Henry: Eeew. What is this green crap, I mean stuff, on my plate?
Anne: Is this from the yard? Gross. I want grocery store green stuff.
Me: Shut up and eat your macrobiotic micro greens!
Henry: Why can't we just have canned green beans LIKE EVERYONE ELSE?
Me: When I was a kid, we had canned beans! Generic canned beans from the charity grocery store! We got a crayon at the door and had to write on the damn can what we could afford! Be grateful for fresh green stuff! Eat it!
Anne: What color was the crayon?
Winston: Really?
Me: Yes, really. The crayon was black, Anne, and I got smacked repeatedly upside the head for suggesting to my mother that we write "1 cent" on everything and then we could eat like kings and not eat CANNED BEANS EVERY DAMN DAY. Apparently, I was rubbing our poverty in her face. Thus, the smack. But seriously, if it were me, I would still do that today. I would have no shame about writing "1 cent" on a can.
Henry: You have a story of suffering for everything. How can that be?
Anne: She's making it up.
Me: Do you want me to tell you the story about the little girl who called her momma a liar and then her mom got hit by a bus and she never got a chance to say she was sorry?
Winston: Just eat your dinner. Where is this store, anyway?
Me: Don't even go there! I am not shopping the charity store so you can get NFL Season Ticket!
Anyway, back to the pool. Anne got invited to go swimming with her friend at their country club. And no, we aren't country club sort of people, as this conversation will demonstrate.
Super Nice Other Mom Who Is Not Psycho: We wondered if Anne would spend the day with us at The Club tomorrow and go swimming? Maybe we could pick her up at 11am and have her back by 4?
Me: Uuuuh... (thinking, "How the hell do I reciprocate that shit?") Sure. I'll pack Anne a lunch and maybe send some snacks for break times? And a towel, right?
Super Nice Mom Who Is Way Classier Than Me: Oh, dear me, no! There are towels at the club. And we'll just eat at the club, so don't bother with the lunch. It's no problem, really.
Me: Hey, Anne, you could just order a steak sandwich with a steak sandwich and charge it to the Underhills! Right, Super Nice Mom? Am I right? Uuuuhhhh.....
Super Nice Mom Who Now Knows I Am Mental: Does she like steak sandwiches? Who are the Underhills? I don't think we know them.
Me: You know... like in the movie? Fletch? He, like, keeps ordering steak sandwiches and charging it to the Underhill family?
Silence.
Me: Well, never mind! Sounds like fun! Please stop looking at me like that so I can run inside and be embarrassed!
There was no talking to the child when she got home from the wonderland that is the pool at a country club.
Anne: I didn't see even one band-aid in the whole pool! And there were pool toys and none of them were dirty or broken! And everyone gets a chair! There's lots of chairs so even kids get one! Ooooh! Ooooh! These fancy boys served us lunch!
Me: Nice! Cabana boys! Sign me up!
Anne: Whatever. Oooh! And the bathrooms! They were so clean! The floor wasn't all covered with wet toilet paper! And none of the toilets were backed up.
Me: You mean how at Lakewood Pool, one toilet is backed up for the entire summer and no one seems to care? Yeah. But that takes all the fun out of it!
Anne: No, it's not fun, Mommy, it's GROSS. And we each got our own changing room with carpet and chairs and a little table and a BLOW DRYER! I blow dried my whole body! It was awesome! I love the club!
Me: Yeah, well don't get too used to it, Toots. Your butt is going to be swimming at Lakewood Pool for the duration of the summer.
Anne: I don't want to go to Lakewood Pool anymore! It's gross and it's not awesome! The signs about "waterborn virus" in the bathroom scare me! I want to go to The Club!
Me: Listen: you and your brother have no conception of what it means to swim in a shitty pool. I don't want to hear it. If you saw where I swam as a kid, you'd have nightmares.
Henry: Here we go. A tale of suffering. Thanks, Anne.
Me: Nope. I'll do you one better. We are taking a road trip to my childhood! I will show you pain and suffering!
Kids: Great.
So Saturday, I told Winston to head out of the county to the little podunk community I grew up in. It was, as always, painfully nostalgic.
"And that's where the Big Wheel Department Store used to be. That's where I got all my clothes. Think Marc's but worse. And that mobile home park used to be the Pumpkin Patch and we used to walk there every year, 2 miles there and back, and pick out our pumpkins for Halloween. I was a slow witted child. Every year I picked a 30 pound pumpkin and dropped it on the way home. You'd think someone would have stopped me at some point. Never actually carved a pumpkin.
Henry: Your childhood was depressing. Can we go home now?
Me: Nope. Not till you see the swimming hole. I won't have you little snobs thumbing your noses at Lakewood Pool. That used to be the library over there, and I used to ride my bike three miles there and get way too many books and then try to balance them on my handle bars the whole way home. And once, Alva Easterly knocked me off my bike on the way home and stabbed me with a pencil in my back.
Winston: I thought he did that in History class in 6th grade.
Me: Don't try to make it pretty! He stabbed everyone REPEATEDLY in the back with his damn little sharp pencils! I hope that turd is doing hard time somewhere! And who the hell names their child "Alva Easterly" and thinks that won't cause damage?
There was no pool in my hometown. So someone decided to dig a big hole in the ground, cover the whole area with sand and dirt, then let it fill with rainwater and call it South Central Pool. It was not a pool. It was a mud hole. But on a hot summer day in the sticks, it was your only option.
