I have many fond memories of taking the two hour bus ride to summer swim lessons at UBC’s Empire Pool with my siblings. Mom insisted that we all learn to swim. In high school, I spent my Wednesday nights learning how to teach swimming and my Saturdays teaching swimming with my girlfriend at the Y.

Although I always seemed to be on my way to a pool or just coming home from a pool, I wore a one piece Speedo bathing suit while in the pool. I didn’t buy my first bikini until my honeymoon. I was twenty five.

In my thirties I swam lengths after work. In my forties my wrist bones disintegrated and I stopped swimming. In my fifties my right shoulder disintegrated and needed to be replaced.

I haven’t bought a bathing suit for twenty four years. I bravely logged on to a bathing suit buying web site from the comfort of my own home and pressed the purchase button for not one but two bathing suits. I paid the extra surcharge for expedited shipment which allowed me to keep track of the exceptional purchase as it traveled to my island.

I ordered it on February 2nd and paid $16.00 for it to be delivered within 3-5 business days. Chinese New Year celebrations considered, the earliest delivery date would be Feb 14 and the latest, February 20. The tracking link they sent me clearly shows that the package left on February 24th and is still somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.. I suspect the coronavirus has again disrupted my plans.

So yesterday I went into a swim suit store in Nanaimo. If I had two choices yesterday, one to walk through a mile long tunnel infested with spiders or try on bathing suits I would seriously have reconsidered my life long arachnophobia.

There are no buttons or zippers or bows provided on women’s bathing suits. They expect you to pull a flowery sausage tube over your head and down your torso. Then, you somehow have to get your girls squeezed into that sausage tube. Getting out of the tube is even harder. If you have ever seen a baby cow birth you might have an idea.

You need to stuff that sausage five or six more times before you are finished, ’cause, god forbid you like the first four or five bathing suit choices.

But I did it. I now have steel plates on my wrists and a brand new titanium shoulder and a bathing suit. Look at me Mom! I am

going swimming again