One very hot day eleven Kodachrome-memory years ago I was reading Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream while sitting in a fold-up chair on the lawn in the dappled shade of a ti-tree at the Oak Park pool.
It was mid-afternoon. The boys were lightning streaks in the white-blue water. Echoed shouts could be heard from the waterslide that is no longer there. An unseen train's rumble crossed Pascoe Vale Road from the parallel track behind the high apartments on its east side. From one of these apartments, a dark figure emerged from its second floor to hang some wet clothing items on the wrought-iron balcony before disappearing again with the faint thud of a slammed door. A plane made a buzzsaw drawl as it inched across the sky. All of these things were half-noticed; a parent's instinctive mental note-taking while monitoring children around water.
In a while the boys came back into the shade for food, splashing and shaking like spaniels, a five- and a six-year-old with ravenous water-induced appetites. I'd packed sandwiches in a cooler with an ice-block against the intense heat. They ate while I read them the paragraph in which Thomas Hudson's sons leave Bimini in a helicopter to return to their mother in Europe, who is divorced from their father. The paragraph is strikingly descriptive, but portentously so. Thomas Hudson waves to his sons as fleeting faces in a window rising into the sky. He will never see them again. I did not read the next section to my boys, who went off again into the water.
The Oak Park pool was closed for a couple of years, one for a complete rebuild and another for obvious reasons. This January we were there again. Teenagers now, they still eat voraciously, but the waterplay is broken up with languid reading on towels in the shade. One was reading A Farewell to Arms and the other, The Old Man and the Sea.
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