When they started digging the new swimming pool at our house, one of my granddaughters asked how much it costs to build a pool.
I told her with all honesty that I had no idea. Any conversation about math or money makes me nervous, so my wife does not discuss things like that with me.
Back in the old days like the 1970s or so, most businesses kept what they called “counterchecks” for customers who wanted to pay with a check but didn’t have one with them.
My barber Terry Scott had just given me a haircut. I owed him $7 but realized I didn’t have any cash or a checkbook. I had never owned a checkbook.
When I requested a countercheck, he asked which bank I used. There were checks from three different banks, so I just took a guess at the one where I might have an account.
It was the wrong guess. When I went back to the barber shop, there was a framed copy of the check I wrote with “No Account” stamped on it in glaring red letters.
I tried to give Terry the $7 to get the framed check off the wall. He said he would rather have the framed check than the money.
That incident illustrates my lack of understanding of financial matters, which explains why I could not give my granddaughter even a ballpark estimate of how much swimming pools cost.
Costs for nearly everything shock me these days. It was the 1940s when my folks bought the house where I grew up. I found the deed on brittle yellow paper in their things. It cost $3,500.
There was no pool in the yard, but we could swim and dive from willow trees at a waterhole not far from the house. We called it the minnow ditch.
The house had a tiny kitchen, three little bedrooms, a living room and one bathroom with an open flame heater in the wall. The one-car garage had a dirt floor.
Uncle Buddy, my mother’s brother, lived with us for a good while after serving overseas in World War II. He was trying to decompress and find a job.
He worked in Texas and then Florida but came back for holidays and vacations. Every time he went in the house, he would walk around and say, “This just feels like home.”
Regina and I were in North Carolina a while back and saw the Biltmore Mansion. I remember thinking that my whole boyhood house could have fit in its kitchen.
My granddaughter would never believe that we lived there all those years, had big family celebrations, a large enough yard for a garden and baseball games, and it cost $3,500.
We didn’t have a pool, and neither did any of our neighbors. But my passion for the water and swimming helped me make big money working summers at the city pool.
I helped with swimming lessons and lifeguarding, cleaned the pool, added chlorine and chemicals, filled vending machines, and mopped the locker rooms.
It was early morning until late night seven days a week. I would have done it for free, but they paid me $22 every Friday.
They tell me the pool we are putting in will have some frills like deck jets, lighting, mini fountains, and a tanning ledge.
There was no tanning ledge at the waterhole where I first fell in love with swimming, but we could bask in the sun floating on an old car tire innertube with our feet dangling in the water.
If my granddaughter asks again about the cost of a swimming pool, I will just tell her that it will probably be more expensive than the entire house was where I grew up.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES