1.
My life in pools begins at a grimy brick pond in Elmira New York, on a very cold February day in 1944. In that brick pond my father died at the age of three years old. He fell through the ice while walking across with his older brother John. John later told me that his little brother was under the ice for "at least four minutes" while John ran to get help. By the time they pulled my dad out, he was blue, eyes open, dead.
"But they got him going again," my Uncle John later told me. "I don't know how the hell they did it, but they did. Scared the living shit out of me. It was the worst day of my life. I was only five. I was holding his hand and the mitten he was wearing just slipped off and he was gone. Under the ice. I used to have dreams about it."
My father held no memories of his sojourn into the spirit world. He claimed to have no feeling at all for the event and shrugged it off like he would a flock of ghosts, as something that was mildly interesting but not really relevant. Not being a reflective man, he saw no great thing in having died and come back to life. "Any asshole can die," he once told me, as if that closed the matter.
What amazed me in light of this traumatizing experience was my father's atavistic ease and comfort in the water as if his very essence had somehow fused with this element. When we would go to the Mineral Palace pool as kids, he would glide through the pale blue water like a mutant dolphin; oddly sleek, playful and completely at home. He would dive into the deep end and touch the bottom with his finger ("It doesn't count if you don't touch the bottom") and slip out always anxious to dive again.
He told me that he had been afraid of the water when he was smaller, back in New York, but when his family moved to Colorado he had to swim across San Isabel Lake to win a Boy Scout badge. So he made himself do it and that cured his fear of water. I knew San Isabel Lake and I was mortified by the thought of anyone having to swim across it. The water was the colour of flat Pepsi and raggedy dead fish frequently lined its greasy shores.
When we moved from the tiny low income tract house I grew up in, to a richer,
