Water parked

     I am not in top physical condition. I don’t even think that I’m in moderate physical condition. I’m overweight. I never lost my baby weight. My wife did, but I have resigned myself to dad bod status. I’m also asthmatic, which certainly doesn’t help in the fitness after 40 department. Given this, our recent trip to an indoor water park for our daughter’s birthday proved to me that my current level of physical fitness is certainly lacking.

     Our daughter’s favorite part of the water park were the slides. There were different slides, each designed to convey a specific raft built for 2, 4, or up to 6 people. The slides were totally enclosed and were about five stories high. After climbing five flights of stairs while soaking wet and in bare feet for the sixth time, I didn’t know if I would make it another trip. Breathing was hard. As we reached the top, I thought that I saw the cold, bony fingers of Death beckoning me from deep within the darkness of the water slide. The slide had become the River Styx, and my innertube was about to ferry me across it.

     Preparing for my impending demise, my daughter and I situated ourselves on our raft. This one was an innertube built for two, like a figure 8 where the smallest person sat in the loop in the front, and the larger person tried to fit their butt though the loop in the back. My daughter, with mermaid-like prowess, swam under the tube, popped up through the hole, and hopped into her spot with ease. I attempted to sit in my spot but soon realized the tube was wider than my stride. I couldn’t simply step across it as I had intended. The nice, athletic, teenage attendant immediately recognized my conundrum and offered his advice, “Why don’t you try hopping into it, like try to jump across and land in it”. So, I did. I tried. I missed. I landed on the back edge of the tube which, as it turns out, is actually a rubber ejection seat. As I was completing a back-flip I heard the attendant shout, ‘You jumped too far”, as my daughter was chortling wildly. I landed face first in the water, and with my total immersion I was baptized as the founding member of The Holy Church of the Water Slide.

     Apparently, my symbolic rebirth allowed me the ability to get on the innertube without further embarrassment. As I lowered myself into the opening in the tube, my butt sank deeper than I thought it should. There was now a disparity in the weight distribution on the tube. My relatively light daughter was in the front half and my large rear end was in the back. My butt was now acting like the anchor of a boat headed for a waterfall. As the attendant shoved us toward our doom, my butt dragged the bottom until we reached the precipice of the slide. We were then sucked into the maelstrom and started our break-neck descent down five stories of looping water slide. My daughter was screaming and my butt was bouncing off of the bottom as we sped into the heart of the watery darkness.

     Moments later we shot out of the tube into the lagoon at the bottom. Once we hit the deeper water of the landing area my daughter fell through her hole in the front of the tube. She disappeared like she had been sucked into another dimension. Now that I was the only one on the tube, back I went. The tube flipped over backwards and I was re-baptized. Apparently the first one didn’t take.

As we dragged our soaked and beaten selves out of the water, she exclaimed that this was the best birthday ever.