Not Waving, Drowning

When, I wonder, will I ever be free of the mental image of my three-year-old floundering and thrashing under water while his swimming teacher had her back turned? He's fine, praise Whomever, but a bit shaken up and not too keen on resuming his lessons on Tuesday. People in my family have lots of near-death experiences: my father alone has had at least eleven close calls--none of which happened while he was on an Atlantic minesweeper during WWII. That, in fact, seems to have been the most uneventful period of his entire life. Things that happened to him: near drowning in a Saskatchewan slough; prop-plane engine fire over Winnipeg; crazed business partner trying to drive the car off a bridge as dad was driving him to be committed; hobo-related train horrors of more than one stripe; even--and this is really no lie--even an enraged Chinese grocer with a large knife who had had enough of the boyish pranks of dad's gang of ten-year-old urchins. There are more. Mom has a small rock embedded in her forehead from when she dove into the St Lawrence and struck bottom some 65 years ago. She lost 78% of her blood in a bizarre something-scopy gone horridly wrong. One sister skidded at high speed through a highway intersection in the winter whilst 5 months pregnant. I survived two earthquakes, the Rodney King riots, a tsunami off Hawaii in which I was swimming with my younger sister, a tow-rope looping aorund my ankle and dragging me under water for a bit, an insane elderly man behind the wheel of a van who did not stop at a red light and an IRA bomb at Victoria Station. So I guess Lief comes by it honestly, and we do seem to be a hearty bunch despite everything. I'm still not going to take my eyes off him for another ten or eleven years.