My mom tells a story about one of her early lessons in parenting, which came from, not surprisingly, another more experienced mother. It came about in a neighbor’s back yard one summer afternoon at a pool party.
Now, when I was a kid, in my neighborhood, the above-ground, backyard pool was a new luxury. Their crimped metal sides and easy-to-puncture blue plastic linings were cumbersome to assemble. And they left a perfect yellow circle of dead Bermuda grass on the lawn when they were disassembled in the fall. But like dutiful wannabe suburbanites, my parents acquired one of these new luxuries, and so did a few other parents in our neighborhood.
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