Dance to the Euro beat

My water aerobics class has grown since last summer. I get paid by the person and so far I’m averaging $25. Not bad for something I used to have to pay to do. I’ve already paid for my summer pool membership.

Most of the women who take the class are in the vicinity of my mother’s age (60), give or take a few years. I genuinely like all of them. They are fun to be around. I get tired of my own peer group which is so wrapped up in children that there doesn’t seem to be time for anything else. Even the book group meetings are more often than not about children rather than books. I love my kid. I love kids in general. But I like talking about other things too.

The women in my water aerobics class may complain about getting into a bathing suit at the beginning of the summer, but they are past the point of caring too much. Two of them are breast cancer survivors with prosthetics in their suits. I know this, because they were pulled out and compared at a class earlier this week, which cracked everybody up. “Hey, no fair. It’s easier for her. She’s wearing a floatie!”

In another class, we were comparing underarm flab of the type I grew up calling “bat wings.”

“My grandkids call them “grandma arms,” said one, holding one of her arms in the air and flicking it with her hand to make it jiggle.

Another one confessed to calling them her “Aunt Thelmas,” named for a relative with a particularly egregious case.

“The muscles are called biceps,” said another, flexing her arm, “but the flab is called “Bye Janes.” This results in a gale of guffaws.

“Bye Janes?” queried another.

“Yes. It’s named for Aunt Bea in the old Andy Griffith Show, because whenever she’d say goodbye to her best friend, she’d wave out the window of the car and shout, “Bye, Jane,” and boy, did those arms jiggle.” She demonstrated, to another chorus of laughter.

The process of aging bodies is not glamorous. The flabby arms are the least of our problems. Arthritis. Joint replacements. Breast cancer. It’s good to be able to laugh at it all together.

One of the breast cancer survivors, the one whose hair is still growing back in, is doing the three-day breast cancer walk – 60 miles. The walk isn’t until August and she’s already raised almost twice as much as she expected. “You never know what you can do until you do it,” she says.

After class, a bunch of the women join a poolside card game that has been going on every summer in the same spot for at least twenty years. They pull out their wallets. They play for money. “It’s no fun if the stakes aren’t high,” says one. They often ask me to join them, but I decline, citing my maternal commitments. But really, it’s that I’m not a gambler. At least not yet.