The Family that Swims Together

Essay 1. THE FAMILY THAT SWIMS TOGETHER

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

I am a Tondo Boy through and through. It is my father, Edmundo, who is a full-blooded Cebuano. My mother Regina, who grew up in La Loma, is Tagalog.

During the mid 1960s, when my father was just into a few years of working overseas as a seaman, he suggested to my mother that we relocate to Oslob, Cebu. My mother apparently vetoed the idea; and we siblings went along with her, not only because we were only minors then, but also because we already led a comfortable life in Tondo.

I was only a year old when my parents took me and my older sister to Oslob for a visit. It was only in 1981, when I was already 24, that I returned there. What I saw impressed me for I have always loved the sea. There is no sea near Metro Manila that would equal the pristine quality of the sea of Oslob 

Beginning 1987, I and my wife Carina, and our two kids, Bahgee and Kai, went to Oslob whenever my father was home from his trips abroad and brought us along with him for a vacation. Since our house there is only about a hundred meters away from the beach, our visits there were always bliss for us. My kids also learned to love the sea. They became good swimmers, having learned the rudiments of swimming from me way back when they were in grade school.

They were lucky. I was a diligent swimming tutor. My father never taught me how to swim. But I truly love the sea that I persisted in going on sea outings with my childhood friends, mostly at the breakwater just off the Manila North Harbor, where I almost drowned on two occasions during the mid-1970s. I almost  drowned again in 1988, in Oslob, while snorkeling with my compadre Rolly San Mateo. Rolly saved me by tapping my elbow upwards from to time to time until my feet found a tall rock on which to stand.

After that near-mishap in Oslob , I seriously tried to learn what the lifeguards called scientific swimming. I hanged out at swimming pools to watch and get tips from the truly adept swimmers like the lifeguards and other swimming.instructors. I even enrolled in a one-hour butterfly-stroke course with Mang Pons, a lifeguard in Malabon. From then on, to show off, I always make it a point to do butterfly whenever I was at the swimming pool, which was often.

That was in the late 1980s up to the 1990s, when I still had a trimmed body with no excess fat whatsoever. But my body deteriorated. I grew a belly. Gradually, I find swimming more of a chore. That's why today I always use fins when swimming---to offset the drag caused by my belly, and to make me look the same efficient swimmer I was before.

My near-drowning experiences pushed me to thoroughly teach my sons how to swim. Swimming pools were our haunts when they were in grade school. We held our swimming classes in the swimming pools of the  Rizal Memorial Coliseum,  the Pope Pius XII Center, the Tondo Sports Complex, the Palaisdaan Resort in Malabon, the Sarreal and Abad Resorts in Imus, the Student Canteen in Quiapo, and the so-called 'Kaharian' in Caloocan, which is owned by the family of my former UE Fine Arts classmate and compadre Arnel Dolatre.

The swimming stroke I taught my sons---and also their playmates incidentally---is American crawl. The American crawl is popularly called freestyle, because that is the name of the swimming event where that stroke is used. Actually, swimmers competing in the freestyle event are free to use any stroke they like, but since the American crawl is the fastest and most efficient swimming stroke, all swimmers uniformly use that when competing in the said event.

Today, my sons are better freestyle swimmers than me. They slice through the water more neatly, executing their arm and leg strokes with lesser extraneous or unnecessary moves. But they still can't do that most dashing of swimming strokes---the butterfly. Not my fault. I didn't taught them the 'fly' because they have shown no interest in learning it anyway.