Swimming Pools and Me

Me as a teen in my childhood home swimming pool

When I was eight years old, my dad and I sat together in our backyard and watched the workmen dig our grass and dirt to put in a new above-the-ground swimming pool. My mom referred to our pool as a "15 Round" which meant that it measured fifteen feet in diameter.  The outside was blue, and it had straight white panels going down each side with the words "Esther Williams" printed on them. My grandmother told me that Esther Williams was a very famous swimmer who starred in Hollywood movies many years ago.   

Every summer, my best friend, Ania, and I spent most of our time in my pool.  Even though she had an oval, above-the-ground swimming pool in her own backyard, we were always in mine.  A few times, we stayed in so long that our lips turned blue!  We loved being in my swimming pool so much that we never realized we were cold - probably because we were always moving and jumping up and down.  One summer, I spent so much time doing handstands and cartwheels underwater that I came down with an ear infection.  I had to take ear drops and wear earplugs every summer after that.  Sometimes, I pretended I was a mermaid and that my swimming pool was a big tank I lived in while on land. Nothing felt better than being in my swimming pool.

But then I grew up and left home for college in Boston.  While I was away, my mom sold the house.  For many years after that, I had a recurring dream that I returned to my childhood home, and the water in my swimming pool turned green.  I was distraught that the pool was unusable. I figured I dreamed this because shortly before I had left home, our pool water really did turn green.  I hadn't been very good at keeping up with putting in the scoops of chlorine and running the filter.  My dad was the one in charge of our pool, but he passed away when I was fifteen.  In my dreams, as soon as I saw that the water was green, I went on a desperate quest for chlorine. Sometimes, I'd look in my shed and other times I'd try to find a store somewhere, hoping it was still open in the middle of the night.  Eventually, I'd find one, and I'd spend the rest of the dream measuring out the chlorine.  

Illustration from Instagram

I've never had my own pool as an adult, but I always enjoy them whenever I get to swim.  One of my favorites is this wave pool in Pennsylvania.  I didn't know one existed until I went in.  It was the best of both worlds, as my other favorite place in the world is the ocean.  One time, I was staying at a hotel in Nevada, near Las Vegas, and the hotel pool was an inground pool that had the pool water streaming right up onto the concrete floor at your feet as you approached it. I was only in Nevada for a couple of days and had a jam-packed schedule with family who live there so I didn't make time to go into the pool.  Ever since that day,  I STILL regret that I didn't go in, and I swear I will one day go back to that same hotel so I can get into that particular swimming pool! 

Over the years, the swimming pool water in my recurring dreams began to appear clearer and less green. I haven't had one of those dreams in a while.  Sometimes, I miss having a swimming pool to call my own.  I can't have one in my backyard now because my small yard is on a slanted hill which is nearly all rock.  But I guess it would be possible to put in a pool if I hired an expert to check the yard out. I mean, if I can find a store to buy chlorine  in the middle of the night, then I suppose anything is possible!

Esther Williams in 1953 (cinemasips.com)

Finally - Dad. (Part 1)

I prefer to remember my dad the way he looked as a young man. The way he looked in the pictures I saw of him taken in the 1950's and 1960's. Not when I knew him when he had that wild, curly, 1970's hair that used to reach the roof of his car even though he was only 5'10." In the 1980's, he lost that 70's hair.  Not because of the cancer treatments he started in 1981 (oddly enough, he never lost his hair like the majority of patients do) but rather because the styles changed, just like the best things in life always do.

After he died in 1984, I took out his college graduation picture and made a conscious effort that any time I thought of him, I'd only think of how he looked in the 1950's and 1960's. Somehow, it made thinking about him less sad.

My father only walked this earth for 41 years, and I only knew him for about one decade of those if you count the years I was an old enough child to have a clear memory of him. A few decades later, he has become an almost mythical figure to me, and I have to rely a lot on what people older than I am can remember, and I'm always anxious to hear stories about him. Luckily, my relatives and his friends are always more than happy to share what they remember of him with me.

One of my favorites comes from my mother's first cousin, Carol. My mom is an only child who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and every summer to escape the City, she and my grandmother spent the entire summer in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with her my grandmother's sister who is Carol's mom. My grandfather joined them on weekends. When my mom and dad became serious, she brought him along on one of the visits to meet Carol and her sister, Barbara, who were like sisters to her. Carol told me about the first time she "almost" met my dad. She said she went out to her country backyard to meet him where he had climbed a tree and was just sitting at the top it, enjoying the country air. She told me that when she spotted him all the way up there, she thought: "Well, I guess we're not going to be meeting him today."

