A New Swimming Pool and a Summer of Quiet Transition

How my family is diving into a new chapter

my pride and joy

We have a pool now.

It’s a hulking thing made of brown metal poles and a plastic liner. It sits in the middle of the yard just in front of the trampoline that is tucked away in the corner under one of the old, sprawling oak trees. We bought it from Walmart; it was delivered to our doorstep in a box that seemed much too small.

We’ve casually tossed around the idea of putting in a pool for years. It’s one of those things we always talked about but never acted upon. Like going to the mountains for Thanksgiving or moving away from Florida and its failing schools, profound backwardness, and general toxicity.

Our idle discussions never went anywhere because I am incredibly lazy and resistant to change. Also, in-ground pools are extremely expensive.

We talked about how nice it would be to have a pool to enjoy while the world ends (would taking a cool dip lessen the burn of nuclear fallout?), and every other summer or so, we’d buy one of those tiny inflatable pools so the kids could use it three times before losing interest or puncturing it. For years, the deflated carcasses of pools tended to gather around the front corner of the house. Out of sight. Where old toys and dreams went to die amongst a tangle of aggressive grasses and weeds.

This summer, however, everything changed. First, my children are way too big for small inflatable pools — my oldest is rapidly approaching me in height, and he apparently has surpassed me in shoe size. (I just learned this fact a few weeks ago, and I’m still very angry about it.) Second, my mom moved from her home in Florida (about 50 minutes from our house) to North Carolina. These two things might not seem to be related, but they kind of are.

Life is a weird tapestry.

As a kid, I had a fraught relationship with swimming pools. When I was around 11, my parents and I moved to a house that had a pool. My two best friends lived just behind us, and we spent hours in the pool on hot summer days, often playing a makeshift baseball game using a paddle ball and a snorkeling flipper as a bat. The house rules were extremely complex, so I won’t get into them, but the action was medium paced, and I’m quite sure, thrilling to watch.

I loved playing in my pool with my friends, but I dreaded venturing out into the wider world of pools. Pools are a staple of suburban Florida life, and it turns out, at least back in my day, they tended to be completely lawless zones where the likelihood of embarrassment was high. Not only was there the whole being half naked thing (sadly, swim shirts weren’t really popular in the early 90s), but nobody else even knew about flipper-pool baseball, so on the relatively rare occasions I was invited to someone else’s pool, I was forced to play mortifying games like Marco Polo.

I lived in fear of being Marco or Polo or It or whatever it was you called the person who had to close their eyes in that god forsaken game.

Can you imagine anything worse than being 11 years old, thrashing around helplessly and embarrassingly with your eyes closed, shirt off, disgusting pool water splattering in your nose and mouth, pathetically squeaking out “Marco” in a tiny voice every few seconds in a pool of acquaintances? I can’t.

I remember being invited to a pool party at a random school friend’s house. I don’t know why I was invited. I rarely left the comfortable familiarity of my very small friend circle. The party turned out to be a nightmare. Not only did they watch an inappropriate movie (I don’t remember what it was, but it was definitely NOT The Sound of Music), but Marco Polo was also played.

I grew gills that fateful night. Hiding deep underwater out of reach of a revolving cast of Marcos or Polos, who all looked normal with their eyes closed, trying to tag slippery adolescents. I would’ve looked like a total embarrassment if I were ever it, though. Like a complete fool. I was certain of it. So I grew gills.

That house from my childhood with the pool, which my brother and his family now own, happens to be located next door to the house my mom just sold and moved away from. Much like flipper-pool baseball, it’s a bit complicated, but we had a mini compound setup going on for the better part of two decades, and it was pretty spectacular.

There was a large backyard at one house and a pool at the other, where flipper-pool baseball was the official sport and Marco Polo was never played. At least not on my watch. There was a path through the woods that my dad fashioned years ago that made it easy to get back and forth without walking the extra twenty feet or so down to the street. We laid strings of lights along the edge of the path connecting houses every December. When my nieces were younger, one of their friends said that walking down the lighted path seemed like walking into heaven.

That might’ve been a bit much and a little morbid, honestly, but I guess sometimes it did feel that way to me, too.

Probably for different reasons.

