Percy Norman Pool

Even vagabonds have hometowns, and Vancouver will always be mine, even if its weather permanently precludes my living there year-round. This year, the BC summer weather seemed hit its stride in mid-July when Christine and I were well into our campaign to spend time with everyone in our immediate family. It was during our stay with my sister Jenny and her hubby Martin in South Vancouver ("Camgara" to the initiated) that we decided to meet up for a swim at Percy Norman Memorial Pool near 30th and Ontario.

I knew it was going to be more a nostalgic experience than a recreational swim. I had learned to swim at Percy Norman, which opened the year I was born. The pool had been part of my compact childhood universe: we lived just a short drive away at 459 West 20th, and dad called the Mounties games from a tiny booth on top of what was then Capilano Stadium, just across the street from the pool. Edith Cavell Elementary was a block from our house.  Everything else might as well have been on Venus.  Our family seemed to go to the pool every second Sunday (and out to my grandparents' farm in Haney on alternate Sundays).

The pool building's foyer housed a fascinating (to me) piece of 1960s exotica (especially for a characteristically austere 1960s civic property): a simulated undersea garden to add interest to the otherwise unusable area under the open staircase that led to the bleachers. It was always the first thing my six-year-old self looked for.  

Back then, the person at the foyer's small ticket counter would issue each of us a square clothing bag made of stiff green mesh. Diagrams on the wall would show how to use the clothing bags to accommodate a suit or sports jacket (when did North Americans stop dressing up, and why?).  Mike, dad and I would head into their changing room on the left, and the three girls would head to theirs on the right.  Occasionally, before I was old enough to look after myself, my mom would bring me into the women's changing area, probably because my dad was away on a road trip with the baseball team. I remember being slightly miffed to discover that the girls got to change in private booths, while I usually had to change in an open room filled with strange hairy men. (And don't get me started on the trough-style communal urinals that you still find in older buildings.) Privacy aside, the sixties were all about cleanliness, so as we exited the changing rooms for the pool we would all wade through a shallow tiled trough filled with a disinfectant solution of likely now-illegal intensity.

The pool hadn't changed much, but was in surprsingly good shape for a fifty-year-old facility just a few days away from permanent closure. The brown tiles around the pool edges and colourful tilework on the deck surface surrounding the swimming and diving pools showed no signs of wear at all. Stephani remembered that she used to scan the randomly-laid tiles for the little yellow circular ones. I recall having been more interested in the warnings "DEEP" and NO RUNNING" incorporated into the tile design, partly because "DEEP" was (and is) "peed" backwards: appropriate nomenclature for a family facility. Since my last visit over thirty years before, a hot tub and sauna wing had been added to the side of the building that had once looked out through tall, narrow windows towards the grass of Riley Park. Unsurprisingly, everything in the facility seemed smaller than I remembered, to the extent that I could barely negotiate the stairs leading up to the bleachers, my feet having mapped them decades before when Mike and I would tear around the building's little-used upper regions after hastily changing post-swim. Walking on the pool deck, I could still picture my first swimming teacher, a limping older man who looked like the guy in jail on the Monopoly board, coaxing we shivering tots into the pool one by one, as he drew us along the edge of the pool with a long T-handled pole as he walked along the pool edge. I'm very grateful my parents put us all through swimming lessons: the lifetime of confidence around water was worth the short-lived trauma.

I was glad to see there were still vending machines in the building's foyer. Our family swims of old were often capped off with a seemingly decadent treat: dad would buy the family a ten-cent chocolate bar from the machine, and we would all share it. This sounds like a time-distotred, Depression-era tale, but it's true. Our favourite was "Liquid Four Flavours", an easily-divided 4x2 matrix comprised of two squares each of vanilla, chocolate, caramel, and "bordeaux" liquid fillings. The exotic-sounding "bordeaux" - a sweet amber filling tasting like dolce di leche - was my personal fave. It was a good day when I got to eat a square of that. 

When things were a bit more flush, the family would sometimes stop on the way home at the White Spot drive-in at Cambie and King Edward for an in-car lunch (a treat to be relived while there are still a few remaining White Spot drive-ins). The long, narrow trays spanning the inside of the car; ketchup, vinegar, salt and pepper in glass containers; genuine cutlery; the smell of dill pickles and triple-O sauce - these all contributed to the illusion that the family car had been transformed into a private restaurant - one where you were allowed to blowgun the paper sleeve off your milkshake straw at high velocity towards a family member.

Getting back to 2010, the five of us had a good swim in the near-vacant slow lane, doing gentle laps, stopping to chat, climbing into the "new" hot tub, and comparing notes about what had survived. After changing, I just had to head upstairs one last time to look at the nether regions Mike and I used to explore. Every public building I knew from that early time in my life - schools, community centers, libraries, public health offices, and Percy Norman Pool - evoked the same unfussy functionality and optimistic, non-sponsored, public-oriented zeitgeist our society has sadly lost. Everything in that naive world seemed to function on a silent understanding that may no longer be possible, but function they did. In any event, Percy Norman Pool's upper reaches were simple with painted concrete, glass blocks, metal handrails, rubber stair treads, and unpretentious light fixtures. Still flawless in their final hours of purpose, they reminded me of my 1952 Chevrolet, whose faithful stoicism won't allow me to let him go.

Christine bought us all a Snickers bar to share as we made our way down Ontario Street to Jenny and Martin's house. Houses of all eras line that route, every numbered avenue shaded by a different species of boulevard tree. We spent the rest of the evening enjoying a gourmet alfresco dinner in the gazebo, and singing every song we three Robsons could remember from K-Tel's 22 Explosive Hits Vol.2. Years from now, when my shrinking bones are folded into some rocking chair, memories of that day will bubble up, and I'll know I've led a wonderful life.

The new Percy Norman Pool has opened in the flashy new curling facility they built for the Winter Olympics. Martin says it has an enormous hot tub and an artificial stream running through the facility. Christine and I will have to try it out when we're back in Canada, which could be next summer or the one after that.