Even though my father had what many people would consider a short life, he did a lot in those 41 years. He was a Language Arts teacher for 17 years at Prall Intermediate School, I.S.27, on Staten Island, New York, and he was also a singer and songwriter. He enjoyed teaching and often brought in his song lyrics to have his students analyze them as assignments.  One of the projects he had done in the late 1960's or early 1970's was an album based on Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" poetry book. Whitman was considered pretty "out there" for his day so he self-published and paid for "Leaves of Grass'" first edition and even did most of the typesetting. So basically, Whitman joins the ranks of today's indie writers like myself (or on my bad days, I choose to think of it this way). What my father did with Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is kind of like what Kate Bush did years later when she wanted to use James Joyce's Molly Bloom monologue from his novel, "Ulysses," as lyrics for one of her new songs and wasn't granted permission. Instead, she wrote "The Sensual World"  and just changed the words, writing her own version of the original prose, keeping in line with the feeling of the words, which in the end is all that really matters - what feelings pieces of music bring to its listeners.  

After my father died, I went through every single loose leaf paper he had in his bedroom dresser drawer, and there were tons of them. It took me months to go through them all, but every weekend when my mom and brother were out with their respective friends, my 15 year old self grabbed another pile from his drawer, sat on my living room swivel chair in front of the TV, and read through every single word. When I read the lyrics based on Whitman's work, I hadn't yet read the original "Leaves of Grass" that they came from. As a grieving teen, I don't think I was really ready for it. It wouldn't have impacted me the way it did when I finally picked up the book several years later. When I read through "Leaves of Grass," I was amazed, and I could see what the appeal of the book was for my dad. It is a celebration of life. It was written for people who enjoy sitting at the top of trees all by themselves enjoying nature around them. I imagined my father reading Whitman in college and embracing his days as a young man, enjoying this earth while it was still his.

My father was a well-liked person because he accepted everyone as being the same as him. He felt a connection with others and with nature around him so I can easily understand his identifying with "Leaves of Grass." Below is an excerpt from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" which is part of "Leaves of Grass":


“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."


My dad wrote this song version of Whitman's "Song of Myself":

My dad wrote at least 9 songs based on "Leaves of Grass." Once I read the original book, I was happy it moved me as much as it moved him because there was now another reminder I could forever have of him because these reminders keep his memory alive to me on those days when I really miss him. My whole life has been a quest to recapture what I can remember of him. Whitman wrote:


“Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.” 

 
Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is both a celebration of life and also a celebration of nature. He believed we should enjoy the little things in life and embrace the natural world that was given to us. His words are affirmation that every human being is connected to one another regardless of generation or even century of time.  He believed human life was carried on THROUGH nature because every generation walks the same green earth. He meant this figuratively AND literally, proclaiming that human beings once deceased eventually are "reborn" again through the growth of the grass beneath future generations' feet.  This passage below is simply beautiful and is one of my favorites from "Leaves of Grass": 


"What do you think has become of the young and old men? 
And what do you think has become of the women and children? 

They are alive and well somewhere, 
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, 
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the 
end to arrest it, 
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. 

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, 
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” 


That last line brings me comfort. I like to imagine my dad is in a happier place even though he can't be here physically with us. I know that I titled this blog entry "Part 1," and eventually I'll write a Part 2, but I have no idea when. Processing the loss of my dad has taken me a long time. In fact, it was not too long ago that I could finally display his school teacher picture in my house which is the picture I have that looks most like the way he looked during the years I knew him. So like I said, there will be a Part 2 one day. In the meantime, I, and hopefully now you, will celebrate Whitman.

Dad and Grandma in the 1970's

Someone Who Gets Me

My mom and I get along well now, but that's because we're very different.  We don't see our own faults staring back at us from each other's eyes. But I also don't think she gets where I'm coming from, and I'd accepted that years ago. When we did our Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which is a personality test developed by a mother/daughter psychologist team and based on Carl Jung's theories, my mom's results were ESFJ which is the most popular personality type, yet my results were INFJ which is the least popular personality type. Emily Dickinson is thought to have been an INFJ so that gives some indication of what my mom was dealing with while raising me. My dad never took the test, but I believe he would have tested as an extrovert (the "E" in the four-letter Indicator stands for Extrovert, and the "I" stands for Introvert). He was a musician who played in a club band, and when he wasn't performing music, teaching or tutoring, he still always wanted to be out of the house. I can't remember him even once saying, "You know, I'd really prefer to stay at home tonight" or "I need my alone time." That spells extrovert because as an introvert, I find myself saying that at least twenty times a day.

