The community swimming pool/Carlos Pueblo

 The community swimming pool/Carlos Pueblo

Our subdivision swimming pool is a well maintain Olympic side facility regularly open from April 1 and close on October 1 every year. In recent years, I have developed a habit to swim after tennis every morning and fully utilized such facility. I like to do 20 laps each time about 4 kilometers which would help me to take a couple of naps during a day and makes me have a quality sleep almost every night. I feel that I am very fortunate to have this pool in my last stage of my limited life.

I learned how to swim when I was at 8 years old at a small mountain town at the center part of Taiwan, Puli. The elementary school arranged a 6 grader as a leader to walk us back to home after school. That tall handsome boy took me to learn how to swim at a small creek by a liquor factory. The water quality was excellent back to that time and I was very impressed. Later in my life after leaving Puli, I had went back to that town and attempted several times to locate such creek in vain. The township needed the space and put a cover on the surface of the creek. Before we moved out of the town, my dad's company converted an old sugar massecuite pool, the left over of un-crystallized sugar pulp, to be a swimming pool with bamboo bottom. I did see my dad's swimming once at that pool with a former swim suite which was a gift from a Japanese friend when he couldn't bring back to Japan after the War.

My dad did ask his engineer colleague, Mr. Tzu Wan Fu, to teach and improve my skill to swim. I still remember this gentleman, a young graduate from the current day Cheng Kung University. He recommended me to follow him to swim in laps as much as we could.

As I noticed, swimming is like a meditation of respiration. You must practice in take the air and expel the air from your lungs like the lotus sit in Buddhism. I can't do well in lotus sit; yet I can swim 4 kilometers at one time and maybe more.