I loved my little swimming cap.  Actually, I adored my entire collection.  The one I insisted on wearing around the house, and certainly in the bathtub, was a little rubber blue cap with a pink and yellow daisies on the side.  I thought I was the height of fashion, and I was just three years old.  Being in stylish vogue was so much simpler then. 

            My family loved the swimming pool experience.  My sister and I got along and were kind to each other.  Mother was relaxed and smiling.  And Daddy fixed ginger ales and bowls of snacks on the umbrella table by the diving board.   We loved the Terrace Hotel in Austin.  It was an incredible hotel.  Not the usual  motor motels of west Texas.  When we stayed at this particular hotel on our summer vacations, I wore my most special bathing cap, the one my grandmother bought me that was beige with rainbow colored rubber fringe.  One time, during a light spring shower, my dad let my sister and me swim in the pool during the gentle summer drizzle.  I can’t think of anything I considered more quixotic than swimming in the rain.  That marvelous feeling of elation and unabashed thrill was so much simpler then.

            The Gibralter  Hotel was the family favorite.  It was a long drive from Wichita Falls to Paris, Texas.  On the way we’d always stop in Honey Grove where Davie Crocket camped on his way to the Alamo.  Aunt Fannie and Uncle Leroy’s east Texas friends,  Thelma and Shorty lived 9 miles south of Paris in Glory, Texas and we would go to visit.  Glory had a population of 50 and it remains the only spot in Lamar County with two cemeteries nearby. The long drive from west to east Texas was made bearable by the fact that we would soon be at the Vintage 1915 grand hotel where we would get in our swim suits and hit the pool.  It was heavenly.  Later we would go to the movies at the Plaza Theater, and I would dream my dreams of stardom.  Those dreams would carry me through the three days of living room chat sessions that never seemed to end.  Strategies for enduring familial obligation were so much simpler then.