So where did I get my introvert gene? I look to my grandmother -  my mom's mother. She was definitely an introvert, and we used to hang at home together a lot when I was growing up. She didn't really have any outside friends and rarely had people over her house which was downstairs from ours. She didn't want to be involved in the ladies' groups at her church and definitely didn't want to bond with my grandfather's sisters who lived nearby: She was German, and they were Italian, and she believed they always ostracized her because of that. But I don't think that was the reason. They just didn't get her. Probably because her personality was different: She liked to stay home and study the Bible and write about it in her notebooks. They liked to meet in groups to coffee klatch.

The only person my grandmother used to seem to really enjoy talking about was her younger brother, my great-uncle, Richard. Her face always lit up when she told me stories about the two of them growing up in Pennsylvania. She said they'd climb mountains to pick "huckleberries." He was creative like my grandmother and used to paint pictures of people or things that interested him. He painted my mom when she was sixteen, and in it, she lounged on a bed with a bunch of brightly-colored pillows. He always used very bright colors, a lot of pinks and light blues, and often painted the cherry blossoms he saw when he traveled to Washington D.C.

Uncle Richard had dinner at my grandmother's apartment in Brooklyn every Sunday where she had moved to from Pennsylvania and now lived with my grandfather and my mom who was still a child. He always brought along what now would be described as his "partner," a man named Bill who was about twenty years older than he was. My mom said that back in the fifties, these relationships were usually not spoken of. She said it eventually clicked in as she got older that Bill was more than just a friend to Uncle Richard.

Several years later, when Bill died, my Uncle Richard was distraught. First he took up with another man, also named "Bill," but this time, Bill was the younger one. That relationship didn't work out, and soon afterwards, Uncle Richard retired from his office job in Manhattan and moved to Texas.

I only met my Uncle Richard once in my life when he visited us when I was nine.  He stayed downstairs with my grandparents for about a week, and I didn't like him because his sense of humor was extremely sarcastic and what I had considered mean. Nowadays, I would have loved this about him and laughed along, but my nine-year-old little girl brain couldn't appreciate this type of wit. When he asked me if I would be sad when he had to go back home, I answered him honestly and said: "No." Still, he promised me that once he got back home, he'd mail me a Texas girl doll since I loved dolls so much. I watched intensely for the mail for a couple of months but eventually gave up and decided I had been right about him all along.

The only time I ever saw my grandmother break down in tears was when Uncle Richard died. In her younger days, my grandmother was not a woman who had it easy. She suffered two stillborn babies and gave birth to one baby that only lived an hour, yet she never cried or even choked up whenever she told me about them. In his last years, Uncle Richard's health had deteriorated due to alcoholism and probably a broken heart. He moved from Texas back to his hometown in Pennsylvania where my grandmother's sister and cousins still lived. My grandmother's sister said that people sometimes told her they'd seen Uncle Richard wandering around the park or sitting on park benches, looking like a homeless person. Seemed he never really got over losing the older Bill. One night, my grandmother came up our stairs crying, saying she had just gotten a phone call that her brother Richard had died. I always regretted I didn't give Grandma a giant hug right then, but I was a teenager, and I looked for a cue from my older brother who was never really one for expressing his emotions. He didn't move from his spot on the living room couch, so I didn't move from my recliner either. It hadn't been more than a year or two after our dad had died so neither of us were the clearest thinkers at the time. But my grandmother didn't seem to mind. I think she was in her own world. I believe if it had bothered her that I didn't hug her, she would have told me in the next few days. She had always been very verbal regarding any situation where she felt she'd been wronged, so I think she would have mentioned it. It doesn't mean I don't still regret it. But overall, I'm sure she did understand where I was coming from that night because she was one of those few people in the world who truly gets me.

Grandma, We Hardly Knew You

My grandmother was born in the beginning of October and died at the end of October, a few weeks after her 95th birthday.  That's why I've decided to remember her in an October blog.

The last time I saw her was at my cousin's wedding.  She had just turned 90 and had flown from Florida with my cousin, the bride-to-be, who was now her primary caretaker.  At this wedding, I saw a sassy side of her I'd never seen before. Every time someone would come to greet her, she greeted them back with zingers.  To her grandniece she said, "Wow, your husband put on a lot of weight."  I asked another of my cousins about this, and she laughed about it, saying, "She's always been like this. Every time she sees me, she still asks me why I only had one child." My mom endured zinger after zinger, most of them questions about my mom's ex-husband whom she married after my father (who was my grandmother's youngest son) passed away.  My mom didn't seem rattled by her zingers at all. When I asked her about it, she said, "I'm used to it. When you were a kid, she often told me I should wash your father's hair for him."   I figured that now that I was an adult, there would probably be zingers for me too. I braced myself for zingers directed at me, but they never came.

