"The Fort"

Madelyn just sent me this awesome picture she found of the two of us with our cousin, Katie Patrick, at the good old Fort Douglas Pool. This picture brought back a lot of memories, some of which I'll share now. For those of you who are familiar with "The Fort", this will be an amusing little post. But, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, you'll most likely be bored to death- or just realize how crazy I really am. We pretty much lived at the Fort all summer long growing up. We basically just slept at home. I know I got up earlier in the summer than I did during the school year. I went to swim team workout for a few hours each morning. Then, I got out and ate breakfast at the snack bar which usually consisted of a cinnamon raisin bagel with plain cream cheese. Then I got back in the pool for some sort of lesson- stroke development, usually. Oh and there was diving team practice in there, too. And one summer when I was 13 or 14 I was also on the tennis team, so there was tennis team practice too. (Mad did tennis too and we've since talked about how we did it more to be able to get out of swim team practice early than for a love of tennis.) At the end of all the team workouts and lessons and breakfast, I would go into the locker room for a good play in the shower. And I mean play. There was a big square shower room with like 10 different heads on the outer walls shooting into the middle. We'd go in there and play several games (always in our swimsuits, don't worry). Some of the games I remember include learning the names of all the Cannon children in order and repeating them as fast as we could over and over. I think there are 10 total (I only remember Sarajane, Emily and Jenny right now... sorry). After the shower I would probably go have lunch again at the snack bar. Lunch was a tuna sandwich or a grilled cheese, sometimes if the whole family was coming up to eat together I would put on clothes, and get something fancy like a hamburger. That brings us to the best part about The Fort. It's simple- the number 1240. That was the magic number. All you had to do was tell it to the employee at the snack bar, the pro shop, the dining room and you got whatever you asked for. It was pretty amazing to a little kid. I lied, that wasn't the best part of the Fort. The best part really was when the whole family would come up for an afternoon swim and dinner. This wonderful time was called free swim. We would all get in the pool together and play around. Dad would throw us up into the air and we would try to touch the flags. We would jump off the "high dive" and we'd show Dad our newest technique for diving off the blocks. I really loved spending my summers there. It was a big part of my growing up experience.