A Funny Thing Happened Today

I am back to swimming after a spell of not tolerating it.  I quickly put on my suit and my clothes over it, and threw my underwear and socks into my swim bag, which is now always loaded with my swim towel, all washed and dried and ready to go, and bustled out the door.  My warm-up these days is going back to bed and napping before my swim and so I was rushing to get out the door.  My bag felt heavy to me, but then exercise can feel like a burden sometimes, I thought.

I got to the pool, slipped off my sandals and fleece socks (yes, it is a strange combination), and then my pants and shirt and stuffed them in the locker along with my purse and hat and then my underwear and clean socks on top of it all and went to dig the lock out of my bag to lock the locker and there in the bottom of my bag, I noted a hammer and began to laugh...What a strange thing to find in my swim bag!!

I had left my bag in the side pantry/laundry/mud room and had simply folded my towel and threw if on top of my bag, not looking to see what was in it first! So how did the hammer get into my bag?  Our back room seems to be the collect-all for things that come and go in and out of the house and the hammer must have been on its way to my husband's work bench in the garage, or perhaps it was coming into the house for a small job somewhere?

I have a great imagination and often I am in the women's locker room by myself.  One night at the pool the female lifeguard and myself had a male visitor that simply hung around, fully dressed, not swimming and visiting with the lifeguard.  I assumed that he was a friend of the lifeguard, and only later learned that she didn't know him either.

We were both aware that the campus was having safety issues: apparently a couple of women accosted in dark areas of the campus by the same guy, and we later devised a plan to alert the other if something was not right.  We were too often the only people left in the building on some nights.  She had called campus security that night after being "creeped out" by the strange visitor.

I had long laughed and joked that any rapist would likely "get me under the lights and then let me go" but later thought more seriously about my safety. I am not so comfortable having the locker room all to myself....perhaps a hammer is just what is needed in my swim bag after all? After watching the Trayvon Martin trials, it isn't such a simple issue...using a hammer to bludgeon someone, might be misinterpreted as being a premeditated assault if used in self-defense?  But then I noticed that stamped on the handle was Companion, and so perhaps I could simply testify to having a companion with me?!  Later in the day, I found myself singing the old folk song, If I had a hammer....I'd hammer...and then giggled again!!