Fathers’ Day
And so it began. The quest for the perfect kiddie pool. It’s not one to enter into, mind you, without solid preparation, a pile of Sunday circulars, and a full set of lungs.
Spicy girl is 2 and a half. Finding a pool that met her need (water) and my need (able to be inflated without damage to eardrums) wasn’t easy. But, alas, I found one that had just the right combination of portability and puffiness.
The pool sent me back 34 years to a time when my dad was the king of the kiddie pool. We started with one of those basic plastic pools. But one stormy night, after it blew from New York to the Gulf of Mexico, he decided to upgrade to an inflatable. Besides, the hard plastic pool barely fit in the trunk of the Nova.
In the course of a month, we went through four pools. One had a hole, the other had a tear, the third was too shallow, but the fourth … holy Mark Spitz, was this thing HUGE. I remember the day in vivid Technicolor. My dad opened the box and spread the pool around the back yard and every kid on the block came over to see it.
There we were, a dozen or so kids. All in our bathing suits. All waiting for my dad to finish setting up the biggest damn pool we had ever seen.
Six hours of blowing, a nosebleed and a momentary loss of consciousness later – it was done. And it was glorious. But, sadly, I was the only one left – everyone else had gone home and gone to bed. It’s true, it was after dark when the pool was finally blown up, and by the time the water was in – it was WELL PAST 9:00PM.
“You ready?” He asked.
“Yes!” I screamed, and then jumped in… to the coldest water outside of Antarctica. I popped up out of the water and my lips were blue. OK, my entire body was blue. I looked like Violet Beauregard from Willy Wonka.
“Maybe you should get out.”
“No, daddy, we waited all day for this. I want to swim!” He smiled as his daughter paddled around.
The next morning, I was in my bathing suit and ready to go out again. But the pool was gone. Dad told me that it had a slow leak and had deflated overnight.
“It’s OK dad, we got to use it that one time.”
Truth was, Mom made him take it down – apparently it was going to kill too much grass. Too bad too … that was one awesome pool. And he was one awesome dad. Happy Fathers’ Day, Dad. The pool is set up on the lawn for you anytime.
