Childhood Saga: The Pool

As I've told Daniel, I fear that childhood month will ruin me, because I think I'm a bit too nostalgic for my childhood. Maybe I'm just too nostalgic about a lot of things. Or perhaps I'm just making this up because I'm thinking about it, since the purpose of this month is indeed to look back on our childhoods. But anyways, nostalgia for whatever reason is both a beautiful and depressing emotion, and it hits hard as autumn descends upon us. It is that emptiness at the pit of your stomach, the chill in the wind, and the look in the stranger's eye as you pass her by.

But most of my childhood memories are happy ones and they have a bright nostalgic quality to them. Especially since most of my big childhood memories involve Daniel, and as you can see he's still around. It makes me very sad to think about those with particularly unhappy childhoods, since even though I don't sugarcoat mine, I realize that I had a lot of fun imagining entire worlds with my friends. Especially with Daniel and me, that was a huge facet of growing up. We could make entire worlds out of the littlest things. Life wasn't about how much you could do, how succesful you are, what your job is, and how many countries you've visited and hobbies you have. Rather, it was about how much fun you could have. Nothing else. And we could make games out of anything. I'm sure I'll talk about this more in the future. Anyways, that's just an opening to my portion of the Childhood Saga.

So...the pool. Holy fuck. That means summer time. And there was nothing quite as orgasmic as summer. Let's be honest here. Intercourse is a let-down compared to the feeling you got in elementary when the last day of school was finally over, you hit that bus home, and then a whole world of possiblities opened up before you. Again, these aren't possiblities like traveling abroad over the summer to learn a language, meet some cool new trendy-type people, and develop some valuable life-skills. Possiblities meant video games, sports, and the fucking pool.

Conveniently the pool was located directly across the street from my house. I don't mean like around the block or down the road. I mean right the fuck across from my house. Its proximity can be shown in a pointless challenge that Daniel and I had, which I sometimes doubt we ever completed. Because the hardest part of going to the pool was the initial plunge or creep in (if the pool was cold, which Waterford's pool often was), we thought it pretty ballsy if we broke out into a run starting from my front door and culminating in a dive into the pool. This was somewhat challenging task, because it involved running across a lot of gravel and rocks barefooted, or it involved taking off one's shoes at a full run. I'm not sure if we ever did this, but I like to think we did. Daniel could comment on it.

Now, for clarification, the Waterford pool was technically called Greystone Pool, named after my house. My dad claims that it was built for his grandfather, who had polio. That seemed pretty common back in the day, showing just how old my dad is. It has had its lion's share of lifeguards through the years, ranging from a young Timbo Cotter's older brother to my own brother to some kid with dreadlocks who liked to play the bongos and left Daniel and I unattended quite a bit to go "do something" behind the pool shed, to the most famous crop of lifeguards that were there during the "high summer" of pool-going, a time when Greg, Daniel, and I went to the pool basically literally every day over this particular summer. I'm going to focus on this summer, because it was a bangin' time for all.

Purists will say this isn't really part of our "childhood," per se, since this summer took place sometime around freshman or sophomore year of high school, but I really couldn't give less of a fuck, because I'm on a roll! Haha. So I believe this was the summer when we invented pool dunking, which was a glorious sport involving jumping off the diving board and dunking a small ball (the best ball was the small signed soccer ball given to my brother by our team, the year when he coached Daniel and me and the world's best soccer team, but that's another story for another day) into an intertube (or I guess technically the rubber inside part of a car tire, since intertubes always popped). But we weren't fucking losers. We didn't just dunk it. We did 360 flips and 720s and of course Daniel specialized in all sorts of reverses. Greg wasn't really much of a technical dunker, but what he lacked in specialized tricks, he more than made up for in attitude and pure height off that diving board. Daniel has a great picture showcasing this, as it is only the lower half of Greg's body, his torso and head well off camera. We milked this sport for all it was worth, and Daniel has a solid video of it set to Joe Satriani showing a variety of dunks. But please remember, just as with all of our invented games, the best stuff was never caught on camera. For whatever reason, whenever we turned a camera on, we always started fucking up and being too self-conscious.

This was also a time of hormones and jackassery. Greg's crush on the lifeguard Allie was well-documented, as was his hatred of her boyfriend-lifeguard Matt Vess (who didn't hate this chump?). There were these pool devices called torpedos or something that you slapped into the water and they would shoot at your groin-area way too fast. I remember Greg and Matt Vess having lots of fights with these. I won't lie and say I didn't have a crush on the lifeguard Ashley. That was Greg and me in our primes right there. Daniel of course could've gotten anyone he wanted, but played it cool as always.

There was a sign-in book at the pool, but like virtually everyone else, we never really paid attention to it. Daniel and Greg should've been paying guest fees all summer, but I doubt they ever spent a cent (Daniel's family would sign up for the pool sometime in August, which really doesn't make much sense, because I'm pretty sure it costs the same as signing up in June). To show our total disdain for "the man," we would sign in as joke names, and this culminated in the epochal "Villain Week" that some say stretched well over a month. While my best contribution for that particular "week" was Grand Moff Tarkin, Daniel took the cake with "The EPA from Ghostbusters." Fuck, that's good. Reminds me of his "Comment of the Year" (did you win two of these in a row?). Now that I think about it, Mike, didn't we award someone a comment of the year once? Anyways, it's clearly my goal to win this award at least once in life. I love how much Greg and I hated giving it out to you (twice?), but that we knew we had to. Haha.

What else is there to say about the pool? I'm sure Daniel can think of some things.

Growing up, there were too many obnoxious and disgusting and wild families to even begin to recount here. Such stand-outs are the hairy armpits of Mrs. Woolcott, the Jarvises, and the Hayfords.

I'm sure I'll think of more things to talk about later.

--Edward