When I was a little girl, I was a swimming fool. The city pool was a few blocks from our house.
First of all, I think they had to drain it every week and refill it with water they piped in from the South Pole.
You’d think with so many that were sharing this cold crammed packed water we would have all gotten a horrible disease like typhoid fever, leprosy or at the very least, Polio, but the water was either too cold to sustain microbial life or nobody could ever stay in long enough to catch anything.
Until I was at least 4 years old, all my summer mornings were spent begging and pleading with my mother to let me go to the swimming pool. But when I turned 4 years old, she decided I was old enough to go to the city pool with my older brother and sister. So every morning I’d get up and kill time by playing hide and seek with the neighborhood kids until the magical hour of 1:00 pm when the city pool opened.
My mother would fix us a tuna sandwich and make us wait half an hour before we could head out to the pool lest we would get a cramp and drown.
For some reason known only to 1960's, the most dangerous thing a person could do would be to down a tuna sandwich and then dive directly into a body of water.
Mother knew "You would get a cramp and you would drown." Period. End of story.
The towel you brought to the swimming pool said a lot about how well your parents had their acts together. The parents who had their acts totally together bought their children their own beach towels every summer with a cute picture of a whale or a beach umbrella emblazoned across its front.
Other parents who didn’t have their acts quite as together didn’t mind if their child brought whatever towel happened to be hanging on the towel rack that day. And then there were the parents who didn’t have their acts together at all. These were the parents who were big believers in sun-dried kids.
My parents fell into the middle category. We would take some dingy towel off the towel rack everyday and fold it in half length-wise and roll it up. Then I would put on my thongs (which is the sixties speak for flip-flops) and We’d head out down the block to the city pool to join the other children who were also addicted to the swimming pool as much as we were.
Looking back on it now, we went most days without fail. Most kids were sun-dried kids and for a while I wanted to fore-sake my towel to fit in.
Anyway, we would simply find a dry spot on the cement and lay there until we got hot enough to brave the frigid waters of Antarctica for another ten minutes of splish-splashing hypothermia.
Most of my activity at the pool was hanging around the neck of either my brother or sister. I learned to swim by the summer's end because they got tired of the little anchor.
My older sister was always at the diving board. Her ‘go to’ dive was a jackknife. Her friend, Judy, was a whiz at a dive called the cutaway. While the girls worked on their dives, the boys were perfecting their cannonballs — a dive that never made any sense to me because why make a big splash if you can’t see it? But I do remember the boys who were a little on the hefty side being much better at the cannonball than their skinnier girl counterparts. Plus it was fun to get everyone splashed.
I have never been hungrier than I was in the 1960's. Being a kid you were always hungry. The hunger you feel from only eating one bite of breakfast before school and counting the seconds until lunch. The hunger you feel after waiting for lunch to find that you are too finicky to eat hamburger gravy and butter sandwiches. And then there’s the hunger you feel after school from being too picky for lunch or Sunday's Pancake breakfast, fried chicken lunches and then left-over fried chicken for supper. Did I mention I used to detest Chicken!
But the hunger I felt after swimming all afternoon in the city pool beats them all. It’s the kind of hunger that only several bowls of Kix swimming in a soup of sugary milk can satisfy. Sitting at the kitchen table, eating Kix with the late afternoon sun pouring through the window and knowing that after you finish your last bowl, the Three Stooges will be on. Does life get any better than that?
I think not.
Nana
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