The Oddball Archives

   We open with a quick recap from my 10-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter, who wanted to help write a blog for the first time. Since they were there, I figured, ‘what the heck’:

 

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   A couple of days ago, my dad, my sister and I went to a private pool at which we had just recently become members. We had swim gear, towels, and etc. with us and we were all set. Luckily, no one was sunburned. We were there for hours.

Some friends of ours were there. They’re members too (well, most of them.)

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THIS IS NOW HIS SISTER!

   I ran into a few of my friends, so I hung out with them for a while. One of them hurt her leg in a previous situation, so she couldn’t do much. I hung out with them the whole time. I thought I was sunburned for a couple of minutes, but it was just the start of a tan. No big deal. OK, So, I went down this HUGE waterslide at the very back of the club.

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(Now it’s back to me).

   At the before mentioned waterslide, you need a tube to go down (they don’t allow boards anymore). This brings me to a certain accident I had there. I had just climbed 5 flights of stairs to get there the second time. The lifeguard recognized me and explained to me how to get in the tube on my own. There is a water jet, however, and I fell over. I was able to slow myself down long enough for the lifeguard to help me in. THAT was embarrassing. Then I went back to the main pool.

 

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    Okay.

  

   Now it’s Daddy’s turn.

 

   It’s official. I have joined the Yuppies. I’m a member of a ‘country club’.

 

   Granted, it’s not the swankiest in town. It has no ‘exclusive clientele’. All you need is the right amount of money and you’re in like Flynn (for the under 40s, actor Errol Flynn, at the height of his movie fame, was accused of statutory rape. His trial and eventual exoneration gave rise to the phrase above, which means you pretty much have a free reign to do what you want).

 

   Gad, but I hate showing my age.

 

   Anyway, this club has one large object in its favor…a clean, chlorinated swimming pool. Being that my hometown of over 50,000 has no public pool to speak of, there are a limited amount of choices if you want to get wet during these dog days:

 

a)      Join this or another club with swimming facilities, mindful that the other clubs come with golf courses and an ‘initiation fee’ that all but ensures you will not see your neighbors at the clubhouse.

 

b)      Head to the waters of the nearby public lake and take your chances with fellow bathers who make the scene look like Seurat’s ‘Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ for people with no access to dentistry, but at least the tattoos are spelled correctly. Plus, as the late Bill Hicks pointed out, the beach is nothing more than the place where ‘dirt’ meets ‘water’.

 

c)      Sit on the lawn outside your house with a garden hose above your head set to ‘fine spray’. The rainbows are beautiful.

 

   The owner/operator and spouse (I’m not sure who actually runs the place and who’s there for the income) are a rather crusty husband and his wife who, I imagine, will support each other if one chooses to argue in front of a bus for no apparent reason. They remind me of a combination of my grandmother and my high school principal. I sort of wish I had known them from a few years before, as it seems they’ve been doing this for years and may not have many left. I bet they have lots of interesting stories.

 

    Once the paperwork was done, we deposited our stuff on some hard plastic patio furniture and proceeded poolside. The water was brisk, but on the whole it was just right. The pool is a rather sizeable piece of work ranging in depth from two feet (for the toddlers) to about 15-20 feet (where the diving board is located).

 

   My favorite water sport that dated back to my single digits was called ‘Evolution’. This starts in the kiddie section on all fours. As you move your way to the deeper end of the pool the water of course carries your weight up and your hands leave the bottom of the pool, indicating you have evolved from a four-legged species to a two-legged one. At this point you become a late Triassic-early Jurassic carnivore, stalking his prey in slow motion. When the legs no longer reach the bottom, you then achieve the miracle of Cretaceous-era flight as you flap your ‘wings’ through the water and your legs become rudders, changing direction and altitude.

 

   It’s kinda fun to let your brain run away for a while.

 

  As my kids alluded earlier, off in the back of the main club house is a two-part water slide. I was reticent about going with my son here, as once out of the water, I become literally a beached whale. Not just any whale…I become Moby Dick, the Great White Whale. With no sun to speak of prior to this trip, my pale skin morphs into Charlie Brown’s hairline or Little Orphan Annie’s left eyeball (or right one, for that matter). I am a polar bear in a blizzard.

 

   Back to the slide…

 

   One slide goes almost straight down for about 20 feet into a receiving pool. I’m not going there. The other slide is your basic ‘S’ shaped for more extended slipping and sliding.

 

   The last time I had attempted such a trip was a good quarter-century ago, when a public slide was built into the side of a mountain at the entrance of Hwy 65 going to Greenbrier. It was THE place in town to go when the sun hit you like a simmering charcoal briquette from a 12-guage. I was reminded there was a small bell at the bottom of the slide only the most foolhardy could reach before hitting the water below. I remembered many attempts, but not much success.

 

   Of course, the lifeguard on duty this day was a mere infant who only heard stories of this vaunted slide from an older brother or uncle. My lumbago began complaining as my son and I climbed the five stories to the top of the structure, replete with what looked like rickety lumber and leaks galore.

 

   Once I caught my breath at the top, I opted for the ‘S’ model and began my 26-second journey to the bottom. When I began moving backwards around the third curve, something in my body started complaining quite loudly. Apparently, people on the verge of the half-century mark are not geared for thrill rides that have little or no control over speed and direction. Once my son landed, it was back to the safety of the main swimming pool, lest Ahab and the ‘Pequod’ find me ashore.

 

   My daughter was having fun with her friends (she was right, by the way…it did look like some criminal miscreant mugged her friend’s left leg), but my son, stuck between toddlers and tweeners he didn’t know, clung to me like a remora to a Great White Shark (hey, hadn’t thought of that simile).

 

   We were sailing along when something glared at us from the water’s surface. Not alive, mind you, just floating in front of us like a butchered jellyfish. It took about a half-second before we realized, to our horror, we were facing the end result of an elephantine sneezing fit. Among the blue of the chlorinated water was a floating Sargasso Sea of Snot. We quickly looked around us to see if there were any fellow swimmers with enormous noses possibly fighting some additional respiratory blockage.  I don’t think the lifeguard was appreciative of our intent to protect other bathers as he reached for the net.

 

   The kids spent the last hour or so back and forth between the pool and the slide, while I sat in the kiddie section soaking in the sun’s rays and listening to a father trying to teach his daughter to place her head underwater by promising there was a tea party with mermaids just below the surface, complete with muffins and seahorses. She looked at him like he was missing a spring in his wiring. The waves made by the kids lapped gently against me in total relaxation, before the sharp blast of a whistle told me (and everyone else) it was time to call it a day.

 

   Next time, we bring Mommy.