I can spend an hour immersed in a David Hockney painting of a swimming pool … the splash … someone named Nick getting out of Peter’s pool. I don’t care who’s in the pool, as long as there’s a pool.

My dad often said, “Honey, you were scared by a millionaire,” an arcane expression that fried up like an egg in some North Dakota cowboy’s brain. Being scared by a millionaire meant literally that my mother was scared by a rich man while carrying me in her womb, thus birthing a child who wanted items her family couldn’t afford.

I wanted swimming pools.

Our neighbors, the Nymans, had a pool, and for a brief period in my childhood they let my family use it. Raised on images of heaven, pearly gates and streets of gold, I pushed open the gate to a back yard with a square of glistening emerald blue and redefined my future then and there.

I still think when I die, I’ll wake up naked in the Nymans’ pool.

Doing the backstroke.

What could be better?

“You’re a pool slut,” my housemate Deb said recently over dinner.

I had just described in great detail my plot to get a speaking engagement at an upcoming health conference.
A conference at a hotel with a pool.

Deb was moved to sticker me with such a provocative moniker because she knows my history. I’ve been a speaker at several hotels with pools, one just last year, and, while I did my part, I was absent for lectures whenever possible.
I was meditating.

“Whilst under water, you are away from all the noise and distraction of life on the land,” according to CNN writer Brigid Delany. “The monotony of the strokes up and down the length of the pool […] can be very calming, and, of course, there is something soothing about being in water.”

So sue me. I like being soothed.

I am currently soothed in the pool at the Queen Anne Community Center. It’s lovely and cathedral-like with huge windows that refract diamonds of light into the water.

I have also been soothed in the Ballard Pool, the Evans Pool (Greenlake), the Medgar Evers Pool, the University of Washington pool, and the pool at the downtown YMCA.

I get around.

I am hoping to be soothed this weekend by an art exhibit called “The Swimming Pool” at the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery, through Aug. 5—glass, photography, and art.

“What is it about a swimming pool that returns you so swiftly to your youth?” Sally Robinson, one of the three artists, asks. “Is it the splash of cold waves on your sweaty body? Is it your smooth strokes as you zip along? Or is it a prohibited [skinny] dip at midnight with a partner under a silvery moon?”

This is a woman who swims.

As everyone knows, swimming is also just plain good for the body.

And if you do enough of it in pools, you end up with a permanent eau de chlorine scent that I, myself, find kind of sexy.