Monthly Archives: September 2007

For several summers in a row when I was a kid, my little brother and I spent spent every afternoon in the swimming pool in our grandparents’ backyard. My mother, who was single and working to support two kids, couldn’t afford day care, and so during the school year my grandparents would drive us to school in the mornings with plastic cups full of orange slices, and in the summer they’d let us have the run of their suburban Oklahoma backyard, tracking water and grass stuck to our feet into the bathrooms and inviting neighborhood kids we barely knew to play in the pool and share our Shasta sodas.

Even on the weekends, when my mom wasn’t at work, we’d spend nearly every day at the pool. It was a favorite joke of hers — in the summer of 1978, the year she graduated high school, married my father and moved out of the house, my grandparents started digging the hole in the background. All her life she and my uncle had begged them for a pool and they waited until it was too late to start building one.

My mom was on the swim team in high school. She told me that’s why she always wore her hair short — it was much easier to go straight to class after swim practice in the mornings when she didn’t have to blow-dry a head full of hair. Her love of the water was transferred to me — she enrolled me in Water Babies at the YMCA when I was an infant and by the time I was 18 months old I was more graceful in the water than out of it. My first swimsuit was a terry cloth Strawberry Shortcake bikini and my first birthday party was held in a highchair in the backyard by the swimming pool my grandparents had only finished the summer before.

Oklahoma summers for me meant chlorine-green hair and the chill on your skin from walking into an air-conditioned house after spending all day damp in the sun. It was fireworks that floated on the surface of the water and remote-controlled boats and practicing my back-flips and how long I could hold my breath. It was nachos and tacos root beer the smell of the grill my granddad loved to pilot. It was summer Top 40 radio hits like a hypnotist’s cue that will always bring you back to that exact time and place. It was standing on the hot driveway in my dripping bikini buying rocket pops from the ice cream man which stained my hands red and blue sticky and jumping into the water to rinse myself off.

My grandfather worked for a grocery supplier and so we always had samples of certain foods like the snack bags of shoestring potatoes he gave out for Halloween. We had every kind of spice made by Durkee Foods and four different kinds of French’s mustard for our hot dogs and peanuts and potato chips and jars of baby food though we had no baby and Oreo cookies and sugar wafers and bite-sized Almond Joys. We always, always had Shasta soda in every flavor and a cylinder of Planters Cheez Balls which I would eat with wet fingers that stuck to each piece and at the end of the day wound up a color of orange that not even chlorine could wash away. I was a ridiculously skinny, overly tall girl, and as a latch-key kid I subsisted on processed food that I could never survive on today, but even into my mid-twenties, every time I would see a canister of Planter’s Cheez Balls with the yellow plastic lid I would remember floating on my back on a summer day while munching on soggy, cheesy handfuls.

Things seemed so much more golden then, mostly because I did not realize at the time how the adults in my life were struggling to keep everything in place for me and my childhood. I rarely talk to my Grandparents anymore and my relationship with that side of my family is strained, at best. I wish I could turn this into some kind of metaphor about how things change, we grow older and wiser about some things, and we also long for the relics of our past, the innocence and ignorance of our youth. It’s a good metaphor, a true one, but it seems too obvious, so I’ll just say this — I’ve never been more depressed about the discontinuation of a food product in my entire life.