Spitball Army

My mother tells me that at about the time of my birth, the city of Oceanside began construction on the South Oceanside municipal swimming pool, right next door to our house.  She was irritated by the noise, worried that the digging, banging and generally elevated noise level would constantly disturb the sleep of her newborn baby.   You could reach the new construction if you walked the two car lengths from our front door to the street, and then walked across the asphalt cul de sac (we were the last house on the street).  My cousin Margy was born two months before me, and lived right around the corner – her family’s house backed up to the pool dig.  I can’t imagine that it was much quieter over there.

My sister Tricia, Gypsy (our neighbor’s Weimaraner) and me, in our front yard, 1962.
That’s the South Oceanside pool behind the tall chain link fence.
Candyland is on the other side of the wooden fence (and check out that cactus garden!).

Wedged between our house and the pool was the neighborhood playground.  We spent a lot of time there, as it was practically an annex to our yard. At the entrance to the playground was a small slide that had an elephant painted on each side so, as you climbed up the ladder on the back of the slide, you could imagine climbing up the back of the animal and then sliding down its trunk. Someone once painted a peanut at the bottom of the slide, just out of reach of the elephant’s trunk.  The swings were great, and there were a lot of them.  In one corner of the park, there was a castle that was really just a tall slide with a raised platform and a cover, with an enclosed area underneath.  The big kids ruled this area.  There was a banner-shaped sign over the entrance of the playground that said “Candyland” or “Candy Cane Park” and, indeed, it was the neighborhood land of, if not candy, play and sweet memories.

I had a recurring dream when I was a kid that I was crawling up the monkey bars at Candyland.  I’d get to the crest of the arch and find that I could not move forward or backward.  The only direction to go was down, through a square opening in the bars, to a hard landing on the dusty brown dirt.  I would fall, and as in all of my falling dreams – and I remember having a good number of these growing up – I never actually hit the bottom.  I’d just fall, spinning, like Jimmy Stewart being sucked into the spiraling vortex in Vertigo, and wake up with a start or a gasp.

I never had such terrifying subconscious preoccupations with the pool.

I was never aware of a day without both the pool and the playground in my young life. Swimming lessons in the morning were followed by an hour or two on the monkey bars, which were followed by splashing and diving at the pool which, in turn, led to swinging and teeter-tottering into the twilight hours. But for me, ultimately, the emphasis was on the happenings at the swimming pool.  I was a water baby.

All of my basic swimming lessons took place at that South Oceanside pool.  I learned how to swim under water.  I was introduced to lap swimming.  I learned how to swim competitively, and swam my first meets at that pool.  I learned why one doesn’t eat an hour before swimming by getting my first case of stomach cramps there.  I got my first Red Cross life-saving certification there, which was a really big deal at the time.  My sisters swam in the annual synchronized swimming program at that pool, and I got to hand out the programs to the attending crowd.

The deck around the pool, and the concrete floor in the showers and entrance building, were textured to prevent human slippage.  On my young feet, these were some of the most uncomfortable and painful walking surfaces I had ever encountered.  On really hot days, I had the following walking obstacle course to overcome if I wanted to get into the pool: hot, black asphalt cul-de-sac in front of our house, leading to dirt pathway riddled with pea-sized pebbles, followed by another long stretch of asphalt that led to the parking lot at the front of the pool, into the front door of the entrance building to surrender your belongings in exchange for a giant metal safety pin with a number stamped into it, then a rest before…a mad dash across the sharp concrete deck and a splash into the water.  The last step was in strict violation of the “Walk, Don’t Run” deck policy, but what are you going to do when you’re a pain-intolerant kid, dying for a swim?  Of course, I could have easily avoided all of that foot pain by taking the shorter route over grass, between the pool and Candyland, and I’m sure I frequently did, but it’s the other route that is stuck in my head…

There were two lifeguards there named Ray.  They were both blond.  (This was California, after all!)  One of the Rays was my instructor when I took my life-saving course and, for one of the exercises, it was his duty to portray a drowning man as realistically as he possibly could.  If you’ve never tried to safely transport a disoriented, flailing, water-logged swimmer, two or three times your size, from the center of the deep end of the pool to the side, I can tell you that it is no picnic.  And Ray was clearly trying to make it difficult.  I don’t think that being a regular fixture at the pool meant that I got an easy pass on these tests.  Quite to the contrary, Ray was going to make every effort to see that I had a tough go of it, and that I got my passing mark honestly.  After all, he – or the other Ray – had taught these classes to every kid in my family, so his legacy was on the line.  After flipping out of my grip on the first “drowning man” attempt and nearly drowning me, Ray eventually got saved – thank you very much – and I got my passing grade.

These days I swim crawl – the Australian Crawl – exclusively.  When I was a kid, and learning the three main swimming strokes (crawl, backstroke and breaststroke), I had a problem with the breaststroke kick that I never could overcome.  My left leg and foot just would not kick in unison with my right.  It would do a flop-kick, and Ray worked with me endlessly to try to correct it.  I was reminded of this recently, when I attempted to swim the breaststroke at my local pool.  There was the old left foot flop-kick.  All of a sudden, I was a little boy at the South Oceanside swimming pool again, frustrated by my inability to be perfect.  The difference between then and now, however, is that in a 48-year-old man the breaststoke flop-kick looks suspiciously like a symptom of a cerebral hemorrhage.  I stopped flop-kicking and worked on my flip turn…

Oh, the dreaded flip turn.