The DAM Thing Is Missing

I dunno if you've been hiding under a rock lately, but there are plenty of words being written on what happened in D.C. last Wednesday and why it was so important.  There will continue to be plenty of words written in the future, especially once we start having trials and people start getting convicted and stuff like that.  Plenty of words. There will be volumes written, and court decisions and scholarly articles and all kinds of stuff.  There are journalists whose careers will be founded in the next couple of weeks, and there are scholars that will study the whole thing for, maybe, the rest of their lives.  What I'd like to just say here, at the outset, is that I am not one of those scholars and this is not one of of those blog posts.  

Why not?  Good question.  I have opinions, as I'm sure most of you do.  The thing is, I'm not sure anybody particularly cares about my opinion.   Certainly my Senators and Congresscritters don't care.  John Cornyn isn't even answering his phone anymore, and Ted Cruz--well, one could say a lot about Ted Cruz, but nothing says it better than "Goodbye, sucker." I will say that what happened in D.C. is not the end of something but the beginning of something, and if you think we've been seeing some weird stuff, baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet.  But, they don't pay me to say things like that (or anything else, either, for that matter).  

So let's get back to something that actually moves and shakes within my sphere of influence.  If you'd rather just read the New York Times, you can head there now and I will totally understand.  No hard feelings.  I don't have time, anyway.  I'm in the middle of the biggest mystery to hit Dallas since somebody shot J.R.*

My swim team has disappeared.

Yes, I realize it's been defunct since March anyway, and even if there were banners rolled out across every pool in town saying WELCOME BACK, EVERYBODY, I couldn't start swimming again if I wanted to.  There's a pandemic and sick people running around without masks on and complete idiots flying across the country to see relatives, somehow missing the part where all the rest of us, who'd rather not get COVID, are not flying across the country to see OUR relatives.  And I can't bring this disease home under any circumstances because it will kill me, or maybe kill my wife, or even more maybe kill both of us.  So I can't go back there, anyway, until I've been vaccinated, and at the rate my state is mishandling the rollout of the vaccine, that may be quite a while.  What I'm trying to tell you, though, is very important.  What I'm trying to tell you is that my swim team has disappeared.

My swim team is, of course, the Dallas Aquatic Masters, a U.S. Masters registered swim team that's been active in Dallas for thirty years.  Started by two ex-Olympians, Bobby Patton and Jim Montgomery, the team is a typical swim team, if you remember what it was like when you were a kid, only it's for grown-ups.  Same swim drills.  Same kickboard workouts.  Same competitions, even (we have a meet four times a year for both DAM members and any US Masters people who might want to come in and join us).  We swim at Baylor, Tom Landry Fitness Center, SMU's amazing new natatorium, and several other pools around town.  There are something like 160 different workouts a week, which should tell you how many people we have.  I myself have been a member for going on 13 years now.  So what I'm saying is that this group is established.  It's been around these parts for a long time.  And yet, inexplicably, it has disappeared. 

I was on the Internet just yesterday and I thought I'd check the Web site to see what was going on.  We've had a few mass emails from Bobby and Jim basically saying that all the pools were either shut down or restricted to members only, that they were doing what they could, and that we should all be patient.  They stopped charging us membership fees about seven months ago and were charging everybody a dollar each just to keep the database intact, though I think it's been a couple of months since they even did that.  There were some instructions that came out about exercises we could be doing to keep our fitness level high and that sort of thing.  And then the whole DAM Web site disappeared.

(See what I did there?)

Now, the Web site isn't actually gone, gone. Instead it points someplace else; to Jim's swim school, which has added an adult program. They are meeting at one pool up in North Dallas, and from the sound of it, they're doing the same workouts that DAM used to do.  With social distancing rules, of course, and they limit the number of persons who can be at a practice.  Still, this isn't DAM, and I don't know if this is like a temporary replacement or if This Is Just It.  

I just checked my bank account and the last time they charged us the real fee was April.  They've been charging a dollar a month since, the last time being November 6.  So what happened between November 6 and January whatever?  I'm not sure how to find out. The person in charge of organizing the whole deal worked at a place called Club Assistant, and I guess I could bug them on Monday if I can find them.  But at the moment, the number of leads I have is zero.

So if any of y'all see a rogue swim team as you're traveling about the Metroplex, would you tell them to give me a call?  Because it would truly suck rocks if my swim team was no more.  In the meantime, think scholarly thoughts and try to stay away from government buildings for a while, folks.  That's good advice no matter what you think of what happened last Wednesday.

*Footnote:  Back in 2002 I was in England and was being introduced around the room at a party by my wife's ex-husband's new wife, who, by the way, is really good at this.  She told this veddy proper English lady I was from Dallas and the lady brightened immediately and asked me, "Oh!  Do you know J.R.?"  I was so thrown by this that I missed my opportunity for some witty retort and just said, "No, uh, no, I've never met him."  She seemed disappointed.