HAMILTON FISH

I didn’t really need to swim but on occasion I’m quite immature about being left out of the fun, and particularly things that have to do with water. So since Cara had decided to make the trip to the lower East side to the Hamilton Fish Pool after work, I made a point of meeting her even though I felt a bit ill with some kind of stupid sore throat thing. We had tried to come here on Monday, but discovered on our arrival an arbitrary decision had been made to cancel lap swim when the temp was over 90 so the KIDZ can cool off. Whatever. It was about ten degrees cooler today.

Swimming here is free, but on arrival at the park we had to sign up for swim cards before we could change, and for women there was a locker room, but for men, because they’re subhuman or something had to change near the outdoor lockers or in a bathroom on the other side of the community building near the pool. Feeling ill makes me pissy and I hemmed and hawed about figuring out how to change which really wasn’t that big a deal once I came to my senses and realized I’d feel about a thousand percent better once I swam.

Divided up into three giant lanes of slow, medium and fast, swimmers do circles around the painted lines at the bottom of the pool, which had more hair monsters floating down there than bath tub after you give a bathe a dog. People stayed orderly and it was the first time I’d been in 50m outside since last summer. And as expected, I felt much much better.