Addendum

Best seven minutes of swimming I ever had in my life!

(Lifeguard clearly set on locking up for good at 10, not letting me swim till 10...)

Only a couple kids left, they were soon out and I had a precious four minutes or so of the magic rectangle all to myself. It will definitely be worth going tomorrow morning--the pool is too small to do freestyle or (particularly) backstroke, but no reason not to do half an hour of breast and butterfly, it will be very nice...

(It's like running after an injury, you are so glad just to run half a mile or a mile that you can hardly believe it!)

Really hotel swimming pools are properly for children, I suppose. We rarely stayed in a hotel or motel when I was a kid, only a handful of times (and not really enjoyable as all five of us crammed into one room for reasons of economy), but the motel pool is one of the great exciting phenomena of my childhood. We didn't get to swim often, but it was always my favorite thing--I can still picture one (somewhere vaguely southerly, Delaware or Virginia?) that struck me then as the height of luxuriousness, because it was lit at night underwater and you could swim there after dark!

Hmmm, I have not really revisited such things in adult life, but it does seem to me that swimming in an outside pool after dark is almost certainly one of the great pleasures in life. All of this maniacal swimming I have done this year has been in fairly grim basementish environs--of course it does not really matter...