It’s a Holidome!

The fact that the laundry room currently smells like an overly chlorinated indoor pool reminds me of the fact that I need to pay more attention when adding Clorox to the wash. I’ve done my own laundry for years, but I still seem to have this difficulty in guestimating the proper amount of liquid bleach to use. Hopefully Merrin’s delicates will all come out OK. :wink

But certain smells (accidental or not) seem to unlock chapters in my mental history book and today is no different. Thanks to my daliance with scorching holes in my socks, I’m reminded today of my first experience with an indoor pool. As a very young boy, my family was spending the weekend in Cincinnati, Ohio (or at least I remember it as being Cincinnati!). We stayed at a Holiday Inn and it had a Holidome indoor pool & recreation area. Basically it was a big indoor pool surrounded by a lot of Astroturf with a putt-putt area and a bar. It may not seem like much, but to my brother and I, we were in heaven!

So the almost overwhelming smell of chlorine always takes me back to that weekend when we could swim indoors despite the miserable Cincinnati weather and play putt-putt all day for free! It wasn’t all milk & honey, though. That was also the weekend that I made first contact with little people…err…dwarves…err…midgets…err…the vertically challenged. Neither my brother nor I had any previous experience with dwarves. (note: I’m not trying to be offensive here. I confess that I do not know the current PC term. Apologies all around.)

My brother and I were shocked and probably a little scared to find out that there was a Little Person Convention taking place at the Holidome. I don’t recall having ever met a dwarf before that day, let alone the hundred or so conference attendees. I can specifically remember my mom explaining to my brother and me that these were not misbehaving children who were drinking, smoking and carrying on, but just shorter adults having a good time. It certainly seemed to explain the moustaches, which –until it was explained to me– definitely had my little sheltered upbringing spinning violently out of balance.

So today, with memories of my first Little People Convention and first indoor pool fresh in my mind, I offer up this simple prayer: “Lord, please don’t let there be too many chlorine burns on my socks.”