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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.