Pool_1

of a thick hickory shovel handle, looking like an exploded putting iron that had been vented on a tree. The iron scoop must have come down on that rat with the force of planets colliding." "Ooooh. Yuk. Goosh?" "But.. the rat looked up at me, shook his head, shook his shoulders, and just kept right on coming, step step step.. ohhhhhh shit!" Fred yelled from the deep end, "Frank, you telling that rat story?" Marcus was nearly drowning with laughter, slapping the water, rolling in fits. It was just beginning to get dark. All the way home in the car, "BAM!" and laughter that made driving hard, "BAM!" that rat's face, "BAM!" The number of pull-outs each hour at the start of the season by this time typically numbered about fifteen. This settled down to about five as the weeks went on. There were about as many drownings - as they were called by the kids - in the shallow end as in the deep, although nobody was ever actually lost. This was a sobering fact that also lent additional tolerance to the presence of these life savers, the kids called them life savers, not guards. Such language was interesting, as later conversation revealed. These kids had no future tense in their general conversation. A guard is a hedge against what might happen, a future concept. A saver is the one who has actually already saved. Future events or ideas were expressed in past tense language. It may just have been idiom, but it did fit their circumstances. Promises did not exist here, just past indebtedness. You could not borrow, but you could owe. Life guards worked half hour shifts of extreme vigilance, with Fred's very carefully choreographed contingency plans for multiple drowning situations getting real practice