Growing up, I hardly ever saw my grandmother smile. If she spoke to me at all, it was either "hello," "what was that?" (because she was hard of hearing) or "goodbye," along with a "pray for me."  I also remember her being obsessed by things.  At first it was her false teeth, then years later, the floaters in her eyes. If she did talk about something other than false teeth or floaters, it was likely to be something odd. Like the time when Jack Cafferty (now a CNN news analyst, back then a New York City's Live at 5 News anchor) came onto the TV, and she suddenly exclaimed, "That is a good-looking man!"  Jack Cafferty? You'd think Tom Selleck had just appeared on the screen!

The only thing I can remember us doing together was play cards. She taught me a great card game with a lot of steps called "King's Corners." She and my grandfather used to stay at our house for one week every Christmas vacation.  During one of those visits, my mom had to go to work, and I wanted to make pancakes. I was probably about 12. I called my mom's work, and she wasn't at her desk, so her co-worker asked me if there was something she could help me with.  I told her, "Well, how do I make pancakes?"  She told me a few things, and I hung up the phone.  As soon as I hung up, my grandmother exclaimed, "Why didn't you just ask me?"  I was surprised at her expression and that she seemed upset.  "I know how to make pancakes!"  she said huffily. She had never reprimanded me for anything in my life except for not asking her how to make pancakes! It was funny, but the thought  never crossed my mind that I could just ask my grandmother how to do it. 

The fact that I didn't think she could handle something as easy as making pancakes is strange considering that when she was growing up, her family of five siblings all agreed that she was the most gifted academically. Her biggest disappointment in life was that her family didn't have enough money to send her to college because it was the Depression. Only her oldest sister got to go.  But she made the best of it and became a legal secretary. She was a champion stenographer who also entered typing contests and won medals. She was such a fast typist that she had to type on a special Underwood typewriter. Otherwise the keys would jam up because she typed so fast.

After she married, she became a stay-at-home mom to my uncle and my father.  It was World War II, and she and my grandfather had going away parties at their house for their friends going off to war almost every week. Since my grandfather had the two young boys to take care of,  he was the last to go. My uncle remembers there being singalongs at the player piano and karaoke before there was a name for it. My grandmother was considered very funny and an excellent hostess. But all that changed about nine years later, when she gave birth to her last child, my aunt, and suffered a severe form of postpartum depression. She wasn't able to take care of either her new baby or her two sons, so she endured "treatments" given in the basement of a questionable doctor and was never the same after that. But it did save her from going the way of Sylvia Plath.

For my grandmother's 90th birthday party, I asked my cousin what I should get her, and she said a brain teaser/logic problems book.  You know, the ones that hardly anyone can do much less would want to do unless they were being forced to? She said little during the party except that she didn't know what all the fuss was about. At one point, a guest said, "I try to never argue with anyone during the day because, you know, one night, you may go to sleep and not wake up in the morning."  "Oh," my grandmother said looking him up and down. "I wish that would happen to me!" 

During the last decade of my grandmother's life, my cousins, who sometimes took turns taking care of her, had a lot of stories to tell. The funniest story was when she stayed with my cousin and his wife who lived in New Jersey. Every morning,  my cousin went into the room where she was staying and noticed that the cable channel was always set from the night before on the same number, a certain adult channel. When they asked her about it, she answered, "I don't know.  I watched this show. There was a woman who had a pink apparatus." When my cousin told us this story in front of my grandmother, all she had to say about the channel was, "I was intrigued by it."

When she moved back to Florida for good, there were various medical personnel who came to evaluate her to help her get the care she needed. She never gave them an easy time.  One funny story is the time a man came to the house and had to ask her several questions as he filled out a questionnaire.  At one point he asked her how much she weighed to which she snapped, "Weigh? How much do I weigh? Well, how much do YOU weigh?"

Her mind stayed intact until only a couple of years before she died. I didn't see her during those couple of years, but I was told her personality had made a dramatic change for the second time in her life, but this time it was for the better. Suddenly, she was cheery all the time.  My cousin said she just sat around watching TV and laughing all day.  Her favorite movie was "Napoleon Dynamite," and she watched it constantly!

Come to think of it, there was one period of time that I actually saw my grandmother happy. It was when I was a teenager, after my grandmother's daughter's baby was born, and my grandmother moved in with them for three years to care for my new cousin while my aunt returned to work full-time. Whenever we visited them, she smiled and simply beamed over that baby.  She took really good care of her and truly thrived while doing so.

My uncle probably knew my grandmother better than anyone else in the world.  When I asked him about her recently, he told me: "People thought she was aloof and distant, but that wasn't the mother I knew."  Again, I say -- Grandma, we hardly knew you.


Post Script:  I have to give the photo credit to my cousin Dawn who found this picture in her stash.  Both of us were shocked that there was actually a photograph in existence of our grandmother and grandfather kissing!