ISLAND CABIN

It's winter, not how I remember it, but how it is right now. I heard that an imposter Santa went on a murderous rampage in my suburb. It's like the pile of something in the subway that you don't want to look at but are compelled to and of course it is the terrible parts of the animal. I was even googling the house where I grew up as if it would mention the rose bushes or that two doors down Lana and her sister had a play house out back with a toy piano or that on summer afternoons Lana would ring the door bell in her bathing suit saying can I swim in your pool. But the house is on the historic registry now, a craftsman treasure, and from the registry I learned that the pool had been built in 1964, so that made it only 12 years old when we moved in. Later we had the same yellow patio umbrella as the one on Neil Young's On The Beach. If only there had been Neil Young by the pool, smiling in that suit. The closest to this was the time my parents rented one of the studio apartments-a detached building for farm workers from when the area had been walnut and orange groves- to a woman with biker connections, several of whom we surprised one night when we came home early from church and ruined their pool party. The pool was off limits to the renters and my dad freaked. During the short interval between this clash of realities it was dazzling to see strange and large bearded tatooed men doing vast cannon balls into the pool. How to explain-on weekends my dad woke up before dawn to scrub the pool by hand with a pumice, waltzes and Sousa bands angling through the radio and out the window.