The goat rodeo is now a zoo

Summer programs for schoolkids have started at the Scarborough Y. When I dropped on at noon, half the pool was populated by screaming, splashing tweens. Of the three "swimming" lanes, one was occupied by teens horsing around; one by seniors chatting and doing exercises in place. This left a single lane for swimming lengths, and about eight of us, all of different speeds and strokes, were trying to share it.

At 12:30, they whistled end of play, took the tweens out, and rearranged the swimming lanes. It still took a while to get back to normal. A teenager nearly landed on me doing a cannonball at one point, a crime that would have got me ejected from the William E. Legros Centre in Ajax in my day.

A lifeguard told me later that the zoo's in town from 10:30 to 12:30, and from 1:30 to 3:30, every day over the summer. This leaves me three options: either a precisely timed lunch hour arrival at exactly 12:30 (I could wear my trunks under my work clothes, and at the appointed hour, just tear my pants off and run shrieking across the street, which I might get away with on casual Fridays, but they're run days, anyway); arriving at 7:30 and swimming before work, which would take some adjusting of my diurnal clock; or going after work, which would mean I'd get home 7:30 or 8 p.m. For the time being, I'm going to try to be religious about a 12:30 lunch on swim days and see how that works out.

In the name of whatever's holy this week, I hope they don't do the same thing with the running track. They have regular sessions up there with about a dozen developmentally challenged adults, and when you combine four or five other runners up there, that's pretty much capacity. With the unruly mob of future felons -- uh, sorry, leaders of our Just Society -- running would truly be impossible.

(Don't get me wrong, I don't hate kids. I just wish they all had my daughter's temperament, compassion and consideration.)