The summer just before I turned eight
years old was magical. Many mornings I awoke to the shimmery song of cicadas,
the background music of Cleveland summers. Our house was on a street that had
been developed for years, but just a block away was several miles of woods.
Within a year or two it would sprout tract houses like mushrooms. Until then,
it was my private nature preserve.
I spent many days divining careful
paths among the trees, stepping over fallen branches, enchanted by the oblique
angle of sunbeams through the canopy. My dad had taught me basics about botany
and bugs, showed me where to look for little treasures. Green May apples grew
under bowed leaves near the forest floor. Spider webs glistened with dew. An overturned log would reveal a world of
grubs, worms and scurrying wood lice. I would find sassafras trees, crush a few
of their hand-shaped leaves between my fingers and drink in the earthy smell of
tea.
In June, I went with my dad to city
hall to buy a pool pass. A functionary upsold us on a season pass for the whole
family for $40. My dad went for it, and a few minutes later, I was holding a warm
laminated piece of pink cardboard. It was my ticket to unlimited admissions to
the public pool at the end of our street. Although my sister and brother went
just a few times, and my parents never went, my dad more than got his money’s
worth from me alone.
I often went to the pool three times
a day. After my morning swim class, I came home for lunch and returned in time
for the 1pm opening bell. With pool pass pinned to my towel, I’d park my bike
in the rack in the parking lot, and sprint into the girls’ bathroom (labeled
“Gulls”; the boys’ was labeled “Buoys”) where I’d pretend to take the required
pre-swim shower.
Next order of business to was to
stake out a claim with my towel. Cement or grass was the choice; I almost always
chose cement. Although I disliked having to exit the pool during the obligatory
20-minute adult swim each hour, I cherished stretching out on my belly on the
hot pavement. The heat would immediately vaporize the droplets off my skin,
filling my body with a warm, relaxing buzz like the feeling I would later get from
a shot of whiskey.
My friends and I made up crazy
underwater games, such as charades, seeing who could scream the loudest, and
striking fashion poses. We always opened our eyes underwater and never wore
goggles, nose plugs or earplugs. Such things were for sissies and losers and
thus out of the question. Our hard line on this issue meant we’d return home
from the pool with blood-red eyes stinging from chlorine and droplets of water
temporarily obstructing our hearing.
Evenings at the pool were my favorite
time. Fewer people meant shorter lines at the slide and boards, and more room
to myself. As twilight began tingeing the sky with pastel pink and periwinkle,
the underwater lights came on. This was the time for floating languorously on my
back, gazing skyward. What would it feel like, I wondered, to ascend like the
Apollo astronauts to the moon? I had savored the chewy, chocolate space sticks
they ate aboard Skylab and drunk many glasses of Tang. I’d assembled a tiny toy
moon rover, powered by twisting a rubber band, from a box of Cheerios. But what
would it feel like if the sky was literally no longer the limit?
When the final bell signaled closing
time, my exhausted legs could barely lift me up the ladder. I felt like I’d landed
on Jupiter and weighed 1,000 pounds. My three-minute bike ride home seemed
infinitely long, the whole world cast in languid slow motion.
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