My Take
Therapy for body & spirit
LINDA DENICOLA
There is an alternate world taking place most weekday mornings within the walls of the YMCA in Red Bank. It is a warm moist place that smells strongly of chlorine, and is filled with older folks who are having fun exercising, some in the warm therapeutic pool and others in the colder Olympic-size pool.

Linda DeNicola is a former staff writer for Greater Media Newspapers.

They are stretching out stiff limbs while focusing on balance during ai chi (water tai chi), and loosening up joints in a class for people with "Arthur It is," as my sister called arthritis when she was a child. Many of us, I'm one of them now, also take a half-hour or hourlong water aerobics class where we use foam dumbbells and noodles for added resistance.

A friend, who is going through chemotherapy, said to me that she loved going into the pool because it is impossible to feel sick in water. I tend to agree.

There is a bonus I didn't count on - I have met many friendly and interesting "pool people" who have always made room for me even though some classes get crowded.

One morning while sitting in the whirlpool waiting for a class to start, I saw a face that looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn't until she spoke that it hit me - she was someone I knew 35 years ago when we were both young mothers living in Matawan; I with four small children under 10 and she with two towheaded boys under 5.

She moved to Rumson 34 years ago and after a couple of years I moved to Highland Park and we lost touch with each other. I thought of her often over the years because she was one of the sweetest people that I'd ever met. And she still has deep dimples to attest to her kind nature.

Joan and I sat in the pool talking right through one class and then continued talking in an aerobics class. Seeing her again was an affirmation for me, and for the rest of that day I walked around with my head in the early 1970s, a time when I was busily, and for the most part happily, the center of a large, messy young family.

As most older people will attest, after the age of about 50 or so, you feel as though you are on a rocket ship to oblivion, and if you have high arches like me, and you have been a hiker and walker, your arches begin to fall and you develop foot pain. Since I can't walk very far right now, exercising in the pool has become a lifesaver.

For the first couple of weeks, I stayed in the therapeutic pool, taking the wonderful classes for older adults and doing my own routine in the warm therapeutic pool, but finally I saw an empty lane in the big pool and carefully walked down the steps into the colder water with my goggles around my neck.

One of the joys in my life used to be swimming underwater with my eyes open, watching the sun dance along the bottom of our pool creating wondrous patterns.

Alas, the sun doesn't hit the indoor pool at the Y and the bottom of the pool is not very interesting. In addition, the pool is a lot longer than it looks from the deck.

Once my goggles were on right, I swam the length of the pool stopping at the end to catch my breath because I have forgotten how to breathe with my face in the water. Then I tread water back to the other side and stopped again.

The next time I swam with my head above water and then back-stroked to the other end. By this time I noticed that the lifeguard, who had been sitting on the opposite side of the pool, was standing at the head of my lane watching me.

It was disconcerting. I knew he wasn't watching me because I am such a powerful swimmer, nor do I have the achingly beautiful style that my mother displayed when she swam in a pool or in the ocean. I figured out that he must be watching me because he was afraid that I would drown.

I realized that what he must have seen when I stepped gingerly down the steps into the pool was a limping, somewhat unsteady and out-of-shape woman; not the woman that I had in my mind's eye, a young woman with a long lean body that cut through the water like a seal - someone who grew up near an ocean and was taught to swim by her mother at 3 years old.

My mother swam up and down our small stretch of ocean off the coast of Far Rockaway in Queens, N.Y. She never cared much about speed; she was all about style and gliding gracefully through the water without making a splash on the surface.

I think of it as a kind of grace, and when my mother died eight years ago at the age of 86, I wrote a poem about how as a little girl I would sit on the beach holding my breath as she dove into a wave and the last thing I would see was her high arched feet slipping under the water. In the poem, which became her memorial card, I called it moments of grace in a long life.

I don't think my children will remember me for my swimming expertise and certainly the lifeguard at the YMCA wasn't wowed by my grace and skill, but I hope, when that day comes and I go back to swim in the deep ocean, that my children and grandchildren will remember something of grace about me.

I wish that for everyone who swims and exercises at the Y, especially at this time of the year when renewal and redemption seem possible. I wish it, too, for all of the instructors who are unfailingly patient and hard-working.