Ever since we started our early-morning-three-times-a-week pool visits I've been getting up before five o'clock to cook my porridge and get ready for the day. It's become such a routine that I can't stay in bed any longer even if it's not a "pool day".
Which it is today, and I've packed my swim togs and a couple of books, including my Latin-American Spanish Phrase Book, because after two hours in the warm-water pool we usually spend another two hours in the Aquatic Centre's coffee shop. There, over a cup of hot chocolate, we meet up again with our then dried-off and dressed-up pool friends, one of whom is more interesting than all the rest of them put together.
Roberto is of Polish origin but grew up in Argentina, and for forty years was customer service manager with QANTAS, flying all over the world before retiring in little Batemans Bay. He's travelled a lot, seen a lot, read a lot, knows a lot, and speaks Spanish, hence my Spanish phrase book (his English is better than mine, but it's fun to pick up a few words of Spanish even though my reply would most times be "No entiendo")
And here's the clincher: Roberto is also a "Consultant Horologist", which means he repairs and restores watches, and I'm about to entrust him with my father's old fob watch to give it a good once-over and clean-up.
It is probably now as old as my father was when he died in 1984. I know he was fond of it as it reminded him of a better life before the war, and it is now the only memento I have of him and the long years he spent as "Kriegsverletzter" on a meagre war pension. As I wrote elsewhere: "He was a little boy at the time the 'Great War', who then lived through the miseries of the Treaty of Versailles as a teenager; whose promising career as a 'Volkswirt' was cut short by the next war, from which he then came back as a physically disabled and emotionally dead man."
Well, I've eaten my porridge, packed my bag, and we're off to the pool.
¡Hasta la próxima!
