When is the last time you had fun?

First outdoor swim of the year at the sweet little pool where I love swimming the most, YMCA at Crosstown Concourse, Memphis.

If you had told me I’d willingly take a photo of myself in a bathing suit for publication at ANY AGE, forget about this one, I’d have told you that you were nuts.

But I’m close to finishing up swimming five miles in a month as part of the American Cancer Society’s Swim 5 Miles in May, and does any accomplishment actually count these days if there’s not a picture to prove it happened?

Seriously, though, I’ve surprised myself with how much I’m enjoying this return to the water, for all kinds of reasons that would never have occurred to me back in the days when I was a teenage lifeguard, sitting on a tall chair in my Speedo, twirling my whistle, watching the kids in the water and hoping the cute guard in the next chair would ask me out again for Saturday night.

Being a lifeguard was my first real job. The pool where I worked at the employees’ park of the National Cash Register Corporation, then a foundational employer in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio.

Old River Park was a sprawling, leafy oasis that had canoeing, mini-golf, movies on a big screen in the grove on weekends and an incredible pool that was over an acre of water — it took 10 guards to open it. The picture below must have been taken in the 50s, but this is pretty much how I remember it, especially on busy holiday weekends.

NCR’s Old River Park swimming pool, circa 1950s.

I was one of the first girls the curmudgeonly NCR guy who ran the park ever hired. It was clear during my interview that he didn’t think I could do the job.

Turns out he was wrong: I made several saves a week during the two summers I worked there and learned how to get myself (on my bike, no less) to work at 8:30 on a Saturday morning to clean the bathhouse and grass area with the other guards before the pool opened at noon. To this day I think that picking dozens of cigarette butts out of the grass with my fingers — part of our opening routine — turned me off smoking for life.

But it was the swimming that I loved the most. I generally swam laps before my lifeguarding shift, but I had always loved the freedom that came with being in the water. The dazzle of the sun on the bottom of the pool, the soothing splash of the water in my ears, feeling my body slice through the water — it was the best.

I grew up middle class in the Midwest, in an era when community pools were the only way most of us ever got to go swimming. On sunny days in the summer, my mom dropped my little sister and me off at the Kettering pool with our beach towels and five dollars between us; she didn’t come to pick us up until at least six hours later. We played together, we played apart, we jumped off the high dive, we challenged each other to go down the super-tall slide. We negotiated pieces of taffy in exchange for licks of the other’s soft-serve cone. Sometimes we fought. Sometimes we were bored. But mostly those long, chlorinated days were glorious.

All those swimming memories came flooding back as I began to get the hang of lap swimming again this month, though I admit that it took me a little while. I’ve never been particularly fast or technically sound, and swimming at pace for more than a few lengths is a tough aerobic workout. But gradually I remembered that no one cares how fast I go swim, and I relaxed into that hypnotic routine.

I remembered what I loved as a kid — the quiet of being inside my own head, no talking allowed, as long as I’m in the pool. The relaxing swoosh of the water. The pleasant ache of my arms and shoulders after a workout.

I remembered that swimming is fun. And having fun is definitely NOT overrated. Especially these days.

Maybe I can swim 10 miles in June.

Join me?