Someone saved my life one day

I'm continuing a theme i started in my first post, about NOT feeling guilty, paranoid, and delusional about offending family members with familystories i choose to share, here on My Crazy Bad.
So i'm going to re-tell the short story i told on the now extinct 'burnt cookies', the last post up, i doubt any of you read it , other than mother. It's the one i thought would be offensive to somebody, somewhere. That is over my friend.


In grade 7, i went with my two brothers, my sister, and her boyfriend, to miquelon lake, some 30 miles southeast of Edmonton. You might have heard of a certain yellow and blue dinghy i once flew through the air with, to the scratchy asphalt below, and it was in fact the same g-d dinghy that we took to the popular local beach. Decent sand, combed during summer, a nice shallow swimming area marked clearly by bouys and floatropes, and reasonably warm water, for middleland, Alberta, in the appropriately sun warmed shallow zone.

So, once again, it's me and the dinghy, together again. With physical harm involved. Bad, crazy dinghy. I was paddling said air filled plastic boat outside the bouyed swimming area, because boating inside the swimming area for some reason was disallowed. Because people inside the swimming area were able to walk out a hundred feet into two foot water...i figured similar hospitable conditions existed beyond the bouys and floatropes. So, in my great wisdom, not being able to swim, and without a lifevest, i got out of the dinghy to enjoy what i thought would be about 4 feet of warm water and sandy lake bottom. Much to my surprise, it wasn't 4 feet...more like 7, and me, with an unnatural tendency to swallow water when my head goes underwater, start to panic, thrash, push myself further under, swallow water, trying to breathe.
Then, i see, as they say, my life flash before my eyes. It was really rather intricate a memory, a lot of details, very fast, but it was not a flash, seemed more like a lifetime.
I distinctly remember at that point the feeling of disappointment that my life had been so short, now that i was going to die. I was a bit pissed about the whole affair. But lungs full of water can be very distracting from such worrisome thoughts.

By the grace of random concern for others, there was an old man swimming about the outer swimming area, near the now empty dinghy, i would guess he saw me go under, and not come back up. He swam out to me, about 100 feet, scooped me up, just as my lights were fading, and swam me back to shore. The first, and hopefully the last, time someone LITERALLY saved my life, all by themselves. In a few minutes.
When he returned me to the beach, my sister and her boyfriend rushed to attend me, there could have been some pushing out of lungwater, i don't remember. After near death, everything else is a cakewalk.
And the old man disappeared as quickly as he appeared. No acclaim, no reward, just a special soul that saved my life.
I''m glad it worked out, if i had died there that day, there's no telling how this family might be different now. And i've learned not to rock the boat. Or, get out of the boat. But not how to swim.