Chapter 3 (PART - 1)

Pool Owners’ Pleasures And Perils

When the swimming season opens everyone is enthusiastic. But no one is more enthusiastic than your children's friends. For two weeks before you plan to open the pool they have been appearing with their suits and towels under their arms, or wearing their suits under their jeans and clam diggers, and trying to act very nonchalant. This latter group is made up of ten-year-olds who have learned by now that it isn't polite to ask; they just stand around all day with a kind of yearning look. So the day you say you will open your pool, you'd better open it, or be prepared to hear the most mournful wails.

There is nothing so startling as the first time a neighbor child comes to your door dressed in a swimming suit and announces at your breakfast table,”My mother says I have to be home by five. “This happens only once. Next time you are prepared with:”Five minutes before eleven, or five minutes after eleven?”"Before, I think,”and that's settled.

When you are doing your Christmas shopping, you may see a child who looks familiar to you, but you just can't place him. When he sees you staring at him, he gives you a very disinterested look, but some time later you recall that he was one of the children who swam in your pool the preceding summer. The reason why you do not recognize one another is that you both have all your clothes on.

You will always have swimming pool friends, i.e., people you only see in the summer. But this is fine, because this is about all you have in common with one another. You have the pool, and people like to swim. How many of these strangers you have visiting your pool will depend on a great many things on how many children you have; on how many friends they have; and on how many friends their friends have. How many friends of friends you allow will depend on how much time you have and on how bighearted you are. It is very difficult, how ever, when eight little boys and girls are swimming, and an eager face appears and someone yells”Hi, Billy,”for you to say anything else but”Do you have a suit, Billy?"

This question brings up another point, by the way, which is worth discussing. Even though you are loaded down with suits of many sizes, it is a good idea to send your young friends home to get their own suits and towels. In this way, you will not be blamed for letting a child swim whose parents had called the doctor in the middle of the night before because the child had a temperature of 103. It will also eliminate the problem of an irate mother stamping her foot angrily on the pool deck because her child, who won't get out of the water, has a bongo lesson in fifteen minutes.

Sometimes neighborhood children who swim frequently in your pool avoid the great inconvenience of having to tote a suit back and forth by leaving their suits in your dressing room. Often the mothers of these children will call to say that their family is leaving for the beach in five minutes, that they have looked high and low for their child's suit. Is it at your pool? The pool owner checks to find that another child is wearing the
suit and is making great waves in a life raft at that moment, but promises the mother she will get the child out of the suit as fast as she can, or would she like her child to borrow a dry suit for the trip? Well, this can get pretty complicated. Sometimes the child who borrows the dry suit continues to wear it a few times at the pool until, one day, he is accused by the original owner of swiping his suit. The accused culprit in turn accuses the pool owner of losing his suit, leaving the pool owner thoroughly confused.

But there are disadvantages in sending a child home to get a suit, because in ten minutes the phone will ring, and not wanting to leave the children unsupervised, you have no choice but to ask all the children to get out of the water while you answer the phone. And then you spend the next five minutes convincing the mother: No, it is no trouble; Yes, you did invite him; No, you didn't know he was a twin; Yes, you do supervise (except when the phone rings); and Yes, you would tell him to go straight to Grandma's house. Certainly you would want to make certain that your children were being supervised if they were in a neighbor's pool, so don't take offense when mothers call to make sure that you are going to watch their offspring. You watch them even though they are all good swimmers. Boys and girls around ten years old have usually had enough swimming lessons and experience in the water to make it a pleasure to watch them. To encourage more swimming and less fooling around, you should remove tubes, life rafts and kick boards before they arrive. They will never miss them.

It is also a good idea to find out how well each child already swims. It is better to find this out by a test performance rather than from verbal testimony. If a child has difficulty swimming the width of your twenty-foot pool, he will not be very safe in deep water, and should be told confidentially to stay within the boundaries of the shallow end confidentially, so that he will not feel humiliated in front of the”good”swimmers. If he is a big enough splasher and kicker, chances are the others will not discover that he is not a good swimmer; and even if they do, he will not necessarily become a target for ridicule.

If the fun seems to be diminishing, or if the children have resorted to doing nothing but cannon balls and can openers, suggest a game (see”Water Games for Swimmers") or toss out a ball and see what develops. Children from six to eleven are responsive to almost any suggestion, and they are so accustomed to organized games that ten children with a ball almost automatically divide themselves into two teams and begin a game of Keep Away. You may need to impose some rules, such as”No fair climbing out of the water"; this rule, by the way, is a good one to follow at all times. If a child needs to be reminded a great many times about ducking, pushing, running, and horseplay, or if there is a child who constantly gives you a heart attack because he wants to dive in water too shallow, invite him to sit with you on the bench awhile. Then say,”You know, if you got hurt here, none of us would ever have fun here for a long, long time. “There is one thing a pool owner can't afford to put up with, and that is the child who unjustifiably yells”Help. “After you have”saved”this fun maker and told him the story of the little boy who yelled”Wolf,”if he continues to yell”Help,”then consider that he's just pressed his luck too far, that's all. There's another trick that ages pool owners. There are children who can hold their breath for an interminably long time as they perform the dead-man's float. Only they don't announce first that they are going to do the dead-man's float, they just do it. And after you give yourself five seconds to decide whether this is for fun or for real (you never give yourself any longer than six seconds) there you are kersplash in your freshly ironed pique shorts, looking into the surprised face of an innocent child.

Contrary to opinion, you have to urge your best friends to come swimming. They think that you are plagued with people who want the use of your pool, and they don't want to be one of them, so you have to invite them specially; they will not just drop in.

