Be a lifeguard

I decided to be a lifeguard since I can swim, I know how to sit on the beach, I can twirl a whistle around my finger, and I have sunglasses. That’s all it takes, right?

Okay, obviously I’m way under-qualified to be someone who saves lives as part of their job since the toughest thing I do each day is choose between McDonald’s or pizza.

I can’t be a real lifeguard because I have certain job requirements: I only want to work when I want, where I want, for a short period of time, and with only one other person—my 12-year-old son Daniel.

Since I can’t be the best, then I’ll be the complete opposite, the most unnecessary lifeguard imaginable.

We would go to a stretch of beach no one sits on, at a time when no one but drivers and joggers would see us, overseeing water filled with swimmer-hungry alligators and bull sharks on a rainy day.

When it comes to being useless, I win!

I asked Daniel, who can sometimes be Mr. No, if he wanted to be a lifeguard with me. Without hearing the details, he said, “Sure.”

Five minutes later, when I’d recovered from fainting, I asked if he was ready to go.

He started walking for the back door, thinking we’d be “pretending” to be lifeguards in our backyard, while I headed for the car. Now it was Daniel’s turn to react.

“I’m not going! People will see us. This is what weird people do,” he said.

False, true and true. He seems like a good future lawyer usually, but the lifeguard wasn’t in an arguing mood. There were lives to be saved.

His only good lawyerly move occurred a minute after we arrived at the narrow strip of sand we’d be guarding that overlooked Lake Pontchartrain. “I saw a snake here once,” he said.

Snakes and Roaches don’t mix, and he knows it.

“Live or dead?” I asked looking around.

“Live.”

I kept looking. He wasn’t very nervous, so I realized he was playing me. Oh, let the games begin!

So I got to “work.” I set up our beach chairs, put Oil of Olay on my nose to replicate whatever it is lifeguards use, donned my sunglasses and got busy.

I oversaw the beach activity of a log and a tree branch directly in front of me for 30 minutes. Lifeguarding is demanding.

Daniel got to work getting away from me, standing with his arms crossed by the jogger’s path or farther away by the car. After a while I asked, “Want to come sit next to me?”

“I’m not encouraging this behavior,” he said.

I think it’s important to share such bonding moments with your kids.

Now, to Daniel’s point, my non-existent fellow lifeguards hadn’t cleaned the beach in a while. Cigarette stubs, plastic bags, used New Year’s Eve sparklers, potato chip bags—not mine!—and Subway cups littered our 104-foot stretch of paradise.

So did seaweed, seashells and some sort of brown sludge I didn’t want to think too much about. Or step in.

The more I considered things, I realized Daniel was right about one thing: We shouldn’t be on this beach. My best work as a true “life guard” would be to keep people away from here. In fact, why am I sitting on Sludge City Beach with flip-flops?

Save me!