My baby was born with fins, so it's no surprise that two days after public pools opened this year, we were second in line to get in. When I read that pools would be at limited capacity, my relief over finally seeing an end to Cowboy's waiting, and my having to listen to endless requests, was replaced by panic.
What if we get to the pool and it’s already maxed out? I wondered. How will Cowboy react if we're turned away, forced to wait for the next session two and a half hours later? And how is he going to handle swimming for only an hour and forty-five minutes? All of our community pools are offering three short swim sessions a day, to give more people a chance to swim, and so equipment and restrooms can be disinfected three times a day.
And so, for the first time ever, we showed up for our inaugural swim of the season 30 minutes before the pool opened. That was Memorial Day; there were six lifeguards and seven of us swimmers. For once, we not only secured a table in the shade, we also had lounge chairs for sunning. It was our first-time-in-a-public-facility-in-three-months miracle.
Because it was only in the 80s, the water was chilly, but Cowboy wasn't fazed. I inched my way in, whining the entire time. After 57 laps around the water-dumping buckets, careful to time my rounds so I wouldn’t get caught in the waterfalls, my teeth stopped chattering. Cowboy was happy to be there, but not smiling much; my heart sank when I realized he missed his friends. He’s the epitome of “the more the merrier.”
After Cowboy went down the slide a couple of times, I turned to Flash and said, "Let's slide, too."
As soon as we got to the top of the ladder, ready to race down the side-by-side slides, I heard a whistle blow. I looked at Flash as I heard a lifeguard holler, "One at a time.” I waited while Flash slid, then followed. After we swam across the pool and headed back toward the slides, a different lifeguard approached us, saying, "The slides are for ages 12 and under." When I explained that the other lifeguard only told us “one at a time,” as I hoped this guard would cave to my puppy-dog eyes, she replied, "We have a lot of new lifeguards." Hmm. I’m not so sure; I saw several lifeguards checking the integrity of the slides after we slid. I suppose they were too polite to mention weight limits.
Contrary to his parents, Cowboy had no run-ins with the lifeguards.
On our next visit to the same pool, I thought for sure we’d be first to enter. Apparently, my competitive nature was bored during our stay-at-home marathon; now I’ll take a challenge wherever I can find one. Cowboy and I quickly grabbed our swim bags and cooler, which I’d put by the front door the night before, to give us an edge. I tried to drive the speed limit, confident that we had plenty of time. As we pulled into the parking lot, there were only four other cars there and nobody in line. Today’s the day, I bragged to myself. We’ll be first to pay, first to pick out our shade, and first in the pool. I threw my keys in the bag, and we headed out as Champions of the Pool.
But when we turned the corner toward the entrance, there they were. Three people in line before us. I never saw them get out of a car, and wondered if they’d been beamed down by Captain Kirk. That grandma must have sprinted with her grandsons, or camped out the night before. Rather than initiating an arm wrestling match to gain their line positions, I accepted second place peacefully.
It was another perfect day at the pool. Every other day, for two weeks, we went to public pools. Each time, there was hardly anyone there. It was bad for business, but great for us. On the eighth day of swim trips, my true love said to me, “Wave pool.” I was glad for the change of scenery. With a limited capacity of 150 in that pool, the 20 of us swimmers had plenty of space. We played in the waves, listening to Keith Urban over the sound system, and all was blissful. Then, I decided to get a tube to float on.
I should have known better. As I was hurrying to get ready that morning in my race to finally be first in line, I tripped on the kitchen rug, slamming my hip into the cabinet under the sink. It was an omen of the day to come.
Cowboy and I walked over to get our tubes. Of course, he’s the Master of Grace when it comes to sitting atop a tube or float; he makes it look easy. But I stayed in the shallow end to sit on my trusty tube, avoiding the tipping-over-while-trying-to-get-my-butt-on-the-tube-while-in-the-deep-end sideshow. Unfortunately, I was so focused on not humiliating myself, I hadn’t noticed the waves started up again while I was still in shallow water.
With all my might, I paddled with my arms to get out deeper. But the waves pushed me back. And then I paddled. And then they pushed. Being a flabby-armed fiftysomething-year-old, my paddle didn’t match that mighty water’s push. In less than 20 seconds, I was a landlubber, my butt stuck on the concrete as it hung through the hole in the tube; I’d washed up directly under a lifeguard’s chair.
