"I'm Saving the World One Fake Eyelash at a Time"

I have to credit Julia with that one.

Thus far that evening, we had stood sentinel by tables of sixteen-year-olds and told them they could go and get their dinner now. We had cleared their plates as they'd craned their necks impatiently toward the desserts. We had whisked away the precious cans of beer they had been allowed to drink prior to dancing.

If you've ever been compelled by your job description to stand on the outskirts of a school dance, you've borne witness to that excruciatingly transparent combination of boredom, social anxiety, and frantic thirst for being noticed. Being "an active adult presence" as we were that night can be translated as "killjoy" or "birth control" depending on where you are, but here I think our role here was "witness to awkwardness, complete with music we don't know."


The girls greeted each other in sky-high heels with kisses on both cheeks, as if they hadn't seen each other mere hours before in Biology class. They swarmed the table where drinks were being served, pretending with all their might that it was a cocktail party with an open bar. They winked at each other over the hors d'oeuvres. The boys finished their drinks too quickly.

Now, I should count myself fortunate that that all I had to do was be present in case of untoward behaviour.

A visiting friend of another teacher was saying that the worst night of his life (I think he dropped that distinction none too casually) was when he was forced to stand in the middle of a mass of teenagers at a similar gala-type event. As they say, Cringe. All I had to do was linger on the fringes and that was enough.

But back to the eyelashes. Apparently the false kind have become popular enough that a girl had purchased a pair for this very special evening. Much to her chagrin, one had come loose from her eyelid, perhaps while she was whipping her hair (though much to my chagrin the DJ did not play Willow Smith's insta-hit Whip My Hair, viewable here). I gather it freed itself in a manner that fairly common, but the situation was no less emergent for its predictability.

Julia came instantly to the rescue and helped this poor girl limp to the loos, where she would hopefully gather up the remaining shreds of her dignity, or just stick the thing back onto her eyelid. I sincerely hope it was the latter, and that eyelashes a-dangle aren't the sort of thing you talk about in therapy twelve years down the road. I wouldn't know, I thought as Julia ushered the afflicted girl down the corridor; when I was in high school they weren't quite as popular.

And it was at that moment that I realized I had arrived on the other side. I had fully inhabited my role as chaperone. Awkward teacher. Oblivious to the fake eyelash trend. Adult (cue heavenly music).

And I was breathing a sigh of relief that I did not have to the do the pounding-music / crowded dance floor thing anymore if I didn't want to. Back in high school, it was an obligation. Now that I'm what my father terms a GAW (a grown-ass woman; say it with a twang), I can do what I like. Which, in this case, would be literally anything but losing my fake eyelashes to an ill-timed hair toss.

My very own eyelashes, and not an awkward prom in sight.

The blessings do pile up.

Freestyle (Not About Rap)

I don't think I meant to be contrary as a very small child, but it just so happened I hated at least two things: liquefied foods (I had sneered at pureed carrots and had moved straight on to cheerios) and getting my face wet.

So when my mother took me to swim lessons at the local YMCA, I quickly became the most difficult pupil some poor high school girl had ever coached. Actually, not coached - make that coaxed, wheedled, cajoled, and begged to go underwater. I wasn't having any of it. I had willingly donned those inflatable wings for the first four years of my life; I saw no reason to give in to gravity and submerge myself if I was strong enough to keep my eyes out of the chlorine (and by strong enough, I mean stubborn enough to hold onto the edge).

The only concession to my policy happened upon seeing a favorite baby-sitter called Suzy teaching a group across the pool. I bartered with my exasperated coach to let me switch groups. She allowed this on one condition: that I go underwater at least once. I gritted my teeth and did it, but only because I knew that Suzy waited for me and would not be so Mean / Cruel / Unfair as to make me learn to simulate drowning. And I was right. I switched groups, lessons were soon over, and I escaped without sticking my face into the dreaded deep.

That's all to say that I had made it through life until this past Wednesday not knowing how to swim. Not really. You could have thrown me in a lake and I wouldn't have drowned; I could have flailed towards a ladder; in a pinch I could have treaded water for as long as you liked. But I couldn't breathe regularly while moving in a straight line.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before I became envious of all those lucky saps who could do such things. But how had they learned? They couldn't seem to remember not knowing. When I asked my swim-capable colleagues during dinner at what age they'd learned, they breezily reminisced, "oh, about four or five."

Thinking back to my four-year-old self cutting deals with high school volunteers so that I could specifically avoid learning to swim, I wondered what my colleagues' teachers' approach had been.

"My friends just chucked me in the pool and would push me back in every time I tried to climb out."
"Yeah. I think my parents just shoved me in the water. I eventually started moving."

Well, fine. Evidently, at four, I had misinterpreted the normal way of teaching a child to swim as semi-traumatic poolside abandon and, rather than submit, had weaseled my way out of it. I'm willing to admit when I've been wrong. Plus, as I say, I was getting envious of all those people slicing their way through the water, emerging with a healthful glow one never achieves in sweaty running clothes. So I asked Bryanston's swim coach to teach me how to do the front crawl or whatever it's called.

The first time, I choked and sputtered and forgot to exhale and all that stuff. Andy took a look at my attempt to swim a length and said, "Why don't we just try your swimming a width?" That's how bad it was. But eventually, the breathing and the arm-flinging, the kicking and the head-turning sort of settled into a rhythm, and at this point (four swims later) I feel much more comfortable in the water.

I'm not quite slicing down the lane in the manner of a Bryanston Barracuda, and I don't think goggled and swim-capped is my best look. But my wheeling-and-dealing four-year-old self can take a hike, because now I know better.