The Town Pool

When I was a kid, my mom, like many other moms around the country, took my sisters and I to the town pool.  The town pool provided an easy and enjoyable way to celebrate summer- by providing a place to go, to socialize, to cool off.  My mother always packed lunch, though my sisters and I inevitably always asked if we could buy fries or ice cream or something from the snack bar- just for the sake of buying something from the snack bar.  We played with other kids, ran around, swam in that water that must have God only knows how much chlorine to keep it swimable.  That was, is, our culture.  We were in a controlled environment, under the watchful eyes of parents and lifeguards, surrounded by people we knew or at least knew of.  At the time, that pool seemed huge.  It seemed like it took forever to swim through all of it (though to be fair I wasn't that strong of a swimmer).  Even just sitting on a lounge chair looking out at it, all the different depths and all the people it held.  At the time, that pool seemed huge.

After a few years, my parents decided to build a pool  of our own, a much smaller one of course, in the back yard.  Maybe I was ten or eleven.  I haven't been to the town pool since.  In my mind, therefore, that pool has always been as huge as my child's eyes perceived it.

Today, years later, as I am about to enter that nether region between childhood and adulthood that is senior year of college, I realized how wrong I was.  The pool at the Syosset-Woodbury park, in the grand scheme of things, is small.  Really, really small, and what made me realize it was the Mediterranean Sea.

I was walking along the lungomare today, near where all the fancy hotels are.  I stopped for a moment to look out the view,  like always.  It never gets any less beautiful or any less moving.  Not far from the shore, which is actually just a long row of boulders, gli scogli in Italian, there was a group of boys, maybe six or seven of them, sitting in two rowboats.  They must have been twelve or thirteen years old, tops.  At one point as I was watching, they all jumped into the water.  The swam around for a while, splashed and dunked one another, and a few minutes later they climbed back in.  As I looked around, I noticed other people swimming, too.  Adults, with swim caps and goggles, doing laps.  There were also people spread out along the rocks: some people alone with fishing rods, some couples, and another group of boys.  They were taking in the sun, the heat, the water.  And all of a sudden, as I was watching these children swim in bay, I realized that the unofficial town pool in Naples is the Mediterranean itself.      

The concept is somewhat similar.  The school year has ended, temperatures are rising, the sun is out, and people of all ages are looking to enjoy these circumstances.  

There are, obviously,  a lot of differences.  

Although I saw both adults and children today, I didn't see them together.  These kids were out in the water on that boat with just each other.  Who knows whether it belongs to one of their parents, or who brought them out there, or the answers to any other such similar question.  And yet what they were doing never once struck me as unsafe.  It didn't really strike me as anything, really, other than enjoyable.  It just seemed normal, that's because it is, and it probably has been for as long as people have been living here (so, forever, essentially).   

Think back to your town pool, if you ever went to one, or the lake at your sleep away camp or whatever the equivalent is for you.  Now imagine that body of water being able to connect you to literally anywhere else in the world.  Try to imagine the place where you spent your summers as a child being the unofficial capital of an entire region of the world, a place that for thousands of years has been a center of cultural, religious, and linguistic exchange.  A place that has experienced the glory of empire, the prestige of culture, and suffered the hardships of loss, war, exploitation and crime.  Over and over again, back and forth, for centuries.

Kids in Naples, kids all over southern Italy, and in Greece and Israel and Syria, and in Morocco and Egypt, grow up swimming, playing and splashing in the waters that gave birth to culture.  They grow up carrying that history, breathing it and seeing it.  Continuing it.  

Kids in the States grow up swimming at the Syosset-Woodbury pool.  

  

The art of "Straight Up Chilling" has long been practiced by Neapolitans.

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I guess in a way Vesuvius is the lifeguard.  He's the only one guaranteed to be watching.  He's always there.  Though lifeguard isn't the right word.  Because the thing could blow at anytime.  

Life is full of morbid metaphors when you live near a volcano.  Morbid metaphors and high insurance rates.