“Well, that didn’t work out well,” I said as I looked directly up into the tan, young, white-toothed, cellulite-free lifeguard’s face.
“You want me to pull you out to the deep end?” the dear child asked.
Now, dear reader, there are times in life when you realize that you have nowhere to go but up. I was sure that every adult in the place had seen my attempt to be cool doing it on my own. I couldn’t risk that again, so I said, “That would be great.”
As it turned out, simply standing up and walking out to the deep water like a normal person would have been less embarrassing. I was convinced I heard children whispering to their parents, “Mommy, why is that lifeguard pulling that grown-up on a tube?”
Indeed. Why was I?
I thanked Malibu Barbie, and enjoyed my floating. Until I decided I wasn’t moving fast enough and needed the tube to be around my waist. Somehow, in spite of the sunny-with-100-percent-humiliation forecast that day, I was confident I could pull my knees up to my chest and put my feet and legs through the tube’s hole, to let them dangle in the water. Why? Why did I think that? Why didn’t I remember the omen? Why didn’t I remember the preceding five minutes?
I pulled up my right leg, and proceeded to put my foot through the hole. It wasn’t going in as I’d hoped, so I pushed with more force. Suddenly, I was staring at my sunglasses at the bottom of the pool, butt in the air, then bobbed back to the surface. I quickly looked around, and saw an eight-year-old boy right next to me, staring of course.
“Wow, that was pretty funny, huh?” I asked, trying to sound unshaken.
He just nodded and kept laughing.
I ditched the tube, and decided to back stroke across the pool. As I hung onto the side of the pool to push off, I thought I heard a whistle. But knowing I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I pushed off and swam to the center of the pool, where I floated on my back, the sounds of the world muffled. When I opened my eyes, I saw a lifeguard saying something, and her arms motioning towards the cement shore.
“…break,” I heard.
I answered with a confused look, my head fully above water by then.
“Ten-minute break,” she yelled, probably for the fifth time.
“Oh, sorry,” I hollered, as I turned to see that all the children had exited the pool.
As I walked toward the shallow end, I heard, “Ma’am?”
I turned back to the lifeguard, as she pointed to our tubes we’d put on the sidewalk by the pool.
“Oh, I’ll get them later,” I replied.
“You have to take them back with you; you can’t leave them here.”
It was the third time in a week I’d been corrected at a public pool. I was quickly becoming a pool delinquent. Thankfully, on our next two trips, I managed to behave myself, especially when our friends Flower and her son Casanova joined us. I try extra hard to not be a bad example in front of other people’s kids.
In the midst of our marathon public swimming, Flash and I had been in negotiations regarding buying an above-ground pool. It had been years since we’d had one; I don’t remember owning one, but there are photos to prove it. It was an easy task years ago, because Flash did all the work. A fact that was the point of contention.
“Flash, Cowboy wants a pool in the backyard.”
“It will kill the grass,” he argued his first point.
“It will grow back,” I answered.
“I had to do all the work last time,” he added.
Crickets chirped.
Cowboy turned to me and gave me The Look. You know it - the look no parent can resist. Well, not unless they have Tin Man’s affliction.
Finally, I said, “Okay, I’m out of this discussion. Cowboy and Flash, y’all have to work this out.”
Every time Cowboy came to me asking for a pool, I told him, “Talk to Dad about it.”
Finally, one evening when Flash was in the hot tub, Cowboy walked over and gave him The Look. I watched as Flash’s heart melted, and he said, “I’ll start looking for one.”
Two weeks went by, and not much was discussed about the pool. One evening, I asked, “Flash, have you been looking for a pool? They are getting hard to find now.”
Apparently, everyone in America thought public pools wouldn’t be opening this summer, or that it would be hard to get in due to limited capacity restrictions. Everywhere I looked on line, they were either sold out or the price was hiked up to $1,500. How awful. In the midst of all this craziness, raising prices to five times more breaks the “do unto others” clause.
“No,” Flash answered.
“Flash, you told Cowboy you would start looking.”
“No I didn’t.”
And then the verbal volleyball started. Finally, I quoted our exact conversation, including his telling Cowboy that he’d have to help take care of the pool.
