In better news, I had to write a fiction scene (aka not real aka something I suck at) for my creative writing class, and at the end my teacher called me out for totally being an essayist. It's true. I cheated. After tomorrow night at 7 p.m., my life will be virtually complete (a couple of notable exceptions there, but I'm working on it).
So I give you Leah's Pet Shark. Oh, and the photo that inspired it.
I’m in charge of watching Leah today. It’s not my actual job. I don’t make any money. I’m not going to get any references out of it. There won’t be any real benefit to doing this. But it’s my job, regardless. Leah’s two, maybe three, and she has this crazy blonde hair – crazy not because it’s long, but because it looks like the perfect straw color. It’s short, and if you didn’t know better, you’d probably think she was a boy, but then she smiles her fang-like grin that lights her face in that girl sort of way. She’s so tiny. I really have no way to decipher just how old she is from her size. She’s tall, but she’s skinny, and her features are as delicate as they were when she was born. Well. Maybe her head’s a little smaller. This family has big heads. But she’s old enough to swim and she’s young enough to swim during the day in early September when everyone else is in school.
The phrase Indian Summer seems so racist, I hesitate saying it out loud, but I think that’s what you would call today’s weather. Warm enough to swim at that point in the calendar year when the pool water should be unbearably cold. So baby Leah (because how could I see her as anything else) runs into the house, throws on her frilly, pink bikini (because that’s the right sort of image to give her at this age), and grabs her blue and pink flotation device. Leah has a big sister, Hannah, and Hannah is a wuss. Leah is therefore a wuss. Hannah’s scared of her own shadow, which leaves Leah scared of Hannah’s shadow, and her own.
If only she could carry her flotation device with her everywhere.
There’s nothing else for me to do but sit at the side of the pool and watch her float around in the clear, saline solution water. Sometimes she steps up to the side of the pool, prepared to leap in. Sometimes she wades in through the stairs. Today must be a bold day because she jumps and creates almost no splash at all as she lands in the three feet of water, hindered by that flotation. She fights against the water, moving centimeters at a time as she paddles along in that little circular floatie. I’m not a photographer, and I don’t take great videos, but I love pointing my point-and-shoot at her, capturing her babble. Something about a shark? She and a shark are becoming friends? Oh, the pool cleaner is the shark. Yes, that makes sense. Leah goes close to the shark and splashes some water in its general direction, and then quickly turns around to swim back. “Quickly” being a loose interpretation. But this must be a senior citizen of a shark because she paddles along and along and finally, after days of paddling, comes to the side of the pool I’m sitting upon and yells loud enough for my camera, “I made it!”
When I ask her about the shark, she says that the shark reassured her he wouldn’t eat her, and she makes her way back out to the middle of the pool to rendezvous with her new shark friend. She had given me an indication that she might physically assault the shark on this trip, and I see her foot move all blurry-like through the water. On her return trip, she takes her sweet time and I discover that in exchange for her poking him (“I’ma poke him!”), he’ll just sit down there at the bottom of the pool sucking up leaves and water bugs, enduring her poking. What a good shark for Leah to play with. Then she pushes off the side and shows me her new trick, which involves almost floating on her back – that floatie gets in the way. And as she floats there, her arms outstretched behind her head, her feet almost breaking the surface of the water, I capture a photo of her blissful moment in that September sunshine, and I capture a glimpse of what I used to feel like.
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