My older daughter (D1) has just started doing some competitive swimming and this morning she had a swim meet about an hour’s drive away from our place. Our youngest (D2) is nursing a cold, so Jamie stayed home with her while I drove D1 to her competition.
I hate the smell of chlorine.
When I was young, I did competitive swimming for a few years as well, but most of our training sessions were done outside. Now, because we live in a wealthy and strangely decadent society here in Australia, almost all of the training and meets are held at these massive indoor swimming facilities. They are like shrines to aquatics. I blame Ian Thorpe.
As a result of being locked inside this concrete tomb with a giant vat of heavily chlorinated water, the odious smell of chlorine-filled my nostrils. I spent much of the meet out in the coffee shop area with my face buried in a terrible cappuccino trying to rid the smell of chlorine from my nose.
When it came time for D1’s race, I rushed in, took my seat, cheered heartily as she successfully made her way down the lane without drowning and finished fourth. In a different race, she finished second in her heat which meant we’d be here longer, but in the semi-final, she failed to qualify, so we got to go home.
D1 likes swimming, but she’s not too fussed about the winning or losing part. She is much more interested in the friends she swims with and the high-tech goggles that Jamie bought her for her birthday. This makes it easier for us because honestly, she’s a bit like me and not very athletic, so if she had her little heart set on being the next Susie O’Neill then we’d have trouble explaining to her that maybe her dream wasn’t going to come to fruition.
Either way, we left the horrible chlorine cave and picked up some McDonald’s hashbrowns for the drive home.
We were about ten minutes into our trip and I pulled up to a traffic light, stopped, looked over at D1 enjoying her hashbrown and a few seconds later, the car jolted forward and there was a thump.
Yes, the person behind me decided that stopping at the red light with a car in front of you was optional and ran their car right up the ass end of mine. Obviously they’d realized too late that it was a solid red light for nearly thirty seconds and didn’t have time to properly brake because while they hit us, it wasn’t at full speed.
Did I mention it was raining?
Oh yeah, it wasn’t just raining, it was bucketing down. The rain was coming down sideways.
I know, right? It’s Sydney, Australia. Everything here is on fire and we’re in the midst of a drought that is unlike anything we’ve had for a couple of decades, but on the day that a person forgets to switch their brain on and runs up the back of me at a red light, it is pouring rain.
Now, I’m standing in the rain. My t-shirt is so wet it’s clinging to my skin. I’m not wearing a bra so my smallish boobs are embarrassing me while my nipples jut out to announce to the world that Beth is not wearing a bra.
The woman who hit me opens with, “I couldn’t see the red light through all the rain and when I noticed it was too late to stop fully. It’s my fault.”
That’s a saving grace at least, I’ve been rear-ended by an honest person. And she too is not wearing a bra and her shirt is drenched as well. Her nipples have the quiet confidence of knowing that her much larger breasts need no introduction, so they aren’t really hard and poking out.
We snap a few pictures on our phones of each other’s cars. We text each other the pictures so that we can send the details to our respective insurance companies, and just as we’re about to wrap up and try to carry on with the rest of our day, she drops in an innocuous line, “This rain is very cold.”
My hard and poking out nipples have embarrassed me fully. The only thing I could say was, “Yes, it is. We need the rain though. Hopefully, some is falling on the dams.”
The only way I could distract from the little pellets under my shirt was to talk about the need for replenishing Sydney’s water supply.
I drove home soaking wet, cold, feeling betrayed by my nipples.
And next week, I have to deal with smash repair places and my insurance company, so that’s something to look forward to. At least the McCafe cappuccino was good.