Let me tell you an interesting fact about South Central Pool. It was conveniently located next to a fertilizer plant. So the smell of the whole area was an intriguing combination of bleach and dead fish and poo. I think the city got the land cheap because no one wanted to be anywhere near that part of town.
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| A peaceful scene of an now abandoned fertilizer plant. |
Me: See that abandoned fertilizer plant over there, kids? It stank like hot poison. And your Grandma made us sit right here by the damn fence because your Uncle Darryl had delicate skin and needed shade. You worry about some wet toilet paper and band aids at freaking Lakewood Pool? I WAS SWIMMING IN RUNOFF FROM THE FERTILIZER PLANT! Any minute now, the tumors are going to start popping out from all over my body, like the Toxic Avenger.
Winston: Are we done here? Did you still want to show them the high tension lines you grew up under?
Me: I want to get a few more pictures. The we'll show them the other reason I will probably die tumorous.
Kids: Great.
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| You're thinking "cute pond." No. Think "sanitary runoff." |
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| That slime was there when I was a kid. We weren't allowed to touch the steps, cause my mom didn't want to deal with head trauma. |
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| lol |
After enlightening my kids at the South Central Fertilizer Mud Hole, we drove over to the house I grew up in. I loved my house. My parents gave us a beautiful home with the best they could, considering the whole country was sitting in gas lines and our town was one of the poorest in the area. But if you grew up in North Ridgeville, Ohio and you didn't have much money, you probably lived under the power lines. Like we did.
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| home sweet home |
Me: Alright, get out of the car. I want you to see where I played as a child.
Henry: No. You can't make me.
Winston: (Sigh...)
Anne: I'll come!
Me: You people suck. Come on, Anne.
Anne and I jumped out of the car and walked the gravel utility access path that I had walked every day as a child. So I could go play in the ditch and climb the power lines.
Me: So, this gravel road is exactly the same as when I was your age, and I would run across the street here to play in the ditch! See?
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| My ditch. |
Anne: That's not so bad. I like ditches.
Me: Yeah, well the ditch was fun, but even a ditch gets boring after throwing rocks in it for the whole summer. But the big fun was back here, playing under the power lines.
Anne: I thought those were dangerous. And there's signs everywhere saying "No Trespassing."
Me: They are dangerous. The government says it's safe to live under them, but people who do always get cancer. That's why poor people live under them, cause no one cares. Your Uncle Dougie and I used to climb the scaffolding of the high tension wires and try to steal the sign that said, "Danger! Risk of Electrocution!" We thought the little picture on the sign of the little man getting fried by a million volts was funny.
Anne: I'm 9, and even I know that's dumb and stupid.
Me: Yeah, well you didn't grow up under this crap so you're probably smarter than me.
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| I did have a lot of fun. But it's a wonder I was never kidnapped. Or electrocuted. |
FYI? The most surprising people grew up under the power lines, so be careful not to use it as a deprecating phrase in polite company. I know a girl named Becky who would have benefited from that advice. When my Henry was a baby, I joined a playgroup so he wouldn't grow up socially awkward from isolation. (We all did this. Yes, it's stupid. Playgroups are just sadism for mothers who already feel guilty about everything.) During one play date at this total tool named Becky's house, she decided to flavor an insult with a power line reference. Her house? I (Heart) Country all over the place. Potpourri wreathes and framed Bible verses with little Raggedy Ann and Andy shit all over the place. And she had this weird upper lip that made me think of a trout, so I sorta hated her already. And I have rage issues.
Becky: ... I mean, you have to advocate for your child. You can't just let them grown up all "willy nilly." You have to research every little thing before you make a decision about your child. If you don't, your kid will end up like those people who live under power lines or something. (snort) Pathetic.
Me: (standing up and grabbing Henry) Becky, you are a freak-lipped cunt. You don't know shit about power line survivors. And who the fuck decorates their entire home including the goddamn bathroom with their wedding pictures?
Becky: How dare you swear in front of my child?! Get out!
Me: Oh, don't worry, Becky, you twat. I'm leaving. I hope your daughter doesn't grow up to be a freak-lipped cunt like her mother. But then, I grew up under power lines, Becky, so you can't expect too much from someone like me. You're lucky I didn't shit on the rug. I'm out.
It was either my finest moment, or the first sign of mental damage from the pool and the power lines.
I think I got through to my kids. There is nothing wrong with the city pool. We will never be country club people. Let's be honest, we'd never pass the review process. I'd probably blow my stack and call someone a "freak-lipped cunt." I could never slink about a pool gracefully and wink at the cabana boys. I cannot flick my hair. If we belonged to a country club, I would definitely be shopping at the charity shop for cheap beans and Winston would never have NFL Season Ticket. But then, my kids aren't country club material either. Anne and I talked about it and she realized that most of the girls there were just tanning or walking around flicking their long blond hair and texting. And that is so not my daughter. My kids like to do multiple cannon balls and try to soak the life guard. They like to wear their goggles and dive to the bottom of the 7ft area and sit there until their ears hurt. They swim and splash and play weird, loud, complicated pool games until they are pruney. We're city pool people, and that cement pond looks pretty fancy to me.
~dana
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| I just love how seriously they take their goggles. |
