Meanwhile, back at the pool...

Today was Enrique's last day at his lifeguard job. In three weeks he will join USMC, if, of course, he passes the fitness test. Which he will. Twenty years old at 6'2" and about 200 pounds of mostly muscle, he is what the Marines want. Or the drug test. Which is apparently more tricky for him. He is so happy going to the army, as if he does not have anything smarter to do with his life. He was at college. He was in fraternity. He didn't like college. He liked fraternity (booze, bongs, etc.). Jokingly, he speculates if he'd be going to Bosnia. I assure him that Clinton will never order American troops in Bosnia, so that there are brighter chances for him to be sent to police Haiti, since this is going to be a several years job. Cheerfully, he already learnt some French from French kids who swim in the pool every day. Enrique designed a game in the pool that we all played - a combination of waterpolo, basketball and rugby (lifesaving floats are 'baskets' and swiming is combined with wrestling, diving, strangling and other ways to grab the tennis ball from the opponent). The game is really funny. I and Gulliene played together against Enrique, and he won.

We will all miss Enrique. He was always mellow and easygoing. And, certainly, he comes from a family with a too strict, too demanding father. Thus, USMC is a way to go.

Carmelo, who lifeguards here weekends, wants to be a NYPD officer. He is 21, goes to college and is a talented graphic artist. He likes comic books, headbanging music and treshold workouts. His father is a marine officer, his step-father a prison guard. No trust-fund there. Do I have to explain that Carmelo is a selfish opportunist who learned how to survive with all odds against him?

Both Enrique and Carmelo were eventually told so many times that they would never ammount to anything, pitiful weaklings. So, that now they need extraordinary tasks to assert their masculinity, to prove that they are worth their fathers.

I had the same 'symptoms' in their age. That disappeared once I understood that nothing could please an over-demanding patriarch.

Nothing that you did - just thinks that you didn't do.