Granddaughters Alexandra and Leah-Bo showed up Saturday night, just in time to give me a good excuse to stay off the golf course Sunday (bless their hearts). Hanging around the pool is more agreeable than putting up with myself hitting rotten golf shots all afternoon (trust me on that).
Leah-Bo's swimming is coming along nicely, she's able to swim along the edge of the pool (which is over her short little head) and make it from one side to the other with only a couple of stops to grab the side of the pool and a breath of air before resuming her mostly-under-water swimming.
She can do this pretty much all afternoon, exhibiting an inexhaustible supply of energy.
The next step should be some formal swimming lessons, so she can learn to swim and breathe at the same time, but from what I hear, Jesse Coalter is in full retirement mode and we can't seem to make connections with the Red Cross swim lesson bunch, so informal lessons and lots of practice will still make Leah-Bo a swimmer of note, I'm sure.
Kim Bowman gave her a brief lesson in "making an arrow" with her hands, and that seemed to help.
At almost 8 years of age, Alexandra can swim, after a fashion, but doesn't seem to have the energy for constant swimming like Leah-Bo. Age affects us all, does it not?
------
I took swim lessons from Jesse at the Walker Park pool when I was a kid, as did hundreds or maybe even thousands of other kids over the years. I guess I was about 8 years old myself at the time, so it was a while back, but I do know I came out of those lessons a much better swimmer with a little healthier respect for possible dangers in the water as well.
Jesse could swim like a fish, and I was impressed.
And I don't think toting the mail all those years messed his swimming up much, either.
------
The plan is to meet up with the granddaughters' father at the Current River this weekend, and for him to take them back home Sunday or Monday.
Then the plan will be, "How can we abscond with the granddaughters for another week or two or three before the summer is over?"
I'm sure My Dear Sweet Sainted Wife is plotting already.
------
Speaking of the granddaughter's father, he just completed his first 'major tournament' weekend at his golf course in Moberly, Mo. (a little ways north of Columbia). Most courses have one "big tournament" a year, this one was Kit's. He called to tell me this, and also that he traded his old Jeep with a blown transmission for a ski boat, even up. Must be a pretty ratty ski boat, because it was a pretty ratty jeep. Still, 150 hp will haul you around pretty fast, if that's the idea.
------
Note to Susie Zimmerman: If a BGRAA meeting (or other public body) deals with "strategic and tactical issues" facing the community, we'll report on that. If they offer up "meaningless bickering and irrelevant banter" at a particular meeting, we'll report on that.
If we "raised our standards" to report only on intelligently conducted, well-ordered meetings, well, there wouldn't be much in the paper about city business.
The $3 million-plus the city owes the Internal Revenue Service (and the 1 cent sales tax that kicked in July 1 on Blytheville shoppers to cover it) is the root of the problem. And worth bickering about, no matter how obtusely.
------
And while I'm at it, I offer another note to Wayne Omillian, who ended what I thought was an otherwise well-considered letter to the editor in Wednesday's paper with, "the support of our local newspaper is minimal at very best."
Wayne, let me ask you -- what sort of "support" does a public golf course expect from a newspaper?
If there are tournaments, we cover them. If there's news about the golf course coming out of the mayor's office or council meetings, we report it. What else is there?
The city owns the golf course -- not the newspaper -- and since the city is beyond broke, it's not able to provide a lot of things, including, until recently, a course superintendent responsible for keeping the course in playable condition.
If you want to gripe about the situation at Thunder Bayou, you have every right to do so. Just gripe at the mayor or the Golf Course Facilities Board (from which I resigned at the end of last year because of my frustration with the city's inability to pay the golf course bills).
By the way, we've still got a few boxes of the 30,000 Thunder Bayou score cards we printed on credit eight or 10 years ago. As they have been picked up and used a box or two at a time over the years, the city has been able to pay for them (sort of, more or less).
dtennyson@blythevillecourier.com