Tucson painting by Felix Pasilis
Sunday, 8/10/08, 6:43 am
In Tucson you can join a club or swim at Public Pool
It’s a beautiful morning. The birds are chirping and whistling. A sparrow is doing her “la toilette,” primping her feathers, on branch right out my window, making herself beautiful. Wow what a big job she is doing. She is cleaning each one of her feathers, under her wing, on her breast, her back, everywhere.
The sky is gentle blue. And the sunlight shining thru the green leaves of mesquite tree is starting to look August, the green has an August hue to it. It is a world of gentle blue sky, August-hued green leaves, and sparrows in my tree, hip hopping from branch to branch, except for Mrs Sparrow, her morning bath and preening is taking forever.
O now another sparrow on another branch is doing his morning preen and clean. Mrs Sparrow has finished hers it seems, she is looking around. O I spoke too soon, she was just taking a rest, she is back cleaning under her wing again.
Tomorrow schools in Tucson open again and the school year begins. The summer lifeguards who are all 16 years old, and spent all summer barefoot in bathing suits at the city swim pools, will be in shoes and socks and regular clothes, and taking history and English and chemistry and trigonometry. Instead of a day at the pool, it will be day in school. I asked one what he thought about school opening again and he said “it will be fun to see my friends who I haven’t seen all summer.” I am guessing this means the friends who were away during the summer. The desert is like NYC in that way, those who can get away from the heat in summer, do. Altho I am guessing his friends just looked for summer jobs outside of Tucson, they wanted to be away.
When my cousins were growing up in Tucson my aunt Ruth rented beach house in San Diego for the summer, and they spent their summers on the beach. San Diego is no longer affordable so now the teachers in Tucson take their families to the seaside in Mexico for the summer. They all have condos down there. I was friends with some of these teachers when I was at Racquet Club and they all said “when I retire I want to move there.” They love Mexico, they love their condo on the beach there. In the public pools I don’t run into this world. There are not so many lap swimmers and the ones I know are rooted in Tucson. But at Racquet Club it seemed almost everyone was going back and forth to Mexico all the time. The ones who didn’t own a condo there would go and rent for a week-end or a week.
It’s interesting what a different world Racquet Club was in summer compared to the public pools in summer. Public pools are so orderly. There are all the 16 year old lifeguards hired for the summer, gazillions of them because so many children are in the pools in the afternoons, the day camps come and bring all their kids. So it is the year round lifeguards, Samantha and the others who are always there; the summer lifeguards; and the morning lap swimmers, the same swimmers you see year round. In the afternoons there is the same father, he is a teacher, who brings his little daughter every day every summer. But he is not going back and forth to Mexico, he takes his daughter to pool every day, and when they are not at the pool he takes her to the movies. I begin to see why the public pools have the same vibe I do. For better or for worse, my life is like that too.
Not everyone at Racquet Club leads life of high adventure. After all Bill and I were there for 3 years, our friend Jim has been there forever, Layla is there, Maria is there too. But if you look closely, Maria does go to New York City a few times a year to be with her son and grandchildren, and does visit Poland where she grew up once a year. Layla too goes to NYC few times a year to see her son, and down to her farm in Mexico once a year for few weeks. Jim doesn’t go anywhere, but his heart is not in Tucson at all, he dreams night and day of having a yacht and living in Tahiti. And Sue always spends her summer back in Michigan.
The world I grew up in is the Racquet Club world. In fact my parents were tennis players, we had a summer cottage in the Adirondacks in the summer; my parents were always active, they did sport, and went to the theater, to concerts. Cultural life was a big part of their life. I was like the children of the parents at Racquet Club. For me being at Racquet Club was being back in the world I grew up in. And that is the life my aunt Ruth gave her kids when they were growing up in Tucson. It is incredible how cosmopolitan Racquet Club is. I was friends with Arlene there, both she and her husband are university professors. And they have been to every country in the world. And really when you think of it, so has Layla.
Well a little birdie is sitting on a high up branch just quietly looking around. O he saw something! O he straightened up, poised alert! O he took off! Hahaha you always think of a bird watcher as someone with binoculars around their neck, tramping thru the woods, but I guess in my own way I am bird watcher too, I like to watch the birds.
Yes Racquet Club is the world I grew up in. I guess it is no surprise that practically the first day there, I was sitting in jacuzzi next to older guy, and out of the blue in middle of conversation, he said about dating Ruth Wilensky when he was 16 years old. I fell over! Wilensky is my maiden name. I hadn’t realized that would have been my aunt’s name until she married George. Only in Racquet Club would you hear your own maiden name spoken to you, without any awareness that was the name you grew up with. “I dated Ruth Wilensky when I was 16, but she preferred George, he became her boyfriend” Seymour told me in the jacuzzi my first week at Racquet Club.
Seymour had grown up in the Bronx, by the Bronx Zoo, but obviously had come to Tucson fairly young if he had been dating my aunt. He became a doctor, was general practitioner his whole life. Sometimes his wife and grown up kids arrived, and they looked every inch New York City. They looked like a family my parents would have been friends with. And of course they have summer house in Rocky Mountains to get out of the heat. There are doctors at my public pool too, but they are not elegant cosmopolitan sophisticated like Seymour (Seymour is an intellectual.) The doctors at public pool work at the hospital close by, and are the klutzes to end all klutzes. You never want to swim in a lane next to them or anywhere near them. They are absolutely oblivious of the world around them. They are completely out of it. There are even two professors at the public pool but they are not one bit like Arlene and her husband Mike the physics professor, the two world travelers. Alfredo is in food science department, he doesn’t leave Tucson, he loves to grow his beautiful plants and swim at public pool every day. And Lyn the anthropology professor, also swims at public pool every day, never leaves Tucson, except I guess for anthropology conventions, and spends his evenings going dancing, he knows all the unusual exotic folk dances.
Of course I love everyone I met at Racquet Club, they are the nicest people in the world. And if you notice our good friends now are people we met at Racquet Club, Layla and Jim and Maria, and even Sue altho I never see her. And Kimberly altho I never see her either. And Gail and Ray altho they switched to public pools as we did. I guess you have to share interests for a friend to cross over from pool friend to friend in regular life. And all my friends in NYC are people you would meet at the Racquet Club.
But it is the public pools which suit me to a T. So few people in that big huge pool, high up by the mountains. Everything so simple, just a big deep swim pool, a bathhouse with no roof, showering under the blue sky and bird call, watching the birds take off and land while you swim. And talking to Patsy in the next lane about the poker game she was in last night. Her husband is top card player, and Patsy is learning.
This is the other world I grew up in, it wasn’t my parents’ world, but the world of the parents of the children I played with in my building. Where their mothers played Mahjong every evening, and we sat at the kitchen table and played poker when we got home from school, and tried to teach ourselves Mahjong. And Carol’s mother would get out her ash tray and cigarettes and join us for a hand, and talk about the 12 egg sponge cake she just made for Pesach.
I am not saying everyone at public pools is like Patsy and Mike. Kathleen teaches the oboe to children who are entering competitions and is a great potter. Eleanor did great pottery too. But swimming in quiet empty pool next to Patsy, hearing how she had a Straight, how could she not bet on it, is just my speed. And Mike is next to her saying proudly how well she did. And because it is a money game (Mike is always in big money games) Mike says he is her sugar daddy and when she was down $400 it was his money and he was very nervous, but she came back very well.... this is what I like. For me this is the kind of pool conversation which harmonizes with beautiful mountains to look at, blue sky above, birds always on their way somewhere, and 16 year old lifeguards up in the stands.
It is the simple life of Annie at 8 years old....
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