How Slow Is Slow?

Come in, the water's fine

I’m 29 and seven months pregnant in what has to be the hottest summer I’ve ever spent in New York City: 1988. Someone recommended swimming as the perfect pregnant lady form of exercise, so I head to the YMHA on 14th Street and Second Avenue to use the pool. The lanes are crowded with senior citizens, everyone trying to maintain a discreet distance of three feet ahead and behind the other swimmers. “You want I should carry you on my back?” the lady in front of me asks when I screw up and get too close. I realize this lane stuff is serious business. It’s not exactly relaxing there in the pool, but the feeling of weightlessness is a miracle.

Seven months pregnant, August 1988 - my bandmate in the Shams Amanda Uprichard made me the suit

*

I’m 36, and me and my husband and seven year old daughter live in Williamsburg Brooklyn. Through our daughter attending preschool at the Greenpoint Y, I discover the fitness classes upstairs, the tiny pool and sauna in the basement.I join the Y and take step classes. In the basement I use the sauna with the older Polish ladies, admiring their brazenness sitting on the wooden benches naked. I hope I can feel that free someday. Sometimes I swim, the pool so small it takes three breaststrokes to complete one length. My husband and I are splitting up. As I breathe in and out, with my face in the water I scream and I cry.

*

I’m 38, living with my daughter in the same apartment in Williamsburg. I’ve discovered the metropolitan pool, around the corner at Metropolitan. It costs a dollar or less to swim. It’s a nostalgic old structure. Wednesday morning is ladies only, so the local Orthodox women can use the pool free of men. Sheets are hung up around the balcony and windows for privacy. They let heathen women in too. As I swim my laps, the Orthodox women float by in colored house dresses, like big jellyfish. They cover their scalps with old-fashioned rubber bathing caps. “You’re dirty,” one of them hisses at me as she swims past.

*

2002 and I’m living in Nashville. For a few years, I have a publishing deal- my actual job is writing songs. My daughter’s in school during the days and once or twice a week I drive to the magnificent YMCA just past the Vanderbilt University football stadium to use the mega-sized pool, sauna and steam room. If I time it right, I’m the only person in the gleaming water. As I swim back and forth, I feel powerful. Outside, in the real world of Nashville, I feel puny— always measuring myself against this person and that one. Sure I have a publishing deal but will anyone ever cut one of my songs? Sure I just toured the UK but some of the shows were pretty sparsely attended. Here in the water, I’m just a strong, living creature, and nothing matters but breathing, and making it to the other side.

*

Chicago, Louisville, Los Angeles; Reno, Austin, Cherry Hill New Jersey. I stay in hotels with pools when possible when I’m out touring. I feel like I play better on the nights when I’ve managed to swim for 20 minutes. I check out as late as possible after I’ve rinsed off, fixed my hair, even put on makeup hours before the show, and drive to the next city with a wet bathing suit over the backseat of the car.

*

Valencia; Worthing; Katowice, Dresden. Kansas City, Sacramento. Eric and I are touring together. I creep out of our hotel room in the morning and take advantage of any hotel pool. Then when I eat a second stroopwaffel or sausage I don’t feel too guilty. “You have a secret life in the morning,” Eric says. while the front desk calls to ask if we plan on checking out today.

*

Extended Stay Suites, Mt. Lebanon PA. I’m in a hotel room looking out over the cemetery I used to cut through on my way home from high school. We used to sit amongst the headstones there, smoking cigarettes. It’s peak Covid time, December 2020. My 93 year old dad’s wife just died, and he’s down the street, alone in the apartment they shared. My stepmother was allowed ten people at her funeral, the rest watched a livestream. I had to find a doctor to give me a Covid test to cross state line from New York into Pennsylvania, and the only test I was able to find came with the purchase of a case of wine at City Winery in Manhattan. I know I’ll drink the wine. Here in the South Hills of Pittsburgh, the hotel is eerily deserted. The lobby is dark and breakfast is a paper bag with a pastry and an apple. The swimming pool is shut.

*

My old friend and bandmate Sue and her niece and grandnieces have come up to the Hudson Valley for the day. It’s August, hot and muggy. After trying unsuccessfully to find a secret swimming hole in West Saugerties, we drive up into the mountains to the State Park where there’s a beach and you can swim in North South Lake. The attendant at the gate to the park says, sorry the beach and lake are closed to swimmers today - they’re short-staffed and there’s no one to work the lifeguard seat. “But it’s August!” we cry. We promise her we’ll be very careful, but she shakes her head.

We head out of there and drive to the swimming hole in Leeds. It’s a hike from the parking lot and the rocks are slippery and dangerous - you need to practically crawl on your belly across them to get in the water without wiping out. But once you reach the deep part, it’s bliss, a perfect massive rock pool surrounded by trees, tall pines towering up into a bright blue sky. “Can you believe something so perfect is free?” I ask.

The next year a local tells me there’s sometimes raw sewage in the water at the swimming hole and that it’s a no go area. I think they just say this because they don’t want all the traffic descending on this perfect spot. If I had the chance I’d go in again.

*

Since Nashville I haven’t lived anywhere near a pool. But our new town in England has a leisure center, one of those classic British ones accessible to all. Everything happens on the fitness app first—that’s where you sign up, see the schedule, pay to join or for single use (or you can just go in in person). I’ve wanted to try it out since we arrived over a month ago but got so busy and then suffered through a vile cold for two weeks. Finally, yesterday morning I felt well enough to go. I walked through the market part of the town and it was sweet seeing everyone going about their business, shopping, kids in school uniforms. I’d signed up for the slow lane on the app, not knowing what I was getting into. How slow is slow in North Walsham?

I felt like a child on the first day at a new school. How do they do things here? Will I stand out too much? Will anyone become a friend? I hoped they hadn’t heard Bricks, a track from my new album, where the character says “we’ve all peed in the pool.” Artistic license, I wasn’t talking about myself, personally— I promise!

A pretty young woman with perfect eyelashes and brows checked me in and talked me through things. “You’re all set now my angel,” she said and I thought how sweet to be called an angel by an angel. I got myself together to go in the water. The dressing room/shower area was co-ed. The lifeguard looked about twelve.

The slow lane had a collection of grey-haired ladies and a gentleman with a strawberry blonde mustache. I wished my bathing suit wasn’t bright red. I felt like a giant Trump hat— like everyone knew I was the new American in town; other. Most of the people had swim goggles on, I doubt they could see anything at all, but that’s just the kind of self-conscious I am. I eyed the medium lane and wished I’d booked for that one but didn’t want to upset things as they cap the number of swimmers per lane, so I descended the ladder into the lane with the older ladies. The water felt delightful, the perfect temperature. Things got clogged up in corners of the slow lane with ladies using it as catch up time, stopping to chat here and there. I asked a woman coming up behind me “are we allowed to pass the person in front of us?” thinking all the way back to the lady in the YMHA pool when I was pregnant. This woman looked a little like Vanessa Redgrave. “Go for it!” she said.

*

Here’s where I’ll be after I’ve gotten in great shape in the next two weeks:

Click image for ticket links/more info on the gigs