I learned to swim at my uncle’s pool. First, you put your face in the water. Blow bubbles. Go full-body prone in Deadman’s Float. Splash exuberantly in a dogpaddle. Refine your strokes when you have a chance, but you’re already off to a lifetime of joy from swims in ocean, lake, or pool.
How did you feel about your privilege
Lucky! Not everyone had a nearby uncle with a pool.
I learned to swim at my uncle’s pool. After World War II, on partly borrowed money, he bought 200 acres in his Connecticut hometown. He kept the estate’s majestic stone mansion for himself, along with its landscaped lawns, koi pond, in-ground pool and patio, and matching stone rental house across the road. Most of the acreage he developed into a subdivision, putting in roads and building small houses that factory workers or shop managers could afford.
Uncle Harold worked hard. Besides a normal workweek as a lawyer, evenings and weekends he would oversee construction, tame the paperwork, and show and sell houses with his booming orator’s voice. In summer, he relaxed by skimming leaves out of the pool and testing and tinkering with its chemicals. Only once or twice each swim season would he dive in and lap two lengths himself.
How did you feel about your privilege? Wealth oppresses the have-nots and gives rich families advantages not open to poorer folks. You inherited privilege by growing up in your white family with two college-educated parents and a well-to-do relative.
You know, you’re right. I inherited an uncle with a swimming pool. I didn’t earn him.
I learned to swim at my uncle’s pool. He and my father were brothers and law partners in the working-class town where they’d grown up. They didn’t look alike, didn’t think alike, yet they got along. Their mother came from the border of Poland, Austria and Hungary, sent to relatives in the US at 12 when winter loomed with nothing to eat. Their cigar-chomping dad ran a small store, selling radios, hammers and nails, pots and pans. For eggs and meat, chickens scurried around their backyard, and the sons went to college on full scholarships.
Uncle Harold took pride in his swimming-pool manor house having been built by an heir of sewing-machine mogul Isaac Singer. “See the chimneys up top shaped like spools of thread?” he’d point out. Having inherited nothing, he hoped to found some kind of dynasty himself. A Republican, he ran for mayor but lost because Democrats predominated locally. He endowed a public-speaking contest at the high school. He drew up a charter for a university and got Connecticut’s governor on board with his concept. At court, he reputedly held juries spellbound with rotund, moral-laden tale spinning.
My father rose to the top of his class at Yale and Yale Law School but opted for a no-fuss, family-centered lifestyle. He valued what was fair rather than flashy, reasonable rather than ritzy. He would have become a professor, quietly erudite, had ethnic prejudice not barred that career. A Democrat, he taught us that racism was wrong, women could achieve anything, the disadvantaged deserved a leg up, and doing the right thing mattered for the sake of justice and integrity.
How did you feel about your privilege? Because those who benefit from systems of power and connection tend to be blind to their advantages.
Only my parents and us kids could swim at Uncle Harold’s whenever we felt like it–on account of that brotherly bond. I knew that. Everyone else had to wait for an invitation.
I learned to swim at my uncle’s pool. In my world, he was rich and we were not. He drove Cadillacs, we drove Fords or Chevvies. Our chunky home was far from a mansion, completely comparable to the other two-story houses on our sidewalked street. He had a lawn guy who rode around to cut the grass, while my Dad and later my brother tidied our yard with a rusty push-mower.
But by the time I reached junior high, I understood that Uncle Harold’s money didn’t buy him happiness. His wife had a heart condition as a result of childhood rheumatic fever. She died during open-heart surgery, then experimental, at the Mayo Clinic. They had one son–odd, detached and not as smart or ambitious as Uncle Harold wanted. This cousin once showed me his multitrack, button-operated trains up in their attic, but he didn’t romp, hang out, or swim with us. After Uncle Harold remarried, a dispute over a trust fund tore them apart. He and his son locked horns.
None of that had a counterpart in my own family of two parents and four children. We had music and dance lessons, enjoyed excellent health, received new clothes every spring and fall and never that I recall begged for anything beyond our parents’ budget. Though no one ever said this out loud, I surmised that Uncle Harold working so hard to get rich and pressuring his son to pursue the same path contributed to their rift. To my mind, our family put money in perspective.
How did you feel about your privilege? Unless we challenge the benefits of sheer good fortune, the unfair boundaries between the advantaged and the disadvantaged remain rigid.
We respected boundaries with respect to my uncle’s pool. Despite having a July birthday, I didn’t clamor to have my birthday party there. Indeed, we never brought non-family members with us to swim, never mistreated the pool equipment or left trash behind on the patio. The distinction between their hard-earned property and us was fair.
I learned to swim at my uncle’s pool. In the home movies of my mind, I see myself wearing a skirted pink bathing suit so baggy on my skinny torso that it would have fallen down without its cloth straps tied behind my neck. But who cared? After two steps running, I would jump into the water and plead with my Dad to hoist me onto his shoulders. My brother raced me to the deep-end edge, each of us splashing hard behind kickboards. My older sister and I climbed ladders out of the grownup part of the pool and dribbled water over our little sister, plopped in the warm, shallow kiddie section. She splattered joyfully with a plastic shovel and pail. My mother called us all out for tangy lemonade and cookies she brought along for us. We didn’t stay much longer than an hour, because the pool had changing rooms but no toilet. Our visits were long enough and often enough that the treat almost rivaled going to Disneyland.
How did you feel about your privilege? Consider how upper-middle-class people tend not to acknowledge their head start in life. They’d rather believe they achieved solely on their own, that barriers blocking others had nothing to do with their own success.
“Eat your vegetables, children are starving in China,” my mother would urge at the dinner table. Of course, we had it better than kids in urban ghettoes or in many faraway parts of the world. “Here, send my peas to China,” I’d retort to my Mom. Even at age six I knew that adding a tinge of guilt to our food or our pool-in-law sessions would not help anyone.
I learned to swim at my uncle’s pool. I loved its challenging depths, its orange life preservers and blue kickboards, the energetic fun it harbored, the just-us home away from home it represented, its cold-spring source, its half-shadedness and slightly greenish wetness.