Imagining growing up with a swimming pool in old-time Phoenix


Many of my friends who grew up in Phoenix tell me that what really made the summers bearable for them as kids were the swimming pools. I've even talked to people who joyfully played in the muddy water during irrigation time, or swam in the canals. It just boggles my mind, since I grew up in Minneapolis, where the very best time of the year is summer. Don't ask me about the winters there!

Anyway, in my journey of imagination today I'm going to try to ponder growing up in Phoenix with swimming pools, which have been commonplace in Phoenix for quite a while. Whether anyone had a swimming pool or not in my neighborhood in Minneapolis I don't recall, but to me the greatest joy of my young life was to get into a pool, so they must have been very rare. I recall the indoor swimming pools at the motels where our family used to stay when on vacation, and just thinking about it gives me waves of pleasure. I just loved swimming pools, they seemed the ultimate in luxury.

By the time I got to Phoenix, in 1977, I was a fair swimmer, but not from pools, from lakes. Yes, Minneapolis really has got a LOT of lakes - in fact, people would describe where they lived by mentioning a lake. I lived near Lake Nokomis. And all of my friends could swim, and were much better than me. Some of my friends would swim across lakes, a feat that I could never do. Mostly I jumped off a dock and paddled around. I was kind of a delicate kid, and as I recall the lakes in Minneapolis were always cold. I just hated being cold!

Swimming pools were so common in Phoenix that even the crummy apartment complex that I moved into had one. Yeah, you could tell that I was from out-of-town - I swam in that pool even in the winter (and it wasn't a heated pool).

What I slowly discovered about people in Phoenix is that they had grown up with swimming pools, but many people didn't actually know how to swim. The pools, as far as I could tell, were just water to be jumped in, splashed around, gotten out of, ran around, and jumped in again. I suppose a regular-sized backyard pool really didn't require you to learn very advanced swimming techniques. The older people seemed to treat a pool as simply something decorative to look at, and sit next to, often drinking some type of alcoholic drink. Most people had floating mats in their pools so they could lie on the surface of the water, and it became sort of an outdoor waterbed.

It really was the same in California, and I'm afraid that I never really got into the groove of the locals. I would visit friends with swimming pools, and I would look at them the same way that I looked at pianos in homes, mostly unused, just there for decoration. When I got the chance, I'd use them, and it always seemed to tickle people, I seemed so eccentric. Imagine that! Swimming! In a pool!

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to grow up in Phoenix, with swimming pools, and irrigated lawns that have valves in the grass, and palm trees, and cactuses growing right out of the ground. I'm sorry I missed it, but I can dream.
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