“Well, I don’t remember saying I’d look.”
And so the frantic search was doubled, as Flash and I both googled.
Amazingly, Flash found one for only $89. The company was going out of business, so they were getting rid of inventory. He ordered it with a credit card we hadn’t used in years. Since we never received an order confirmation, I called our credit card company; the card had been inactivated due to inactivity. When I googled the pool company for contact information, numerous articles surfaced stating there was no such company; it was a scam used for stealing money and/or credit card information. I was never so glad to have an inactive card, and I’ll never skip researching a company when a deal sounds too good to be true.
We were back to square one. And then, my neighbor Vanessa and her daughter Jolie found several pools at Walmart. I couldn’t believe it. We had to make a decision quickly.
“Do we buy a pool that’s not as deep as we want, or do we go without?” I asked Flash.
We decided it was more important to stay cool, and to have a pool for Cowboy’s upcoming birthday party, than to wait around for bigger pools to be restocked in the Northern Hemisphere. As temperatures increased, Cowboy’s plans of a big dance party had become Cowboy’s water party – complete with a hot tub, pool, water balloons, etc. And I was grateful; there’s no better way to party in a Houston summer than with water. Rain or shine, we will party; our rain showers are often short-lived, and we’ve got ping pong and air hockey tables as backup.
And so it began. Phase 1 of Operation Pool. I called experts about the best way to level the ground. Somehow, over the years, we’d grown a hill in our backyard, right where the pool needed to be. I learned more about sand than I ever thought I’d need to know. I did price comparisons; dirt is not, in fact, dirt cheap. I learned how to estimate how much sand I needed. And eventually, I had a mountain of sand delivered to my driveway. We’ll be using it all year for various projects.
On a Friday night, I started shoveling sand into a wheelbarrow and taking it to the back yard, dumping it into the perfect circle that Flash had measured and spray painted onto the grass. Back and forth I went, willing myself to keep going. Until the mosquitoes won.
The next morning, Cowboy was my wheelbarrow man, and we couldn’t have finished it as quickly without his help. I worried about Flash in the extreme heat; he rented a U-Haul to transport the rented sod cutter to our house. Then he used the machine to cut slices of grass where the ground was too high. It worked well, but was still work. Cowboy can be quite the taskmaster when it comes to a pool being built. We had several people-are-more-important-than-things-and-your-dad-matters-more-than-the-pool talks. Cowboy would nod his head, and then sign “Pool.” Finally, Flash rested in the middle of the day, and I tried to take up the slack, running errands for tools, and running interference when Cowboy got bossy again.
By Sunday, Flash and I were spent. After I broke into tears that morning, I called my friend Jersey, since he’d worked in construction for years. He confirmed that my emotional state was a sign of too much heat from the previous day, and suggested I increase vitamin C. I drank an Emergen-C packet, and 15 minutes later felt great. That’s our new go-to drink for days in the sun.
Sunday afternoon, it was time to put the pool together. All of us helped; the assembly was nothing compared to the preparation. It was soon complete, and Cowboy went out frequently to see if the water was ready. Five hours later, the pool was full, and Cowboy was swimming within seconds.
Monday, the two-day process of testing water and adding chemicals began. Cowboy was patient, and in the meantime, his first summer wish came true. Since March, he’d wanted to go to a swimming party at his friend Daphne’s house with his closest friends there, which always takes precedence over swimming at public pools. And so, last week, he was reunited with his tribe again – Cowboy, Daphne, Casanova, and Paige picked up right where they’d left off months ago. And celebrating Paige’s twenty-second birthday made it more of a party. All felt right with the world; it was healing for me and Cowboy.
The next day, our pool was officially open full-time for the summer. Cowboy’s been in it every day since. The smile on his face and his most relaxed demeanor I’ve seen in three months is worth every electrolyte that left our bodies. Now that we’re not frequenting the public pools every other day, I’m getting more done around the house, as well as getting more downtime – much which involves floating in my own backyard. As a plus, public humiliation is down by 90 percent.
We’ll have Cowboy’s World Famous Dance Party sometime in September or October. In the meantime, every time I climb into that delightfully wet labor of love seven steps from my back door, I thank the good Lord for water. And for my Water Baby.