I have no idea...

... what's going on in this photo. Or why. This was taken in the house we rented in Long Beach while we were transitioning from Denver to San Diego in 1978. I'd spent most of the summer living in San Diego with Beth while Mom and Dad dealt with the details of moving. Maybe Mom dealt with the move while Dad was working.

Anyway, all I can tell you is that I'm wearing my swim goggles with sticks stuck in the sides like antenna. In the photo they're competing with the rabbit ears from the TV so it looks like there're four of them. I assure you only two of them are mine. That's my purple hippo sleeping bag wrapped around my shoulders.

At least I'm all blond and tan from so many hours at the public pool. It cost $0.25 to get in. Mom would save quarters in a blue mug I'd made in a ceramics class with her in Denver. She kept the mug in the buffet. I would take a quarter, my towel, and those lovely goggles and walk to the pool where I would alternately pretend to be either a dolphin or a sea otter. The dolphin was kind of exhausting. No kicking allowed. Sea otter was much more relaxing with lots of floating on my back.

There was a woman who was always there. She wore a black bikini with string ties at her hips. Her skin that was tanned to a deep dark brown and her blond hair was slicked back into a tight ponytail. Most of her face was covered by a pair of Jackie Onassis worthy sunglasses. She would recline on a towel ignoring the chatter and splashing. Every so often she would remove the sunglasses and climb the ladder to the high dive where she would stride to the end and in one final springing step hurtle into the sky and fall with Olympic grace into the water before repositioning herself on the towel. I thought she was beautiful.

Then one day I saw her in the locker room. I was standing under one of the showers, leaning on the wall button to keep the water flowing and rinse away the chlorine. Out of the bright sunlight, in the slanted shade of the angled wooden roof, I got my first really good look at her. Up close her skin didn't look smooth like everyone else's. It looked stiff and leathery, like my Buster Browns after I'd been jumping in puddles. This wasn't the alluring woman I'd been admiring for weeks. She looked crunchy. And very very old.

This wasn't when I gave up tanning. That happened about eight years later when skin cancer started popping up in the family. It certainly doesn't explain this photo. The only excuse I've got that is being eight.