surrounded by black plastic garbage bags, sobbing as I went through each drawing, story, report, and essay. With great grit and discrimination, I selected a representative few to save for each boy, which remain to this day in files labeled with their names.

            There were other things I hung on to through two moves as well, apparently thinking they would eventually reveal to me my true nature or destiny or stupidity or missed chances. It seems every fall or so I look back through the mementos—diaries, a model of a yellow Stingray from a high school boyfriend, swimming medals, letters, pictures—and experience a tad of self-pitying melancholy. When I read P.I. Carlotta's comment, the light bulb flared to life—it was incandescent, not florescent—and I recalled that among those little saved supposed parts of myself were some items I really, really did not want anyone else ever to contemplate. I don't want my teen and young adult angst and deeds spread across the headlines like Obama's and Romney's. Okay, maybe what we do, think, and feel in high school and college sheds some light on our future behavior and attitudes, but as Joel Stein writes in "The Awesome Column" in Time for May 28, 2012, "I wish I could go back in time and change the way creepy young me behaved." Sure, my kids are more likely to dump my diaries and old letters in the trash when I die, like I confess we did my mom's tens of notebooks, but just in case....

            So I hunted down those items, discovering a few others choice remembrances along the way, and fed them all to the shredder. But my hunt through my past also turned up some things I should have preserved and will still keep. For instance, how many of you women collegiate athletes out there competed pre-Title IX?

            I found an article my dad had saved from my college newspaper. Sports were not exactly a priority at my small, private, liberal arts college. I know this because I was a song girl, and the band was more interested in changing the tempo while we danced to make us look like fools than in whether the football team scored a touchdown. As a Division III school, I don't think there were or are any athletic scholarships. People went to the school for the academics or the Friday kegs in the wash or the hiking and skiing in the mountains west of LA or the proximity to Southern California beaches or late night trips to one of the original In-n-Outs in nearby Azusa or early morning doughnuts from the bakery in Claremont to sustain an all-nighter. If they played sports, it was more or less for fun.

            I joined the women's swim team because I wanted to swim in the same water as former Olympians. Growing up, I really, really wanted to be an Olympic swimmer, or at least to qualify for Nationals. I remember going to the Olympic swimming trials in Detroit, although I don't remember any races or swimmers, just that we sat on green bleachers and we were there. I volunteered at the Short Course Nationals when they were held in the new, state-of-the-art Trees Pool swim complex at the University of Pittsburgh. I always wondered if we'd stayed in California and I'd swum for George Haines at Santa Clara Swim Club if I would have achieved my goal. 

           When we returned to Pennsylvania, my dad was my first coach—he started a local girls' swim team because there wasn't one. After a year or so, my parents started driving my sister and me twenty miles to Mt. Lebanon every day so we could be on a real team. When my sister got her license, we drove ourselves. When my sister went away to college, my parents and I began driving an hour round-trip, twice a day, so I could swim in Oakland, next to Pittsburgh, for the best coach in the area. My dad took me in the morning before work and school, and at night I came home with my mom, who by then was working on her PhD in Library Science at Pitt, her school located conveniently up the street from the YM&WHA. My dad loved to ask the waitress, who happened to be a large, jovial black woman, at the on-site cafe for bacon, to which she'd always respond, "Honey, do you know where you are?" The "H" stands for Hebrew, but we swimmers were a mixture of Gentiles, Jews, and who knows, maybe even Muslims and atheists.

            One night, the fall of my senior year of high school, I climbed out of the pool mid-workout in utter frustration and said I quit. My coach said think about it for a week. My parents said it's up to you. I'd made it to Eastern Regionals in Lancaster that summer, a qualifier for Nationals, but my times were miserable. It seemed I always reached last year's qualifying times for Nationals this year. Sometimes I wonder if I'd been pushed at that point if it would have made a difference. But who wants to push a seventeen-year-old who's made up her mind and who frequently reminds her parents what a bum rap it is to be the youngest and left all alone at home with two parents?

            So the newspaper article is titled "Girls' Swim Team Wails." Pretty impressive title, isn't it? Rereading it, I smiled, and my chest puffed up a little, as I learned that I actually did better in collegiate swimming than I'd remembered! What I recalled was working out rarely and not very hard and going to swim meets. I was more likely to climb over the cinderblock wall of the pool on weekends, when the gate was locked, to "study," sunbathe, nap, and hope some guy would notice me than I was to go to swim practice. Apparently, it was a training regimen that worked well enough.

