Apalachin Community Press, August 1999

Norman Rockwell

Would Approve

by Terry J. Ward

I remember walking home from the Owego Pool on hot summer afternoons. The skies were blue, I had that delicious, bone-melting tiredness that only comes after spending your day seeing how perfectly you could stand on your head underwater, or, if you were lucky enough and the lifeguards didn't notice, how expertly you could dive and find a penny at the bottom of the pool. I knew that my mom, who had spent the long hot day working, would have something good to eat waiting for me. Dinty Moore Beef Stew was my favorite for a long time. I remember taking my bowl of it into her bedroom and watching the Flintstones. I would be starved and life didn't get any better than that. When I was a little older, and boys became a focus, the pool was a place to perfect my tan, while Liz Mead and I tried to unravel the mysteries of what exactly attracted them. The answers that my friends and I came up with were perhaps a bit more innocent than what a pre-adolescent would ascertain now, but the confusion and uncertainty are probably the same. All the same, laying in the sun, your best friend at your side, looking vaguely out on to a clear blue pool, never hurt the best of philosophers.

It is indeed unfortunate that so many kids don't have the luxury that I had when I was a kid. It's hot this summer. Really hot. Just as it has been for the past few summers. We don't have a real long summer here. The beauty and the curse of this area is that we seem to get all of the seasons in all of their glory, just like clockwork. But each season seems to try its hardest to live up to its full potential, summer being no exception. America is a land that embraces the Norman Rockwell ideology of what things should be. I confess, I'm a sucker for it too. I insist that my kids eat as many ice-cream cones as possible in the summer and throw as many snowballs as they can make in the winter. Spring is for sloshing through mud puddles and, in the fall, your mission is to find the most colorful leaves. Kids should be rag doll tired from swimming all day in the summer. A kid's summer should be for dreaming, for looking up at the clouds and finding shapes, for not being serious. And jumping in the pool when it gets too hot.

Not in Owego. Several years ago, we decided to rob our kids of this very basic, fundamental pleasure. Oh, please, I've heard the arguments about how expensive it would be to fix the pool. Tell me how expensive it is to fix kids when they go down the wrong pathway. Because if we don't start putting our money in areas that really benefit our kids, that really begin to give them a childhood that puts them on the right footing, that's exactly where our money will be spent. Where would you rather spend your money (oh, and by the way, the figures that have been given to us for this project are, I believe, outrageously inflated)- sending kids to rehab, paying for drug programs, or, on things that would help keep them out of trouble to start with? When you're tired out after a long day of skateboarding or swimming, drugs and trouble are much less appealing.

Drug use is the occupation of boredom. And unfortunately, our town has very little to offer kids outside of organized sports. I think we should change that. It's well past the time that we re-opened the pool at Marvin Park. I don't know much about the committee that has been formed to help organize this, but I will say this - there is a donation jar at Original Italian Pizza. There's a start. Go put a couple of bucks in it. And you people that grew up in this town and made your fortunes here, did you go swimming in the Owego Pool? Did your kids? Do you remember how excited you were when you passed the swim test and could use the diving board? Time to help some other kids have what you had.

(Just an idea - perhaps we could put together a work crew like the one that built the playground at the elementary school - worth thinking about??)