Swimming: Part Two

Once I could swim, my mother had a hard time getting me out of the water. We went to various local pools. Griffith Park’s huge one was kind of scary because of all the older teenagers trying to impress each other.  Much, much later in life I read a “Dear Abby “ column about how it was possible to get impregnated in a public pool from all the wandering sperm.  That was the end of the Griffith Park Pool for me.

There was another, smaller pool in the neighborhood where kids took lessons. It had a really stupid name that I can’t remember. We often went there and I often ignored my mom’s calls to get out of the water.

And then there was Jane’s. Whenever it was really hot, Jane would invite us over to swim.  Not, it always had to be made clear, to pet her bedlington terrier who didn’t like kids—but to swim.

Jane was my mother’s maid of honor.  Jane never married and lived with a woman doctor who never seemed to be there. The two homes they owned together both had pools.  The first home had a deep kidney shaped pool where I perfected my skills with a scuba mask and snorkel.  Needless to say, my favorite television program was SEA HUNT with Lloyd Bridges.  My main-non cowboy- hero was Jacques Cousteau and—after a science fair project—I was an expert on the bathyscape Trieste. (And also at painting a softball gray and adding portholes made out of the ends of an empty toilet paper roll.)

Then Jane moved to a new house that the couple built together. Each woman had a separate wing of the home (Jane's was always a purple theme) and the pool was a perfect rectangle bordered on one side by a sandstone wall and on the other by a deck with orchids. By the time we were invited to this house, I was a teenager and becoming too cool for the pool.  Years later, Jane would open her house to my in-laws when they came from Scotland for our wedding in 1979.  I’m sure that the David Hockney blues of Jane’s pool were a welcome change from the omnipresent grays of Scotland during the December miner’s strike that eventually led to Margaret Thatcher's election.