When I was in my teens, my family went to a swimming pool a few blocks from where we lived.
It was a community pool, and we paid a fee each year to belong. I remember many hot afternoons hanging out at the pool, swimming and playing games in the water and getting out for five minutes every hour when the lifeguard called out “Rest period!”
If I remember correctly, I think once kids turned 16, they didn’t have to vacate the pool for those five minutes. It was always more pleasant during those few minutes that the little kids weren’t in the pool.
I don’t live in Virginia any more, and when we lived in California, our neighborhood pool was much smaller than the one I used to visit. But it was still wonderful to get into the water in the late afternoon of a hot day and cool off some.
The only problem was that in the smaller pool, even a small number of children made for an awful lot of splashing. The children tended to be a lot younger — at least half of them appeared to be 5 or 6 years old — and they got a lot of joy out of making the water fly.
Our pool in Georgia is much larger — although shallower. — but in a community of senior citizens there’s very little splashing.
The California kids didn’t seem to play organized games. In all the times I went to our pool, I never heard the words “Marco” or “Polo” even once. I suppose I could have tried to teach them, but as wary as kids have become, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear one of them yelling “Stranger danger!” the first time I said anything.
Actually, I did have a brief conversation with one little boy one afternoon. I was standing in water up to my shoulders at the edge of the pool, trying to keep my copy of John D. MacDonald’s “The Dreadful Lemon Sky” from getting wet.
He walked up to me along the side of the pool and asked me a question?
“Can I jump in right here?” he asked, gesturing to a spot about a foot from me.
I didn’t pause for a second. “No.”
He looked disappointed, so I explained to him that I didn’t want to be splashed, but if he went to the other side of the pool, the water was the same depth.
That’s what he did, but I still felt bad.
You kids get off my lawn.
Oh dear Lord, I had turned into Bob Dole.