Let’s go swimmin!

Those joyous summer days when Aunt Nina visited us in Riverdale

We made the big move to the burbs before my brother was born. Daddy drove his little Pinto to and from Atlanta proper every day from 6754 Tara Boulevard, Apartment H-2 in Riverdale - down south of the city where all the airport workers lived and 30 minutes closer to ‘home,’ which was my Granny Benton’s house in Warner Robins.

We traveled to Granny’s about every other weekend when it was cooler and I was in school - and by ‘cooler’ I mean not 95 degrees with 95% humiditiddy. The little yellow-orange Pinto didn’t have A/C and it was a brutal trip from hot to hotter during the summer.

Summertime was reserved for my two-week visit to Granny’s and then, beautiful Aunt Nina’s trip to ‘the city’ to visit us for two weeks. This meant at least one excursion to the mall and definitely someone to gladly take me to the pool for as long as I wanted, almost every day. Eeep. The joy of having my Aunt Nina as a built-in babysitter for two weeks was indescribable.

Aunt Nina was the coolest person I had ever personally known in my whole eight years on the planet. She personified the 70’s. She was short, cute, athletic and had gorgeous, gorgeous hair that would actually feather on both sides evenly.

(Side quest. Remember ‘feathered’ hair? Remember how one side would be perfect and look just like a fully feathered chicken wing and the other side would be all derpy and weird? And you’d just pull that one side up with a barrette, because it was perfectly normal to walk around with two hairstyles if your feathers wouldn’t fluff on both sides? Yeah. That never happened to Aunt Nina.)

The summer of 1976 was wild in every way. Endless parades and special things happening for the Bicentennial. It was joyous and hopeful and did not contain one single gold-leafed plywood archway or anything ‘yuge.’

It was a glorious time - but mostly because momma had oral surgery up at Emory University Dental clinic and the baby dentist intern doing the work dropped the drill in her mouth and it almost cut her tongue off from the underside.

Wait. That didn’t sound right. Sorry, momma.

That did indeed happen. And it was horrible. Daddy brought her home from what was supposed to be something simple with her whole face full of bloody bandages. Needless to say, she was whacked out on pain pills and the reason it was glorious was because Aunt Nina came to take care of me while momma healed her tongue back on, which required keeping her tongue as still as possible because sewing the underside of a tongue is like sewing snot together. It’s dicey. Also, this was 50 years ago, so wound care was not what it is today.

Nina took me to the pool every single day. A transistor radio bathed us in the totally inappropriate lyrics of “Afternoon Delight,” and I sang along at eight years old having zero idea what an adult version of afternoon delight was. I thought he got a Popsicle for being good, or something.

I got to play with the ‘pool kids,’ and become one of the mermaid club in the ‘little end.’ I could swim but I was only allowed in the ‘big end’ when Aunt Nina was in the pool. To be fair, her idea of ‘watching’ me at the pool was to sunbathe in her magnificent red and white striped bikini that set off her deep tan beautifully. She exemplified the word, ‘bask,’ while turning the lounger to maximize sun exposure.

My Aunt was a magnet for single men waaay too old to be flirting with a 15 year old girl, no matter how perfect the feathers were on her Dorothy Hamill wedge. One of the guys who like to flirt with her was cut-off jeans guy - who wore his shorts so short his ball sack would fall all the way out if he squatted down to check the water temperature in the pool. And they did. And I saw them. Several times.

I had no idea what the heck was wrong with this guy (beyond the fact that he was a sleazeball, but that’s hindsight) I thought he may have had a conjoined twin removed or something. This was at the height of my Guinness Book of Records Days, when my cousins and I sat for hours and stared at the conjoined twins, Chang and Eng Bunker.

(By the by, the now incorrect term ‘Siamese Twins’ originated with the brothers. It is now know as ‘conjoined’ twins and they are most often surgically separated if at all possible these days.)

For whatever reason, I thought a Siamese twin might be what kept falling out of his pants. That or an injury from Vietnam. When I was a kid there were an awful lot of terribly disfigured young men being sent back from that hell - you were taught to never, ever ask them about it or stare.

So I put my head down and did a super cool mermaid move and tried to forget about Mr. Afflicted. He gave up after he realized that Aunt Nina wasn’t ‘studyin’ him at all. I don’t know if she ever caught the ball sack action but you can bet it was displayed specifically for her.

We did get some great diving board shows, though. So. Many. Cannonballs. Each one hoping to splash Aunt Nina to make her squeal. Guys trying to out-do each other like it was the mating show of the Tara Boulevard Apartment Complex pool. Lots of shoving and ass-grabbing and manly stuff that looks manly, except when you squat down and your conjoined twin’s wrinkly weird head falls out of your short shorts.

If you just played a Nair commercial in your head, you are my people and you relate to this piece solidly.

Eventually momma’s tongue healed and Aunt Nina had to go back to Warner Robins to start the year in her high school basketball career in which she tore her ACL and had a gnarly surgery on it. But that’s another story.

We packed up in the Pinto and took her home, which was sad, but also happy because the time she was away Granny used to make us both new school clothes and I got a pair of real elephant ear pants made out of this groovy material with numbers on it. I wore the absolute shit out of those pants.

Life was good in the 70’s. Even with the occasional ball-sack sighting.

Until next time, keep your conjoined twin in your Fruit of the Looms and be safe out there. Don’t forget to turn it up.