Dad used to talk about some of the crazy things he would do as a child for cheap entertainment. When he wasn't helping out at home, or out working a small job in the neighborhood, he was out in the city. Looking at people and things would form adventures. He once told me on a particularly warm day that he had this urge to jump into the Danube River and cool off. He said that he was with one of his friends and not his cautious cousin Joska because he tended to be a tattle tale and my Dad wasn't up for proper Hungarian discipline or as we would call it stateside; smacking.
He and his friend make their way to the river's edge to see all the happenings. It didn't seem fun enough to merely take a dip in the water. Especially not while they were watching this heavily trafficked waterway ferry through ships with freight delivery that was surely escorting goods and people headed to what had to be an exciting destination. It was a sunny day and early enough yet for some fun.
He said that he did not know what got into him, but that he and his friend somehow dared each other to see who could hold their breath the longest. That got old quick and somehow they arrived at the challenge of proving how long they could hold their breath by daring each other to swim beneath the hull of one of these docked ships to the other side. Whoever could do it first would be the winner. So they select one of the larger ones determining that it would be wimpy to settle for anything smaller. They decided to chose a point in the middle and off they went.
Dad said that the swim felt like an eternity. The depth of the ship and the distance it would take to clear the path to take that needed breath had been greatly underestimated. The other conditions that they had not realized was the lack of clarity at that depth and how much colder the water would be than at the surface.
Halfway through the distance, anxiety began to set in. The water was calm and quiet and my father was left alone with his thoughts. What would happen to his grandmother if he did not survive this? What would happen if he did, and suffered injury? How will he get out of this and when was he going to make the surface to breathe again. When? When? I imagined him feeling the cool, unforgiving ships bottom and being scraped by the occasional group of barnacles. He really in that instant began to understand his faith, all the things the "padre" would say to him as an Altar Boy at church and just what it meant to really surrender for help. Just as he felt he might have to succumb to this dark, floating tomb he somehow reached the noisy surface.
Dad would go on to say that he and his friend made it, barely. They never tried to determine a winner, nor, would they ever speak of it again. Dad would reflect with a look of being somewhere far and said many a time that this would join the list of the many times he escaped death.
Survival of the events that would continue to unfold around his childhood would require great risk, courage, and prayer. Holding his breath would become a way of being for many years to come.
