Swimming

WHEN THE LADY in Florida kept posting on Facebook complaints about the lack of rain in the Tampa area, she never failed to mention that the prolonged drought forced her to turn on the sprinkler system in her lawn, and to keep "topping off" her swimming pool, to compensate for evaportaion without natural replenishment. Suddenly a thought cme to me: what if, during a prolonged drought, people simply let their lawns dry up and die, keping faith that they would at length be reborn, and kept their swimming pools empty, for the sake of conservation of water. She assured me that this was a ridiculous idea, that so doing would lead to a less than beautiful lawn, and do damage to a swimming pool. She turned out to be quite correct, according to my subsequet research. Apparently most home swimming pools are not constructed with sufficient strength of concrete to withstand the presure accumulated by failing to equalize pressure on both sides of the walls. My thought at the time was that if home pools were constructed with adequate reinforcement, eny pressure exerted by the encroaching Earth would take so long to do damage that even if an entire summer swimming season passed with empty pool, the damage would be minimal, if any. Not so, assured she. She then invited me to retract my comments, which I declined to oblige, telling that I do not "do" retractions", which I indeed do not. As goethe said: Only by errors which really irk us do we advance." One must own one's mistakes. If everyone who makes inaccurate comments on Facebook offered to retract them, where would we be in our pseudo world of social media? Constrained to the truth, an unthinkable state of affairs in our digital world of alternative facts, it might seem. She bragged about her ability to teach a teacher something about swimmming pools, I countered with a comment that any average first grader can teach me a great deal, about almost anything, on account of my willingness to learn. Swimming pools, full or empty, can teach us lessons, sometimes with tragic results. In 1963, renowned American poet Theodore Roethke had a heart attack while swimming, and died at 55. The pool in which his life ended was drained, filled in, and turned into a Zen meditation garden, complete with decorative patterned pebbles and lush plantings. Still today it is well utilized for that purpose. On another occasion my best friend's father, while staying at a motel, awakened in the middle of the night, and decided to go for a midnight dip. He failed to notice that there was no water in the pool, dived off the high dive and into the waterless pool without looking, and ended his life. Empty pools do damage to more than their mere selves. They also can provide moments of joy. In some communities, the annual autumnal draining of the public pool is preceeded by a day in which folks are invited to bring their dogs for a final end of summer swim. Surely there can be no better use for a concrete hole filled with chlorinated water. It must be conceded that jumping into a soon - to - be -emptied - for - the - autumn swimming pool with innumerable wet dogs beats the hell out of jumping into a never to be emptied private pool only to discover that it is inhabited, on a temporaty basis, by an alligator or water mocassin. Stranger, more fightenign things have happened, but I don't know when or where.