Swimming

We often go swimming on Saturday or Sunday mornings. The boys and I went today. Anna is feeling better, but not enough to swim. Here is a clandestine photo of True at the pool. Photography is actually forbidden there, but the "maitre nageur" (swimming master) let me take a few shaky shots.

We started, of course, from home. The weather was warm enough that True wore only a T-shirt. I love our apartment building. We are on what the French call the first floor - second floor to Americans. The way the stone garlands hang over our living room windows makes me think, for some reason, of the windows in the stern of a galleon. There are three big windows in the living room, which is oval. It's a lovely, sun-filled room. Below us lives Doctor Horn and his family. He's a plastic surgeon and periodically we see women 'of a certain age' tottering out of his place with their faces in bandages.

True was too hungry to swim on an empty stomach, so he stopped in to the nearest bakery. We call this the "brown bakery," because the facade is brown. Our favorite bakery has a green facade, so we call it the "green bakery." True always orders the same thing: "un pain au lait," which is a milk-bread bun.

The swimming pool is only a few blocks from our house. It sits between the Russian embassy and a branch of the University of Paris. It is named for Henry de Montherlant, a French writer and member of the prestigous Academie Francaise. I didn't know anything about him until I looked him up just now. He led a fairly scandalous life and committed suicide in 1972.

This is a picture of Sky running to the entrance of the pool. You can see full sized versions of most of the photos if you click on them.

Anna goes to this pool the most. It is closed during school hours because it is used by neighborhood schools. It tends to get crowded when it's open to the public.

Many of the French swimmers have a funny habit of doing leisurely backstrokes even at the most crowded of times, so there are frequent near misses and occasional collisions. Everyone is very tolerant and polite though.

"Excusez-moi, Madame!"

The entrance is down a flight of steps from street level.



Inside, you have to buy a ticket or have the man at the cashier window stamp your prepaid card and give you a ticket.

Then you go down another flight of stairs and give a man there the ticket you just bought.

He throws the ticket into a box.


The locker room is co-ed. You punch the number of the locker into a keypad and then a four-digit code, and the locker rotates and locks. You do the same thing to unlock it and the locker rotates open. It's a neat system.

When we first started going to the pool, Anna and Sky would swim laps while I would sit in the adjacent baby pool and play with True. True has gotten too old for that, though, so recently I've been obliged to swim myself. I'm slowly getting used to it.

The pool is 25 meters. The rules require that you wear a tight Speedo-type swimsuit. Who knows why. You also have to wear a swim cap. This is the reason you don't see any pictures of me at the pool.

The boys, of course, are used to this. When we were in Florida a couple of years ago, True wore his tight suit to the pool at the Ponte Vedra Beach Club and a little girl looked at him oddly and asked if he was on the swim team. He didn't know what she was talking about.

While the actual changing takes place in stalls with doors, the showers, too, are co-ed. It's very democratic: the very elderly and the very young, the very thin and the very fat, all standing there together.

Today, there was a lady with a baby in diapers.

People bring their shampoo and lather up, all in their suits, of course. It can get a little strange when some men insist on washing everywhere, however discreetly.

After swimming, the boys normally get a hot chocolate from the beverage machine in the lobby. Half the fun is watching the cup drop and fill up. Sky didn't have one today, though. He was saving his appetite.

But True never passes up an opportunity. The drink costs 40 centimes, or about 48 cents. "Thanks, Dad!" he says every time.

We crossed the street and headed for Paul, yet another bakery in the neighborhood, where Anna was going to join us for something to eat. We used to go to the brown bakery after swimming, but Paul is more comfortable and Sky prefers the hot chocolate there.

It is on the corner of Rue de la Pompe, or Pump Street, and Rue de la Tour, or Tower Street.

This is a picture of the same intersection in 1898.

The tile work shows a baker with a pyramid of macarons, a kind of cookie made with egg whites, almond powder and sugar.


They come in a variety of colors and flavors and are traditionally displayed in pyramids.

Anna discussed with True what he wanted to eat. He doesn't really like the hot chocolate at Paul, so he opted for hot milk. Sky ordered by himself in French: hot chocolate and a "demi flute," which is a half-length of baguette that comes with butter and jam on the side. Anna and I had salads.


Paul is a chain, but they do bake the bread on the premises. The oven is through the glass behind Anna and while we were there, a man was shoving lengths of dough into the oven door with a big, long-handled wooden spatula of sorts. The interior is beautiful, though the paneling is a reproduction and not original. I can't tell if it is really carved or pressed somehow.


After our meal, we headed off for the car to take Sky to his friend Rawi's house in Garches, a suburb. True then came home to watch soccer on T.V.