Dialogue on Uncle Pete

Beaver: says:

"I enjoy reminiscing about Uncle Pete - swimming lessons were challenging, but memories, at this stage of our lives, of Uncle Pete are fond ones. He was one of those rare people that you encounter in the road of life that, I think, helped shape your life. We all joke about it but he was a reverential, almost, God like figure in our then young lives.

I, like Meegan Keegan, liked to do the sidestroke. I still remember like yesterday Uncle Pete telling and exhibiting how to "bury your face and exhale, stroke, inhale, while doing the crawl - to this day I never mastered it."



JOH replies:

Uncle Pete taught the sidestroke thusly:

The whole class of kids was put on the sandy beach lying on their sides.

Uncle Pete would say this is what to do:

"With your right hand, reach up, grab an apple off a tree.
Bring your right hand down to your waist and transfer the apple to your left hand.
Then move left hand down to your left side and drop the apple in a bucket. At the same time, lift your right hand back up to the tree for another apple.

Grab the next apple with your right hand and bring it down to your side and put it in your left hand. Put the next apple in the bucket and reach up for the next apple," etc etc.

That was the arm movement.

The scissors kick: "Up, open and close. Up open and close." Uncle Pete used the "up open and close" mantra for both the scissors kick and the frog kick for breast stroke.

Is there any other way to learn those strokes??????



Beaver replies:

“What's all this about apple picking and what does it have to do with swimming??. This is all very confusing to me. “

JOH replies: :

Those are figures of speech, Beaver. Figures of speech.
If you were too dumb to understand those simple metaphors that Uncle Pete used to teach swimming (he was a teacher after all) no wonder you never learned to swim. You probably flunked English too.

That was how Uncle Pete explained how to do the side stroke.
Summers before, he taught us to do the dog paddle by saying "what does a dog do when he swims?" and we answered "He cups his hands."

Summers later he taught us how to time artificial resuscitation in Junior Lifesaving by chanting "out goes the bad air, in goes the good"




Beaver replies:
“Agreed - I learned to swim but not well. I did barely pass English. Come on Jim - you're not going to ever get me to believe that we answered "he(dog) cups his hands" You being a dog owner must know that a dog is physically incapable of "cupping" their hands" - after all dogs don't have hands, they have paws!!”



JOH:
Go figgure.
Get back to work.