            I also remember returning from a meet at Stanford and stopping at the Madonna Inn to use the restrooms. For those of you who haven't visited this landmark on California Highway 101, it is hot pink, inside and out. There is nothing that is not hot pink. I've always been partial to pink and green, but Madonna's pink against California's golden hills does not quite cut it. The next highlight was that a Swedish teammate ordered chicken wings for dinner, which I thought was totally weird. I've grown up since then, and now I get it. I also remember we had to stop for my sister to use the restroom about five minutes from campus—she just couldn't make it that last five miles. Oh yea, and I remember my sister hanging out during the meet with her then beau, who attended Stanford and had been a childhood friend back in Pennsylvania—bizarre. I have no recollection of how I or anyone did in the meet.

            So I smiled when I read this in the article:

            The Pomona Women's Swim Team [note how we went from girls in the title to women in the article—talk about a quick maturation] ended their regular season with an impressive showing—including a meet record—at the Southern California Championship Meet at San Fernando State College, last Saturday, May 10.

            The relay team of Becca Harper [my sister], Marilyn Harper, Virginia Miller and Marilyn Walkey set a new standard in the 100 yard freestyle relay...and later in the meet took a first place in the 100 yard medley relay.

            Marilyn Harper and Marilyn Walkey, both freshmen, also gave outstanding performances in individual events—both girls finishing second to former Olympic swimmers. Marilyn Harper finished close behind Cathy Ferguson Cullen, swimming for Long Beach in the 100 yard backstroke.…

            …Becca Harper swam to a fourth in the 100 yard breastroke to round out Pomona's scoring in the A division, which was won by UCLA, with Long Beach State runner-up, Cal Poly and UC Santa Barbara tied for third…followed by Pomona…ahead of six other schools.

Not bad for a D-III women's team pre-Title IX! I must digress to say, also, that I knew three other Marilyns in college, one of whom was Hispanic. I can't speak for the other mothers, but my mom swore Marilyn Monroe had nothing to do with it, and it's true that although the film industry started to notice her in 1950, she didn't hit the big time until 1953. At least we know we weren't named for Marilyn Manson.

            So, this is odd. After reading that article I'd rediscovered while culling my personal files for dangerous items that should be snuffed out, I feel completely at peace with never making it to the United States National Swimming Championships. For a long time, off and on, I've thought that I lost my get-up-and-go when I climbed out of that six-lane indoor pool with a low ceiling that I lived in for one-eighth of just about every day for three years. My competitive streak may have caused me to forget that I didn't just swim with the 100-meter backstroke champion of the 1964 Olympics, but I placed second to her, because placing anything but first rarely counted. But my forty-four-year-older self thinks, I wasn't even a backstroker before college, and I still placed second to an Olympic Champion! That's not too shabby! And I did it while not killing myself trying to see, as a high school friend used to say, how fast I could get back to where I started. Of course, I'd have to assume my competitors weren't training especially hard, either—the article doesn't publish our times.

            As a child, I had other dreams, too: I wanted to be a dancer, and I wanted to own a horse. I always made friends with the girls who owned horses, and after one taste of chasséeing across my friend's long wooden bedroom floor in her ballet slippers, I was in princess land. Quitting swimming left time for other things my last semester of high school, like modern dance and softball. The latter I played only to get a sports letter, since the PE teacher denied my sister and me that for swimming, never mind that as a two-woman team we placed fifth for our school in the first-ever Pittsburgh area high school girls' swimming meet. I accepted my letter with glee, as nearly the entire season had been rained out, and thus I hadn't had to prove myself in softball, for which I definitely had no gift.

            Along with the article about my college swimming prowess, my files contain dance pictures and programs. I took my first ballet class when I was an old twenty-six. Then, seemingly miraculously, I was offered a full-time job teaching dance. For five years, I taught, took classes, choreographed, danced en pointe, and lived a little girl's dream, and I was involved in the local dance world for another five or so years.

            Maybe I would still have taken up dance if I'd kept swimming. Maybe not. But I don't think I'll feel the occasional regrets and what-ifs about swimming anymore. Intellectually I know that every path we take, for whatever reason, provides a new set of innumerable possibilities in life. I'm also told I'm a champion at intellectualizing my feelings to conform them to reality, which often doesn't work out so well. I don't think my life will change now that I've come to terms emotionally with having given up on my swimming dreams. But that nice little sigh of relief somewhere inside and the smile I feel thinking I didn't just get wet with Olympians, I placed second to a gold-medal winner! sure feel good.

            Silly? Sure. We humans are nothing if not silly.

            Thanks for saving the article, Dad.