Depending on the size of your pool, and the number of swimmers, in a mixed group (e.g., adults and children), it is often not much fun for either to fight their way through the crowd. An idea that has worked very well is to let all of the children swim, and then have them lie on their towels on the deck, and then have an adult-only swim. This gives the children a chance to rest and plenty of opportunity to criticize the way their parents swim.

Children usually do not know when they have had enough enough water, enough sun, enough exercise; and it is your responsibility to remind them to get out and rest a few minutes. And then when you decide that they have had a satisfactory swim, and call out gaily,”O.K., everybody out,”what you will hear is a chorus of”I just got here,”or”Come on, five more minutes,”or”One more dive. “Maybe you will try another system:”I've set the timer for ten minutes. When the bell rings, you are to blast out onto the deck. “When the bell does ring, be prepared for a number who didn't hear it ring, a great many more who just got there, and others begging for just one more dive. They couldn't be less interested in such reasoning as it's time for dinner, it's getting cool, or that they may come back day after tomorrow.

Save your energy and words because settling this matter is only half the battle. The other half is to get them out of their wet suits and into their dry clothes. If your group consists only of boys, you find that after they arrive for their swim, it takes them about 33 seconds to get out of their clothes and jump in the pool. But after their swim, finding their own tennis shoes, socks, and underwear, and pulling them on their wet bodies takes closer to 33 minutes. Also, if the hair-combing ritual has become important to them, not one of them would be caught dead coming out of the dressing room with his hair rumpled. It does no good to try to”control”the dressing process. You would be accused of playing favorites if you asked the swimmers to dress two at a time, and allowed the others to swim. And calling out”If you boys aren't out of there in two minutes, I'm coming in”causes such wild excitement at the thought of being seen in their underpants that it slows their progress about five minutes. It's better to busy yourself picking up kick boards and collecting fins; and then make sure they all get out the gate.

When you have only one dressing room, and if both boys and girls are swimming and must use the same facilities, there are, of course, problems of an even more complicated nature. The girls are scared that the boys will peek at them while they are getting dressed, but no more worried than the boys are when it is their turn to dress. Girls often leave more things behind, because they bring more things to leave behind. More scarves, more beach bags, more terry-cloth robes, more hairbrushes.

Even if there is a room in your house which is readily accessible from the pool a room in which your own children may prefer to change it is still worth some effort and ingenuity to provide special poolside dressing rooms. Cabanas may be built or bought, although in either case, you should not expect to provide reasonable facilities for less than fifty dollars.

A pool owner had a young guest, who had just arrived, ask her where the bathroom was, and she instructed him to go through the back porch, down the hall, and to the second door to the left. She was startled when, a few moments later, he came to the pool dripping wet. Later, when she checked her suspicion, so was the lower half of the house. Somewhere, somehow, the commandment of taking a soap shower before entering a pool had been driven home to this young man. He also came equipped with a snorkel, foot fins, ear plugs, a face mask, and a nose clip. In addition, he had a full-length beach, robe and swim suit with matching shirt. Aloha! He told the pool owners he sure liked coming to their pool better than going to the public pool because they wouldn't let him bring anything down there, and besides it was so crowded.

Many pool owners have an arrangement with the people in their neighborhood about sharing the privileges. They hoist a flag and this means:”It's swim time. “Usually another part of the agreement is that each child must be accompanied by a parent. So mothers unplug irons, grab the baby, and race down the street with the child who has been waiting for the flag to go up. Usually, mothers do not get in the water, they sit and talk with other mothers, often involving the pool owner, who is a mother and who also likes to talk. And who's watching the kids? Sometimes, nobody. The biggest danger here is that the pool owner may lose control of the situation. It is not too easy to reprimand the big boy who crashes into everybody, when his mother is watching him and shows no signs of thinking that this behavior is out of”the ordinary. Then, there is not much the pool owner can do about the baby in the stroller, eating and spilling a thousand arrowroot crumbs. Then there is the mother who decides, just about the time everyone is ready to leave, that it is very warm she believes she will have a little dip after all if you wouldn't mind lending her a suit. This takes some rummaging, but pool owners always have lots of suits around tired and worn as some of them may be if they look long enough. “Oh, I need some goo, I burn so easily. “There, she's ready to get in. “Ohhhh, this water is so cold. How do you stand it so cold?”Perched on the steps, she instructs all who are near,”Don't splash me!”Finally, after she's in, she calls out to you,”Say, my cousins from the South are coming up tomorrow. I'd sure like for them to see this pool.“

Naturally children are going to run around a pool. They are used to running everywhere else they go, so why stop here? And just as naturally, you are going to remind them not to run around the pool. Pool owners often post a thousand rules like NO RUNNING, NO PUSHING, NO DUCKING, NO EATING, but because the list is endless, it could easily include items like NO SWEARING, NO SPITTING, NO THROWING UNDERWEAR IN THE WATER, NO DIVING OFF THE FENCE OR TABLES, NO UNNECES SARY NOISE. The reason you need not list these rules in large painted letters is that some children who use the pool cannot read, and others who can read very well do not abide by the written word, and some of the written words just give them ideas they never thought of before. The best and only rule to follow is that while children are in your pool, you are also in or around the pool.

Adults are more difficult than children because not only do they have as many carefree and untidy habits, but an adult guest will read the pool rules and somehow think that they don't apply to him. As he reads them, he will flick ashes from right to left, and eventually crush the cigarette on the pool deck. It is easy for pool owners to remind children of rules that seem necessary, but it is difficult for an adult to tell another adult how to behave.