Special memories of summer swimming

Olympic sized swimming pool lane with stripe on the bottom
Olympic sized swimming pool lane with stripe on the bottom

When I was a kid, our "swimming pool" was an oscillating lawn sprinkler.

When the sprinkler broke - which it often did when somebody inadvertently stomped on it - we would take turns putting our thumbs over the mouth of a garden hose to spray down our neighborhood friends. This was called "getting squirted" - as in, "Hey, do y'all want to come over this afternoon and get squirted?"

There was a members-only swimming pool in our little Maury County town, but our family couldn't afford the dues. We lived two blocks from the Duck River, but the river's current was too strong for kids to swim. Occasionally we took a 30-minute car trip to Swan Creek to scavenge for landscaping rocks and to sit in the cool, rushing creek waters.

Complicating things for us kids, my family belonged to a fundamentalist church in which the older congregants believed that "mixed bathing" - a dusty term for males and females swimming together - was a borderline sin. We occasionally broke from church orthodoxy to travel to nearby state parks to take advantage of their "Olympic-sized" pools.

I was forever hoping that the real Olympics would somehow land in Limestone or Chapel Hill - little towns in middle Tennessee - to take advantage of these man-made wonders. There was something about "Olympic-sized" that sounded "world-class" and elevated these outings to near-mythic proportions in my little mind. For all I knew, that was a United Nations-sized kiddie pool over there, too.

I remember my dad once gave me $5 for diving off the high board at Davy Crockett State Park in Limestone, Tenn. I made the trip up the diving-board ladder several times before I could coax my waxy-white, shivering body to dismount the board headfirst.

Almost every summer, we would take a trip to visit relatives in the Tampa Bay, Fla., area, which usually meant a stopover at some budget motel in Middle Georgia. Thus, my sister and I could end a long day of sitting on a mattress in the back of our Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon with a dip in a motel pool.

Heaven.

Swimming, for me, was always associated with celebratory events. It was special, joyful, rare.

Maybe that's why, when I bought my first house, I chose one with a pool. But stripped of its "specialness," the seldom-used pool became largely ornamental. When my wife and I welcomed our first child, we soon moved to a different house - partly because the idea of having pool and a toddler seemed dangerous.

When our two sons got old enough to enjoy weekend visits to our town's community pool, we became regulars there. I don't know if it's an Olympic-sized pool, but it's big enough not to be overcrowded on any days except Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.

It's the only place our two sons and I can play together for hours and not get bored. We can toss a ball for long stretches before our older son, age 14, needs to wander away for a few minutes to establish his independence. Sometimes I look around and I'm the only adult in the pool. Still, I carry on with my fun with the boys, unfazed by being the goofy, happy dad throwing wounded ducks with the foam rubber football.

An afternoon at the pool is one of the few experiences I know that can be both relaxing and invigorating. My favorite part of the pool experience, though, is the comforting feeling of pulling on dry clothes after a post-swimming shower. There's something about warm fabric on chilled skin that reminds me of being 10 years old.

At 58, feeling that visceral memory is special, and beckons me back to the pool again and again.

Like the sparkling blue waters at a mid-century Holiday Inn somewhere in Middle Georgia.

Mark Kennedy is a resident of Signal Mountain. His columns appear in the Times Free Press on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Contact him at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.

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