I spent afternoons mostly atop a lifeguard chair six feet above the deck of Roseville High School pool—when I wasn’t taking a turn standing on the opposite side of the deck, twirling my lanyard-tethered Acme Thunderer around a couple of fingers.

I spent mornings trying to coax little kids into gently settling their faces on the surface of liquid turquoise, to blow bubbles, to dunk themselves, bob up and down hanging onto the pool gutter practicing breathing and breath-holding, to float on their backs, small chests thrust to the sky, learning to trust the miracle of water supporting them.

I spent evenings coaching the synchronized swim team I’d joined as a participant when I was 11. My sister, two years younger and always more physically adept, caught on quickly, little fish that she was. I was slower but determined to master the three basic stunts—kip, dolphin and somersub—that we performed at meets throughout the summer, and to blend those stunts and other tricky moves upside down in the water with music and other girls, which was where the “synchronized” part came in.

I often worked five 12-hour days, then only five or six hours on a Saturday. I loved it all.

My uniform consisted of a red bikini when I was lifeguarding or coaching, a red tank suit when teaching because small, graspy hands could inadvertently prompt what would later be called a wardrobe malfunction. And though I weighed 100 pounds soaking wet and barely filled out an A cup, none of us teenage girl instructors wanted to risk inadvertent exposure.

As if, afternoons, we weren’t showing off most of our bikini’d bodies anyway, our male colleagues outfitted in baggy red trunks over their Speedos, with their taut middles and swim-team muscled arms, all of us patrolling the deck in flip-flops, serious about pool safety. Acme Thunderers twirling like slingshots, occasionally blowing them to get some kid’s attention, our peeling noses slathered in zinc oxide, and, as summer wore on, the tops of burnt shoulders and feet, too. T-shirt for sun protection, usually a floppy red hat. Mirrored Wayfarers protected our eyes.

You were not properly dressed for lifeguarding without your whistle and your Wayfarers. I’d learned that as a water safety aide helping instructors and watching lifeguards at the pool years before I became one.

We used to joke, when we saw our pool friends in non-summer times, “You look different in clothes.” We knew we were lucky not to be toiling in fast food or scooping ice cream like so many of our school friends. We practiced math taking attendance and a quarter from each kid who came to swim. (I figured out geometry years after I’d more or less failed it by plotting synchronized swimming routines for six or eight girls.) We learned chemistry by performing three-times-a-day water tests to check the pH and acid levels. We taught each other what we needed to know about opening the pool, resupplying toilet paper in the bathrooms, locking up at night.

A half century later, I wonder what the grown-up bosses we rarely saw were thinking, how impossibly young we were to be trusted with so much responsibility.

We didn’t think of ourselves as cool or confident or accomplished, though I realize now that we were all three, frying under the summer sun of a bicentennial summer in that concrete chapel of chlorine with so, so much life ahead of us.

•••

With appreciation for and love to all my pool buddies still in this world and the ones who became heavenly bodies, swimming happily, I hope, in the mystery.