Odd!

Last night we went swimming at Antibes pool at Bathurst & Finch. It was the only indoor facility with an evening swim that I could find - aside from an all-male swim at Lawrence Park from 7:30-9.

A year ago we would never need to search for a place to swim because our next door neighbours, Rebecca and Michael, had a pool that we were welcome to use any time we wanted to. Their daughter taught R to dive in that pool last summer.

But this spring, those neighbours moved away after 11 years, and the new neighbours, Yeng-ki and Nancy, are almost never around. And the water in the pool is kind of tinged with some impurity of the wrong colour. Kind of blackish, like when you dip your paintbrush into a glass to clean it off. So at least we're not gazing longingly at it through the fence anyway.

This summer we've started going to public swimming pools at Toronto community centres.

And since the new Prince George - who got his name yesterday - may never know what it's like to swim in a small, overcrowded public swimming pool, I'm going to try to describe it for him. Later on, when George, Prince of Cambridge, finds himself splashing among the waves in the sunny Seychelles, or performing a medal-worthy swan-dive in the royal deep-end, he needs to know exactly what he is missing.

At a public pool you get to shimmy out of your clothes and put on your swimsuit in front of naked strangers, and then you get to take your flipflops off and walk across a gelatinously-dirty tile floor toward the pool deck. You get to politely ask the lifeguard if diving is allowed, and you get to see him silently point at the sign that says "no diving". You get to stake out an area for yourself in the pool where you can swim without getting some other swimmer's foot up your nostril. You get to see someone make a bee-line for your area and begin enjoying it. You get to repeat that process again a few times until you just tread water in one spot. You get to look at the clock and realize you've only been there 30 minutes when the whistle blows and the lifeguard screams "everybody out!" and a lady sitting leisurely on the ladder with a calm expression and no intention of moving out of your way asks you - what is it? - and you get to eventually emerge from the now-empty pool so you can stand on the crowded-confused deck to see the small patty of vomit floating on the water's clear surface, down in the shallow end. You get to laugh in the shower, as the cold water shocks you, and the lovely (swimsuit-wearing) mom next to you jokes in her slightly Jamaican accent about the coldness of the water and you make your own joke that it was only baby-vomit and who hasn't been exposed to that anyway?

Once R and I were dried and dressed, we also got to walk around the community centre and check things out. There was a classroom filled with large canvasses and colours and women and men visibly over the age of 60 seated with their oval palettes, painting with oils. It reminded me of a symphony.

But this was a symphony of soloists. No two subjects were alike. There were muscular, stampeding horses, quiet autumn lake shores, a large, blurred portrait of someone's grown daughter. The painting that held my attention longest depicted a crisply-vivid beach scene. Amid shades of aqua-blue and green and champagne tans, a large, spotted conch shell took centre stage in the foreground while soft white sand and palms receded immediately behind it. The sky and water were clear, the shell appeared shiny and heavy and golden-brown, nestled in the sand. A pair of palm trees grew, just-so, on either side, of it, like the open curtains on a stage. As real as it all appeared, it was, without a doubt, a scene from a gentleman-of-few-hairs' imagination. And, like Rousseau before him, his scene of paradise was beautiful but unconvincing. And I wondered, briefly, if he's ever been there.