Cash Flow

It's just damn depressing. I was just out back looking at my swimming pool, and obviously it's falling apart. I'm not sure exactly when, but about six or seven years ago I had the thing re-surfaced with something called Diamond Brite, and now it is starting to peel away. I have tried to find the warranty for this job, but so far it has eluded me. Chalk another one up to clutter.

One day, when I was about eleven years old, my dad came home with a lovely, colorful brochure. It was a proposal for joining a swim club to be built by the local Lions Club. There were lovely drawings of how the pool would look, and a description of all the amenities. I was excited. I had always loved swimming, but the only outlet we had was the twelve inch deep little wading pool that my dad had dragged out into the back yard. That pathetic puddle was supplemented by our yearly trip to the Indiana Dunes, and/or a vacation week spent at various, small Midwestern lakes. The prospect of a pool in our neighborhood brought joy to my heart. The Lions Club pool was eventually built, and my dad paid the yearly membership fees for a few years. I loved it. Swimming, diving, and just hanging around the pool with friends while rock and roll music blasted from all the transistor radios.

When looking for a new home seventeen years ago, one of the requisites was a pool. Many of the good memories from my early teen years centered around that Lions Club pool, and I just had to have one of my own. On the day I found this house, I was happy. Out in the back was a beautiful, sparkling swimming pool. It apparently was so sparkling that it blinded me to the flaws in this house, like the fire prone electrical system, lack of air-conditioning, and giant piles of garbage everywhere. On the day I closed on the house, I returned with keys in hand and a song in my heart, only to find the pool half full of toads and green slime. The damn thing has been sucking money out of my pocket ever since. Looking out the window at it now, all I see is a watery money pit. I'm going to keep looking for that Diamond Brite warranty, but I think I'll keep my options open. After all, I can always turn it into a skateboard park.