The Pecan Grove swimming pool where I learned how to swim and where my mom learned how to swim has been filled in. My mom tells me this one day after she’s been out and about. Even though I haven’t been swimming there in decades, I feel a twinge of something nostalgic.
Under the shadows of the trees just now beginning to turn colors and drop, I walk to the park to see it for myself.
The area is enclosed in a chain link fence. A bulldozer sleeps off to one side. A pile of large cement segments rises like a poor attempt at a pyramid; the remnants of the cement that used to be the ground around the pool over which children (such as I) used to run while lifeguards shouted down from their perches, “No running!”
From where I stand, I can’t even see the outlines of the old pool. The whole patch of ground has been dug up, filled in, spread out. Small, yellow construction flags mark some future plan; a splashpad, a jungle gym. I’m not sure.
Garland has been doing a lot to make its public spaces more usable and maybe this is just the next project on the list. They’d recently expanded the Green Belt walking trail to go through this park. Another #getoutside incentive, perhaps, or another way to break up the ever-growing concrete world. The basketball courts are still at one end. But the swing set that I used to try and swing high enough to go over the top (I never could get that high) whose thick metal legs had been sunk deep in the ground, seeming so permanent, so sturdy, is gone.
The giant metal slide that used to be just to the left of the pool has long been gone. Whose idea was it to put a metal slide in a Texas park? It must have been a good idea to someone. And I never complained, sliding gleefully down the sheet of metal, burning the backs of my legs as I went.
Playgrounds are built differently now.
Some bird, it sounds like a bird of prey, shrieks a repetitive call from the trees behind me. I glance around and then back again remembering more.
The bench my grandparents used to come sit upon so they could watch me that one summer when I was on a synchronized swimming team is also gone.
“Because of COVID? Was nobody using it?” I ask my mom after she tells me about the pool. I’d driven by before when it was empty and had seen the crumbling tile. Maybe it was too expensive to fix.
“They couldn’t get lifeguards,” my mom says.
Flashing backwards in time, I remember talking to one of the lifeguards. He’d been in one of the first aid classes I took one summer. His mother was the instructor. How cool he’d been.
Now it’s not so cool to be a lifeguard. There are better first jobs. Better tasks than sitting under an umbrella on a high perch in a red swimsuit swinging a whistle’s string around the first two fingers of a hand in the brutal Texas heat.
Was it not so hot when I was a child?
I guess it didn’t matter when we lived the summer in the pool.
Many of those sweltering days, I’d leave the house in the morning, sometimes with my siblings, friends, or neighbors, and ride my bike down to the pool. Pay fifty cents –or was it a dollar fifty?—to get in. Or I’d walk barefooted over the hot tar streets and rough cement sidewalks with my thick callouses getting thicker, towel slung over one shoulder.
In the water, however many of us there were, we’d play sharks and minnows, whatever mermaid games we’d thought up, breath-holding contests. We’d race or try to outdo each other’s tricks; handstands, underwater flips, swimming the length of the pool without surfacing, cannonballing, diving.
There used to be a high dive. With its metal steps and railing (like a ladder in my memory). How easy it was then at eight, nine, ten years old to jump from that height. How scary it was a few years ago when I jumped off the high dive at an indoor pool near my friend’s house in Oregon. How hard it was to step off the 16-foot platform into the deep, cold water of a Mexican cenote three years ago. I didn’t have the nerve (or need) to jump from the 32-foot platform.
They (whoever was in charge of the pool, presumably Parks and Rec) removed the high dive years and years ago. And though probably done with safety in mind, I was sad about that too. Hot slides, high diving boards, sturdy swing sets were important ingredients to the recipe of my good childhood. What do today’s children have?
I turn away and walk on the new, connecting trail back to the sidewalk. I’ve seen what there is to see. It’s only dirt now. A filled in space of ground that used to be something else. Time has already filled in so much of what I remember. The details get lost. Along with those other things, I can’t recall or add up how many hours I spent in that pool. Or know how many my mom, in the generation before me, spent there. Or the collective hours of all the children (and adults) who swam there over the years.
Even so, I hope that whatever takes the pool’s place will be used as much and be thought of with nostalgia by someone and their mother some day in the future. It’s a nice hope.
I check both ways then cross the street. I don’t look back. Having both satisfied my curiosity and walked down memory’s lane, I head back to my parents’ house, occasionally glancing up at the trees whose leaves are changing with the season.
