'It's just not feasible to share'

I had less than an hour. I dropped my 4-year-old at soccer practice and my 8-year-old at gymnastics and raced to the locker room to change. Day three of training and I needed to swim for 16 minutes and bicycle for 24, 40 minutes of exercise. No problem.

Not so fast.

Two of the three lap lanes at the Y were occupied by swim lessons. There was only one swimmer in the narrower third lane. When I bent down to ask her if she wanted to loop swim or stick to one side, she spoke first.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just not feasible to share."

Not feasible to share? Hers was the only open lane. I could hear the clock ticking off the only time I had all day. Not feasible to share?

"That's ridiculous," a young mom with two small children said when I turned to the lifeguard to find out the YMCA's policy about pool lane sharing. "This is a public pool. She has to share the lane. You should just jump in that water and start swimming!"

The young lifeguard, high as she was on the perch, looked embarrassed and unsure. She obviously wasn't going to assert any authority. She blushed and said nothing.

"I work here," said an instructor in the water. "If the lady's willing to share the lane, it's like totally fine with my boss."

"That's just it," I said. "She doesn't want to share."

Time was passing and I hesitated. I watched the swimmer in the water as, oblivious to our conversation, she made her slow way to the other end of the pool. Her arms were thin and seemed almost palsied. Her back was humped. She looked much older than me and she also seemed unhappy. Unable to share.

Of course I thought the outraged woman with the toddlers was right — there was enough room on the lane, I pay my dues to the Y every month, and if this swimmer was unwilling to share she probably shouldn't swim at the Y. When my friend E. found the crowdedness of the Y overbearing and disliked the din made by happy children, she quit and joined a more adult-oriented gym.

I usually don't have trouble standing up for myself. I had a verbal altercation with a flight attendant who wouldn't allow me to recycle my tomato juice can (and called ground control to say there was a security threat on the airplane — me, and presumably my then 2-year-old son who was asleep in my arms — when I refused to give it to her), and I've been known to yell, "This is a crosswalk!" to strangers in their cars who speed on Siskiyou and don't stop for pedestrians (recently, six cars blurred past the zebra stripes before anyone stopped). But I looked at the swimmer's gnarled, probably painful body, and I didn't have the heart to say anything.

Maybe there was some real reason — beyond her sense of entitlement and her loneliness — that it wasn't feasible to share. If she can't share a pool lane, perhaps she also isn't sharing her life in lots of other ways. She is the one who has to live with her pettiness and unhappiness, unsharing and unwilling to compromise, stuck in a toddler's mindset of selfishness.

Feeling sorry for her, I swam in a makeshift lane beside another displaced lap swimmer, dodging teenagers and the blue cordon, and swam away my impatience and frustration. When the palsied woman finally left the pool, the friendly, communicative guy who'd been swimming in the same awkward way as I, ducked into the now empty lane.

"Hey," he said, flashing a smile, "want to share?"

Jennifer Margulis is a freelance writer who lives in Ashland with her husband and three children. Her most recent book, "The Baby Bonding Book For Dads: Building a Closer Connection with Your New Baby," is about all the ways dads and babies can bond.