Swimming pool closed? Are you kidding?!

Swimming Pool Closed. SWIMMING POOL CLOSED! What the heck! That’s the sign on the apartment pool after we mounted our expedition to my daughter’s apartment pool this morning.

Some of my gentle readers may be thinking, “What’s the big deal?” Those are the readers who are my age or older. When we took our kids swimming in Washington State nearly 30 years ago, it was simple. We grabbed four towels, took our kids by the hand, walked down to the inlet, disrobed, and went swimming. That’s not the way it works now. Not by a long shot.

Nowadays we have learned that the sun’s rays will kill you. They will store up their evil effects over the years, eventually eat your skin off, give you cancer, and (worst of all) degrade your beauty with wrinkles, giant freckles, liver spots, and hideous moles. And, you don’t just expect today’s kids to play in the water when you get to it; you need toys to play in the water…lots of toys. This is how it goes when you mount a family swimming expedition in 2012.

First you have to wait for the right time. Nobody can be taking a nap or be in a bad mood and nobody can be due for a nap in the next two hours. Everybody has to be sufficiently fed to not have a hunger attack in the next two hours. Then you have to prepare everyone’s skin. My daughter has thoroughly researched the ingredients in sun block products and has selected a special suitable product that is about SPF 400, has no known carcinogens or allergens, and has the color and about twice the viscosity of lithium brake grease. Today I drew the task of having to smear it on the granddaughters. Every exposed square centimeter of the granddaughters must be generously covered and rubbed in because if my daughter detects even one tiny exposed pink spot after the solar exposure, I will be a dead man. Of course they are wiggling like crazy (especially Yaiza the toddler) and much of the product goes into their hair or eyes, which is a serious mess. Yaiza’s swimwear begins with her “Little Swimmer” disposable diaper, which is purported to trap and retain any accidents during the swim. Ha ha, fat chance. After that, both little girls must be inserted into their swimsuits. Their life jackets are mandatory so they are added to the two strollers that it takes to carry Yaiza and all the gear. The other gear includes two plastic floating tubes, which first must be topped off in air pressure. Then there is the diaper bag, acres of towels, and lots of toys including many cups, and pails and toy horses with rainbow-colored mane and tails that need to be washed and rewashed if we ever reach poolside.

So you should be able to understand now, that when daughter and I wheeled the expedition the 300 yards to the pool and found it closed, we were ready to kill somebody on the apartment staff, or at least hold them under water until they were blue. I stayed outside to keep cool in the heat while daughter went in to demand an explanation of the staff. The water had too much chemicals in it (medicine she said to our preschool age granddaughter) in case she didn’t yet know what chemicals were. TOO MUCH CHEMICALS!? I thought chemicals were what you were supposed to put in the water to kill the germs and make it safe. My friend who is a chemist says chemicals are good for you and you should embrace them without fear.

The irony of all this hyper preparation is that you still cannot remove all danger. Two days earlier on a successful granddaughter swimming expedition Ayla the elder (at age 4) was standing on a bit of smooth wet concrete safely outside the pool near the ladder. She was well prepared with a quarter pound of sun block and a snug well adjusted life vest. Suddenly without warning her feet shot out from under her and she smashed down on her face. She wasn’t wearing a helmet and face guard. I strongly suspect some of that lithium brake grease on the bottom of her feet was a contributing factor but I can’t prove it.

Why did they uninvent the...

...energy absorbing car bumper. We had ‘em in the late 70’s and early 80’s by federal regulation until a sweet old president with dementia decided to excuse the car manufacturers from this requirement. I had great ones on my ’80 Civic. They were mounted on shock absorbers and covered with scratch resistant black rubber. The current car bumpers should be called the senile Republican bumper in honor of the president who allowed the manufacturers to make painted plastic bumpers that cost $500 to $1000 or more for repair or replacement after one’s wife has a 1 mph contact with a concrete post in a parking garage.

Naked Girls Reading

Naked Girls Reading! That’s the name of a play my wife and I saw here in Asheville last night. I spied the ad for it and figured it would make an ideal Friday evening outing that both of us could enjoy. Wife has master’s degrees in both drama and librarianship, and I… um… also like reading.

The play was in the old, fashionably seedy, artsy west side of town at a tiny theater squished into an ancient vintage storefront strip. They were selling $1 raffle tickets for an original oil painting door prize. Wife sprang for a ticket then actually inspected the prize (a choice of two very naked female nudes) and commented, “Ick”. I figured then that we’d probably win the door prize.

The play action was exactly what the title said except there was also some singing and celebrity impersonation, e.g. Elvis and Dolly Parton. I enjoyed the performance very much except the venue was not air-conditioned on an uncommonly hot evening in this mountain town. I began to envy the performers who had the privilege of stretching out naked, drinking their ice water.

Oh, I almost forgot! Of course we actually DID win the door prize raffle (a lifetime first). I was about to choose a standing nude who had a cupcake levitating in front of her public parts but wife nixed that one. We got the one you see in the picture above. I think I’m gonna have to get my own man cave before I have a place to hang it.

Senior Museum of Play

We visited the Marbles Kids’ Museum in Raleigh with my Granddaughter. It’s a realm for educational play in a world of pretend reality. It was a blast, with all sorts of activities; dance, construction, life size pretend vehicles, and farms. Granddaughter loved it as you can see from the pictures.

All the while I couldn’t help but wonder why they don’t make senior play museums. I can just visualize one now. It would have venues with memorable pleasures of things done years ago and things we wish we could have done. Of course it would have all sorts of vintage vehicles, mostly convertibles, like ’57 Chevys and ’32 Ford Hot Rods. People could sit in them and be towed around, drinking Schlitz beer and making stops in drive-ins where curb girls in roller skates would sell giant burgers and French fries made from actual potatoes.

