A few days ago, E came home from her first swim class in gym and her takeaway was, “I can’t believe how many people don’t know how to swim.”

The sad thing is that we do live in a community where swimming at the community pool is subsidized by a local foundation.

We are one of the few schools in the area that has a pool. We also have a competitive swim program that is relatively inexpensive, and while we currently have over 100 kids on our team, that’s only a small percentage of our population.

And still, we have many high school age kids who, as E put it: “Like, really can’t swim. I don’t mean they can’t do butterfly or something, I mean they can’t swim.”

And just like that, the universe set up a beautiful teaching moment.

Swimming was always important to me, and even if my kids decided they never wanted to compete, it was something that I was going to make sure that they could do well enough to survive if they ever ended up in water over their head.

Happily, two of them enjoyed it enough to compete, and one of them tolerates it because he likes the other people on the team. But it took a lot of time and energy to get them to that place. Not to mention money.

E is my most empathetic child and it very quickly became apparent to her, after thinking about her own experiences, why some people might not know how to swim. She was also quick to realize how important her gym class is to her classmates.

But E’s questions reminded me of a conversation I had about 30 years ago.

I had just started working as a swim instructor and lifeguard at a YMCA near my college. The aquatic director asked me if I would be interested in teaching adult swim lessons, both group and private ones. Having come from a place where “everyone knew how to swim,” I asked what I would be expected to teach, thinking it would be higher level stroke and technique work. The director laughed at me and said, “No, it’s nothing like that.”

My first class was eight adults who could not swim a single stroke to save their lives. Almost all of them had had some traumatic incident, usually as a child, that had turned the water into a terrifying place for them.

I quickly learned that adult swim lessons were about 90% group therapy and only about 10% actual swimming lesson. There was one older woman in the group, though, who wasn’t scared of being in the water. She just “never picked it up.”

Over the course of the six-week class, we had varying levels of success.

For some of them, just putting their faces in the water (while standing in waist deep water and holding onto the wall) was a major accomplishment. Others managed to move onto floating for a few seconds. My older woman, however, was on a mission. By this time, it was clear that she wasn’t going to pick it up overnight. But at the end of the six weeks, she asked if she could continue with me privately.

Over the course of a few months, I learned a lot more about her. She was a successful artist who had work hanging in galleries all around the world.

She was married to a retired professor who had been very successful in his own right, but was now faced with a debilitating disease that had him in a wheelchair. They both knew that it would eventually kill him. She was taking a leave of absence from her work to care for him, and she had a part-time aide coming a few hours a week to give herself a break.

She chose to use few of those hours to learn how to swim. Facing down a debilitating illness and certain death had made her want to “show her body who was boss.” It took us many months. Eventually I convinced her to stop paying for lessons and to just come to adult lap swim and practice on her own, where I could help her if needed.

The night she swam her first full solo length of the pool, we hugged each other and cried. As long as I worked there, she continued to swim, and I hope she kept it up long after I left. We lost touch as her husband deteriorated and I moved on with my life.

I have probably taught hundreds, if not thousands, of kids to swim over the last 30 years, but she is the one student who changed everything about what I thought I knew about teaching people to swim.

You see, the reason that she “never picked up” swimming is because she was Black. It took me years to realize the story that she didn’t tell me was that where and when she grew up was during segregation, and that swimming pools simply weren’t accessible to her.

I spent a lot of time in a swimming community that operated under the stereotype that “Black people can’t swim.” It took a long time, and maybe in some areas it hasn’t happened yet, to transition to the idea that it’s pretty hard to be able to do something when you weren’t even allowed to try it.

Unlike me, who could encourage her kids to participate in an activity that I was already good and loved to do, it would be a lot harder for Black parents who never had that opportunity to push their children in that direction, thus creating a problem that lasted generations after pools were desegregated.

Since then, I’ve always tried to understand what brings people to the pool and what motivates them to stay there.

Understanding that has made me a better coach, and a better person.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News