A Pool of Dreams

In the midst of the celebration of the end of World War II, two natural phenomena, more typical to a child's world, seduced me with their wonders.

First came a fondness for digging in dirt and, soon after, I became attracted to water, an element that might have appealed to me initially had I not I associated it with baths, something I preferred to avoid. I learned in that year of the war's end that water in the form of rain left delightful puddles in which to splash and play. It was at this early age that water and dirt were firmly joined in my pantheon of pleasures and dreams. More serious, from my parents' point of view, was that I was showing up for dinner with muddy clothes every night. Sometimes dreams clash with other's standards.

The puddle of which I was so fond was at the foot of North Nicholas Street where the paving gave way to yellow dirt just before crossing a little creek with foamy, brown water and entered Charley Turner's yard. There were many other temporarily wet places that sprang to life in the aftermath of summer thunder storms, where a paper boat would float gaily on an imagined sea. Of all these transient puddles, it was my singular experience in the muddy pool at the entrance to Turner's property that created in me the love of small wet places.

As a teenager, I discovered a way to continue my involvement with puddles without juvenile embarrassment. I built a fish pool in the corner of a backyard patio my father had constructed. This pool had sloping sides of concrete and was home to some gold fish and a water lily. Soon, however, my interest in dirt, specifically clay with which to make pottery, overcame my love of water and the little patio pool went dry. Then came the years of wandering and journalism.

Much later, as Joyce, Francesco, and I finished our first year on Ivy Street, I began to have dreams of pools again. I chose a place in the backyard where a disreputable garage had been. I dug a hole, shaped the inside with cement, filled it with water, and imagined how the garden around it was going to look. My neighbor looked over the back fence and I could see by the look on her face that she thought I was crazy.

Eventually this pool was filled with earth, as my love affair with dirt again became ascendant, and a greenhouse went up where it had been. Instead of letting my dream of lovely water wither, I found a new place for a pool, flush up against the rear foundation and next to a high cement wall that supported the back porch. This was not a fancy pool; just a hole lined with black plastic that was thick enough to keep the water from seeping out .The pool was in a place I could look down upon and if the light was right I could see all the way to the bottom of it. While looking down on this water one night, I realized that bodies of water can unshackle memory and encourage romance.

A pool of water without fish or a spray that shoots shimmering liquid into the air to activate the water's surface is without poetry or honor; it is close to my original mud puddle but without imagination. To partly remedy that, I purchased a dozen feeder goldfish for $1. Feeder fish have a sense of poverty and inevitability about them but they do not lack a certain nobility. They are small fish intended for the pleasure of larger members of their kind who will eat them. My new pool lacked big mouths and the feeders were safe. Or so I thought.

One morning I went out to feed my goldfish but I found the pool empty. The missing fish became a mystery we discussed frequently and we thought the kidnaper was a neighborhood youngster we had seen pulling lettuce plants from the garden. I bought more feeder fish almost immediately to keep the pool busy, not to tempt the fates. The next morning I arose and looked anxiously at the pool. The fish were gone, but so was the water, except for a low puddle in the middle. We dropped the idea of the neighbor's kid and substituted a raccoon.

There is something about mysteries that gnaw at the mind and the spirit until truth is a certainty. The solution fell to my clever son, Francesco. He set up a trip wire on the side of the house that would activate a bell inside, if boy or raccoon broke it. For several nights, the bell was activated, but we saw nothing and the trip wire remained intact. Another mystery was building, but it did not last long. On the fourth night, about 9 p.m. we heard a commotion in the pool and ran to the back porch to see a wet raccoon turning the corner of the house where he went under the trip wire, moving it enough to send a signal, but not breaking it.

We realized the raccoon was a formidable opponent. The solution was to buy a round, six-foot wide cattle watering trough from the Sears farm supply catalog. When the truck arrived with it, we fitted the watering trough in the hole where the pool had been. No raccoon was going to punch holes in this new pool, although he did return once or twice to bathe (we learned several years later that he had been living in a neighbor's garage). Instead of fish we got a little statute that made a fountain and regularly added chlorine bleach to the water to kill the inevitable mosquito larvae.

Without fish, the pool was lifeless and boring, and one Saturday I walked up to the pet store and purchased four Koi, one of the most beautiful fish species in the world. By the second year, only two of the fish survived. It was the fish themselves who changed my attitude about fish and pools. These fish were too beautiful and special to keep in a tub of water without the proper care. I began to learn something about keeping fish and what they needed. I soon purchased a large, rock-filled biological filter.

I thought the filter would increase the water quality, but it had another influence as well. A year after the filter was installed, during spawning time, something marvelous occurred. The fish became parents, and by extension I became a grandfather to 60 or 70 fry so small I could hardly recognize them. In six months their shapes and colors made them recognizable and some individuals began to stand out. I watched them for hours as their colorful shapes darted through the water and jumped at the food as it floated down to them. There was a joy in living that they exuded from their watery world that is present in only a few of us who suck air.

The birth of all these fish also brought some anxiety. I could see how quickly they were growing and I had seen how quickly the little eight-inch fish I had purchased became twenty-inch monsters. I began to worry about what I was to do with all these fish.

While he lived in California, a dream took up residence in Francesco. It was a noble dream of working with his hands to nurture plants and to build beautifully landscaped, rocky pools with gently splashing waterfalls. He built several for himself and for others and he brought his dream of fish and water gardens east with him when he returned to work with me at the nursery.

I have never heard a scientist claim that dreams are part of the gene pool shared by a family, and I will not offer such an assertion now. My little fish pools have been much less exalted than those designed by Francesco and that is why I asked him to build a slice of his dream in my backyard. Any hole in the ground with some liquid in it has satisfied me; this is definitely not the way my son looks at water and stone.

Pools, ponds, creeks, rivers, oceans are truly foreign territory, places we can visit but in which we are unable to live. Whether these holes in the ground occur naturally or are handmade, they are places of discovery that enlarge our inner world. The creatures who reside in them live outside our atmosphere in a place with its own structure and rules, where air is replaced by water and feet become tails. Perhaps that is why humans find pools, and the fish in them, fascinating and are drawn to them, as Francesco and I have been.

Francesco's artistic method is unique, and intuitive. Almost zen like, the idea for a particular pool and its form rise from his contemplation of the site Before he began to dig, or even look at a shovel, I saw him crouch down and stare intently at the spot I had chosen for the first pool. He remained in what looked like a near-trance state for many minutes, oblivious to everything around him. He was, of course, visualizing the pool and its every rock, and, perhaps, the building of each section of it. After he had spent several days, observing the spot, he said he was ready to begin and offered to draw me a sketch, but I told him this wasn't necessary; I wanted a piece of his dream.

Francesco's construction methods are as unusual and old fashioned as is his method for making the perfect pool for the intended location. Arduous hard work with a shovel is his preferred digging technique. Thick rubber liners or concrete (or both together) are his usual materials. He carefully hand picks individual stones to decorate the pool's edge and mortar's them together smoothly with a painters brush, creating an artistic impression from common materials.

I watched him carefully as he worked through the heat of last summer. I realized he had a dream of dirt and water, too. It was not my dream, but his own, expressed in a singular way. As I observed his careful working style one afternoon, I could see the moist excitement in his eyes as he labored over the exact placement of each stone around the pool's apron. In many ways, he and I are different, but our lives are animated by the inner life we call dreams.

Dreams are delicate things and often difficult to energize. I encouraged Francesco's dream and now he is ready to bring his dream to you. This summer he will begin constructing his gardens of water and stone to your requirements so that you, too, may dream to the rhythm of another world more ancient than our own.

--Tom DeBaggio