This was probably my last Sunday swim of the summer. Next Sunday we�ll be on our way south and by the time we get back, the pool will be closed for the winter, a fact that is as stunning as it is alarming.

I go to the pool five days a week at least and Sundays are always a little different. While I�m pretty much always the first one in the pool, I know enough not to show up on time at 9 on Sundays because the guards almost always show up late and the guard with the key is inevitably the last to arrive. The trundle in looking groggy behind their sunglasses, nursing cans of ginger ale. On other days the amble in looking young, tan and athletic, beautiful as Abercrombie and Fitch models. On Sundays they are pale and achy.

As I wait with the guard who arrives first, there is often a confessional of sins the night before. I�m not sure whether they simply need to unburden their consciences or if there is something about me that particularly inspires truth-telling. I am always sympathetic. I feel like stroking their hands. �Oh, I know. I�ve been there,� is what I want to say. Even though my bloodshot eyes are now due to too much time bathing in chlorine and a three year old jumping on my bed at 5:30 a.m., I remember the headaches daylight would bring after a night of too much. Although I wouldn�t particularly expect them to believe me.

There is an unwritten rule that the guard who is the latest has to skim the pool. The other is generally curled up in the fetal position on one of the lounge chairs lining the pool�s perimeter, huddled inside a sweatshirt several sizes too big.

The last time I guarded I was nineteen and had just finished my sophomore year in college. I had landed an internship doing marketing for an arts and music center in South Jersey. I arrived at my job on the first day by bus from Philadelphia, debarking at the town�s stop on the porch of a shuttered General Store surrounded by cornfields as far as the eye could see. I dragged my summer�s worth of luggage two miles, walking alongside the empty highway.

My boss was not too much older than I, a recent college graduate who was dating a glass blower, whom I never met. She had a vintage Volkswagen Beetle that she often let me drive down the winding roads of the rural coutryside. We made regular runs to the nearest 7-11, seven miles away, for Slurpees or ice cream, which would melt by the time we returned. It was at that 7-11 one day that I came face to face with the picture of the tall, awkward boy who had sat next to me during a semester of Modern European History in ninth grade, copying my answers on quizzes. He was staring at me from the cover of the National Enquirer. I read the story of how he�d murdered his parents with an axe and burned their bodies in his backyard. I began to question my interest in a career in journalism.

I quickly became adept at my job, which involved writing piles of press releases for assorted performances and exhibits and assembling books of clippings and PR material to use for grant reports. It was mostly tedious work. My boss knew I was bored and began to look around for other things for me to do. Pretty soon I had more than I could handle. In addition to a small museum and concert hall that was not much bigger, the center ran a summer arts and music camp. I took on duties as a substitute counselor for the nine-year-olds and a substitute lifeguard at the camps massive pool, since I happened to be certified. I filled on for the counselors on their days off. I helped chaperone bands of children to Ocean City, watching them as they leapt in and out of the waves and tore up the sand between the boardwalk and the ocean. I took my job as their lifeguard seriously, even on the road. The trips exhausted me. I also played second violin in a string quartet made up of New Jersey symphony members who taught at the camp. We toured nursing homes and community centers. And once a week, I taught creative writing to a small class of morbidly depressed high school students.

It is this latter task that I think of whenever I see the hungover lifeguards on Sunday mornings. I had my first serious hangover while teaching that class (although there would be many to follow. The one the day after my 22nd birthday when I was still drunk in the morning while trying to get through a morning rehearsal in a walled orchestra pit while playing high squeaky violin and sitting in front of a trombone and tympani pretty much cured me of alcoholic overindulgence). Instead of teaching them anything that day, I had them freewrite, mainly so I could get down on paper the weird series of circumstances that had led to the hangover. Yesterday I came across what I wrote that day while I was cleaning out a file cabinet. It�s long, so I�ll post it as a second entry. I wrote it down as a letter to my mom and dad. This was in the days before ubiquitous cell phones. They had given me their calling card for emergencies and I used it the day before I had the hangover. My story was an explanation of the call they would see on their phone bill. I�ll post the story as soon as I have a chance.

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