Swimming Pool

11

Write about your first experience of swimming. How old were you? Was it in a swimming pool with an instructor, or someone kicked you and you fell into a lake?  Were you with your friends, your parents or by yourself? Did you learn how to swim eventually? Do you love it, hate it, or are you indifferent to it? Visit  Rise and Write for more daily writing prompts,

I don't remember not swimming.  My earliest memories were of going with my mom, or an older sister to the splash pool next to the large pool in my home town.  This splash pool had two square water fountains that turned on in the morning when the pool opened and shut down when the big pool closed. The enclosed  splash pool was staggered so the center between the two spraying fountains perhaps got about 18 inches deep, and gradually less depth as you moved away towards the outside up to the dry side walk that lined the pool. Here is where the babies, the toddlers, and the young preschoolers played. Here is where I also walked on hot summer mornings with my son the first two summers of his life when our first house was only four blocks away. 

As we got older, we graduated to the big pool.  Each summer we would each get a season pass.  The pass was not the credit card variety if today, but a cloth patch that was sewed on your swimsuit.  This pass meant any summer day we had a ride into town, or were ambitious enough to bike the 5 miles in and then back home again, we could be at the the pool. I don't remember taking any formal swim lessons, but oddly, can't recall ever not knowing how to swim, except for the splash pool days.  My mother was terribly afraid of the water, so it was not her that taught us. My dad would have either been working long hours in construction, on the road  putting shoes on horses around the state, or working in the barns, large garden or fruit trees, so was not the teacher either.  It must have been one or more of my older siblings and their friends that helped me and my sisters learn. I don't know who taught them.

Throughout elementary and junior high, I loved that pool. My friends, sisters, and I would try and get there early and seek out a spot not too close, but easy to see the locker room entrance to the pool that let us see who was coming, and easy view to see the diving boards so as not to miss the really good divers.  There were two diving boards at the far end of the pool and the life guards one by one would let kids climb up and dive, or more often cannonball into the water.  There was always a few non or minimal ability swimmers that were goaded into jumping off, knees shaking the whole time.  I fortunately never witnessed anything tragic, but on many occasions I recall a life guard jumping in to help the struggling novice to the ladder. We played games of Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Who turned out the lights?, and Marco Polo.  We dove for coins or sticks.  These were real sticks, not the made for pool diving sticks used today.

I loved that pool, and then, overnight, I didn't. I don't know if it was the summer before high school, or the summer even before that when I stopped going.  It suddenly felt juvenile and like the pool was over run with either  idiot little boys, giggling little girls, and  yelling and bossing parents with their kids. We moved to the beach, the strip of sand on the St Croix that separated Minnesota and Wisconsin. 

With my family, once we moved from walking distance, I didn't take my kids to the splash pool much.  We always had a back yard set up that I could fill or add to each morning, gently warming up for use later in the day. My kids had formal lessons at the high school pool, and we swam weekends at the lake. Eventually the community pool, leaking hundreds of gallons of water a day, was removed, and a new 0" depth pool and aquatic center was built. My kids were starting school then and we used that pool a lot.  My youngest still does. I don't know if there are any of these community pools left.  Water parks  seem to have replaced all the ones I was aware of.  They are of  another time, another era.  This pool, as many were, was a product of middle class expansion in the 1950's.  In keeping with other modern times, these pools are too simplistic, not enough wow.  I miss it now, or miss the nostalgia.  Whenever I watch the movie The Sand Lot, the scenes at the pool are my favorite. That was my pool.