There would also be dance venues where people could do or learn to do important vintage dances like the Jitterbug, the Carolina Shag (not what you Brits think it is), Clogging (not for the faint of heart) and swing dance (Those actually old enough to remember swing dance should best view it on one of the large video screens from a comfortable seat). There would actually be many video screens all featuring black and white snowy reruns of everything from Howdy Doody to politically neutral news programs.

There would be many outdoor venues since in the olden days there was more outdoors than indoors and people went outdoors to cool off in the summer time. There would be big back yards. On warm days people could go into changing rooms to get into swimsuits. Then they could run or toddle through sprinklers in the yards and young “mommies” in floral print sundresses would come out through wood framed screen doors to serve Kool Aid in frosty pitchers. It would not be real Kool Aid of course; it would be Sangria. Real Kool Aid would be unhealthy for seniors. At 4:00 PM each day daddies (staff men in their 30’s and 40’s) would bring out churns and hand churn homemade ice cream.

There would be a major water slide venue with everything. For the really seriously old there would be stable rowboats with handsome oarsmen to take out widows (in life vests, bonnets, and parasols) and read poetry to them. There aren’t enough really old men to make them a market priority. For younger seniors, like new retirees, there would be waterslides similar to what young people enjoy today. They would not be made of gaudy colored plastic but real stuff of our memories like storm water culverts and irrigation flumes. There would also be just plain swimming holes with sandy bottoms, not concrete pools. Hey! Maybe for the Woodstock generation there could even be a skinny-dipping water hole. It could be seeded with a few young attractive staff members to embolden shy seniors. The young staff would be behind a protective Plexiglas barrier where they could safely distract the seniors from themselves and each other.

Throughout this marvelous play museum there would be food food food. It would all be made from actual organic vegetables and killed animals, which had enjoyed a good free life before they hit the chopping block. Food would be served in various cafes where waitresses actually wear uniforms, and a mere 10% tip will be met with raves of stunned appreciation. Food would also be served in other surprise ways like the Kool Aid and ice cream discussed above. For example men driving vintage Cushman three-wheeled ice cream scooters would come putt putting through the outdoor areas ringing a bell. Some food would even grow on actual live trees. Seniors could use a big rock and a claw hammer to crack actual windfall hickory nuts and black walnuts. Fruit trees would probably be stripped bare too fast.

I realize the overstimulation of all this food and activity could tax the energy and well being of vulnerable seniors. There would have to be on-site pharmacies, vintage of course. They could offer tonics like Hadacol (really Jack Daniels in replica bottles; it has the same active ingredient and tastes better) Carters Little Liver Pills (placebos of course) and lots of Milk of Magnesia (real). Of course there would have to be some concession to twenty-first century miracle drugs upon which some contemporary seniors depend for life safety. But, none of those little blue pills. They would make things way too awkward in the skinny-dipping venue.

Maybe I can start this museum myself. I don’t have any successful entrepreneurial experience but my granddaughter would certainly encourage me with her favorite phrase, “You can do it Bapa!” If you want to invest in this endeavor, comment below and I shall open a Pay Pal account. Buzz, you’ll have to get a young computer savvy person to show you how to make an anonymous comment.

The telltale diphthong

I just moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains. People talk different here. One clear marker in the regional accent is they never diphthongize a long i. Now those of y'all who aren't English majors or married to one may need to know what a diphthong is. It's a vowel sound that you can't hold indefinitely like you can hold a short a as in fast. Many other English vowel sounds are diphthongized, ending with a little transition as the a in "Dawg" the way U of Washington Huskies pronounce it. We diphthongize that a with an "ah-oo" sound. Now...back to the long i. Well bred erudite flat-lander southerners like myself strictly observe the rule of never diphthongizing a long i if it is followed by the consonants b, d, n, g, l, m, v, z or no consonant. For the other consonants we diphthongize it like yankees by sort of a quick long e ending. From here forward in this engaging lecture I will insert an h after an i in a quotation when i want to designate no diphthong as in, "Ih'd be much oblihged if you'd get me some ice cream."

The thing that makes this long i non-diphthong so culturally interesting is that non-southerners (a.k.a. yankees) consider it a marker of special toothless ignorance. Even the most dull double negative-using elementary school dropout from yankee land feels intellectually superior to a southern fellow who says, "Ih think it's about fihve mihles down the road."

Now, here's the interesting part. When I was growing up I had the same snooty feelings about Southern Appalichian Mountain folks who never diphthongize a long i no matter what consonant follows it. They don't let diphthongs go to waste though, they might diphthongize something else like as short a. Famous race car driver Richard Petty might say, "Ih drihve a faa-eest race core on a track that never turns riht."

I was stunned to learn that I still have my prejudice when I recently arrived here to live. The first thing I did (of course) was break off a tooth. (Probably from chomping on a BBQ rib but that's another story.) Oh mercy! I had to go to a strange new dentist from the yellow pages. Of course I got lost on the way and had to call for directions. I had to report to the receptionist that I was at the corner of Biltmore and Short Coxe Avenue. (I'm not kidding; that's really the name of the street.) She instructed me to, "Go just a little down Biltmore then turn riht into our parking lot." Yeow! At least she was just the receptionist. When I finally arrived and got in a chair, the dental hygienist instructed me to "Biht down on this." I almost bolted out of the chair running. I resisted the escape urge and I got the greatest crown job ever. I've been here a month now and I'm finally overcoming my silly linguistic prejudices. I long ago determined to never behave or think like a racist. Now I'm committed to never being a diphthongist. We're all human beings no matter how we close our vowel sounds. Riht?!