The yellow sticky notes plastered on the door and the walls and under the light switches when I returned home after helping my mom move to North Carolina carried a clear message.

Or rather, a clear question: “Can we have a pool?”

picture about a hundred of these

The “yes or no” bit was a nice touch, but since I can be a stubborn person, particularly when assaulted by sticky notes, I refused to circle an answer.

The key to parenting effectively is to avoid answering questions whenever possible. Particularly questions presented in writing. Anyway, I was tired, and I figured my wife and I would handle the situation the way we always do: (1) by letting it languish until the kids forgot about it or (2) just giving in without fanfare because we secretly wanted what the kids wanted.

There is no suspense here. As you already know, option two won out.

Summer is miserably hot and often boring. This summer with the big move and the kids who won’t stop growing and the accompanying sense of upheaval we are all feeling, things feel even more difficult. More tenuous. The geopolitical climate certainly doesn’t help matters either. Literal concentration camps are being built in my home state as I type this, and half the population either yawns at the news or cheers. Doing anything feels pretty stupid.

So, in the face of all that, a pool seemed like, well, not a solution to anything, really, but a decent distraction. Not only was it something fun for the kids to do that wasn’t tethered to a screen or device, but it was also a fun project for me.

Putting the pool together was surprisingly easy, as it turned out, but there’s a lot more that goes into it. There is cleaning to do and chemical pouring and water testing, and fishing leaves off the surface of the glistening water with one of those skimmer nets, or in our case, an old fishing net that has been hanging in the garage since the boys briefly got into the idea of fishing several years ago.

pool in progress

So it was that I found myself one recent afternoon dragging a patio chair off the faded red stones of our small terrace with one hand, a hardback book tucked under my other arm. The chair’s curved metal base made tracks in the sandy soil as it raced to escape the midday sun.

Terrace is an insanely pretentious word to use here, but I honestly couldn’t come up with anything else. Picture like twelve largeish, weathered stone pavers sitting a bit askew after years of neglect right outside an extremely cluttered screen porch, and you’ll get the general idea.

Anyway, I was forced to relocate from the terrace-like structure because the kids and some of their friends were swimming in the new pool, and the closest available shade was a few steps away, in the dirt and weeds that make up the rest of our backyard.

Florida summers are not for the weak. I’ve managed to survive so far by some combination of luck, fortune, and the uncanny ability to stay in the shade as much as possible when I find myself outdoors between the hours of 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. Those gills I developed all those years ago sometimes come in handy, too. Even though I rarely swim anymore.

I took a glance at the pool and noticed it seemed to be leaning a bit to the right, like an old man bracing himself against a steady headwind. Ah well. A problem for another day. I sat down and opened my book, an essay collection by Hanif Abdurraqib about basketball and life and existing as a human, with a foolish feeling of optimism I really should’ve lost by now after over a decade of parenting. Reading while the children play? Please.

Before I got to the end of the first sentence, fat drops of water splattered down on the cream-colored page. The shrieking, which is kind of like a white noise machine setting to me at this point in my existence, became more pointed and personal.

“ANDREW!! ANDREW!!” One of the neighborhood friends called. “Olivia is cheating! She opened her eyes.”

Marco Polo. Of course. I let out a sigh.

“There is no such thing as cheating in Marco Polo. We all do what we have to do to survive.”¹

Marco Polo is much like life in that way. You do what you have to do to get through it. Whether it’s making up gods or growing gills or buying an above-ground pool to try to stop time.

Time is a thief, but sometimes we can fight back, if only a little bit. We can’t hold onto the way things were or the way things have always been, but we can create something new.

Like a wobbly-looking pool, which, if you think about it in just the right way, is probably a pretty solid metaphor for how fleeting and frivolous life is.

Florida Man Florida-ing in a more literary way

1. That’s definitely what I said. I would never lie to you for the sake of a story.

Words and photos by me, Andrew Knott. Best known for duck.

Books:

Love’s a Disaster - contemporary fiction about a marriage proposal gone wrong, complicated families, second-chance love, Florida, sword fighting, and punk rock music.

Fatherhood: Dispatches From the Early Years - essays and humor about the very early years of my parenting journey