Too pool for school

Summer birthdays are the best.

It makes it so much easier to plan stuff. I always felt bad for people who were born in the dead of winter; any potential celebrations you organize are always tentative, because nature could just up and gobsmack you with the kind of blizzard that makes one pine for a timeshare in the Galapagos. Activities are mostly limited to watching Cary Grant movies on AMC and venturing outside to see how long it takes to lose all feeling in your face. Happy birthday!

Crummy weather can alter summer plans, but never outright dash them – unless your plan was to go snorkeling off the coast of Nova Scotia, in which case I’m jealous and you’re a buttface. If it rains, you just move the party indoors and wait for a break in the clouds so you can skip through the dewy mist in a pair of flip-flops, thanking the gods of August that you don’t have to wear thermal underwear. When engaging in an indoor activity, like bowling, then traveling there is basically a lock, since nobody has to shovel rain from the driveway, or worry about getting stuck in a rainbank.

But these advantages are more pronounced when you're a child.

That's because birthdays are a much bigger deal amongst the younger set. For a grownup, it almost becomes a non-event, just another reminder that you're one year closer to taking medication for an inflamed something-or-other. (Not to mention doing the Jumble with a giant magnifying glass.) Your friends might make a fuss if your birthday is a multiple of five – 50 and 75 frequently herald some kind of semi-lavish hullabaloo – but otherwise we tend to mark the occasion wryly, with half-acknowledged foreboding of an impending senior discount at the local multiplex.

Kids live it up, and they should. The younger we are, the more we experience time as a slow slog through endless weeks and months; that makes each birthday feel like some kind of accomplishment, on a par with nailing down a Master's degree or landing a spacecraft on the craggy surface of the moon. We feel so. Much. Older. And wiser. To a six-year-old, a five-year-old is a laughable curiosity, a naive protege ripe for instruction on how to avoid those embarrassing Kool-Aid mustaches. Each birthday is a rite of passage, worthy of cake and toys that we play with once and never touch again.

So is it any wonder that a birthday in the summer is some kind of small miracle? It combines two totally rad concepts – parties and sunshine – and accomplishes this without the pesky consideration of school, that fearsome bane to any small child's contentment. It also makes two thrilling words flash in the gaudiest neon in our tiny, developing brains:

Pool party.

Among a certain age group, pool parties are the best parties of all, a 10-year-old's equivalent of a barnburning college kegger. Anyone feels like royalty who's the center of attention at a social gathering, but especially so for the host of a pool party, who gets to preside over a shindig replete with lemonade and leaky, dorky-looking swim goggles. As our minds evolve out of childhood, we graft complications onto the veneer of daily life, and even the simple things become knotted in a web of adolescent angst and emotion; teenagers, caught in an awkward midway point, tend to add complexity to things that are really pretty basic. A child doesn't have this problem. Give them a floating basketball hoop and a towel with a Super Mario theme, and they're as content as a cat curled up in a wedge of sunlight, albeit with less proclivity to pee on things. That's why a pool-themed birthday party is a kid's version of Valhalla: Everything is simple and good. When nothing else matters, the smell of chlorine and cut grass is a heady intoxicant.

I was 10 the last time I had a pool party for my birthday. Never one to be considered a “popular kid,” I nevertheless felt like a king that day, despite the fact that I was wearing Coke-bottle glasses and a Dick Tracy shirt. How could I not? The day was hot, but not oppressively so. The pool filter was gurgling invitingly, as if to say, “Come, fill me with children's fart bubbles.” And in a stroke of genius, my parents commissioned a guy to make me a birthday cake in the shape of Raphael – the Ninja Turtle, not the Renaissance painter. (What kind of kid do you think I was?) All this made me the envy of my friends, which, when you get right down to it, is what every young boy wants. Besides stink bombs and sugar packets.

Nearly a quarter-century has passed since that party, and yet the clarity of certain memories is borderline startling: Diving for rings, the post-swim game of touch football, top 40 hits blasting from a transistor radio the size of a large potato. The reason it's a highlight of childhood is because it represents a confluence of good fortune – the right people doing the right things at the right age at the right time of year. And all that wouldn't have happened if my parents hadn't felt frisky after splitting a case of Heineken one late-November evening, thereby ensuring that my birthday fell in the sweet spot between the Fourth of July and Labor Day. Amazing that I have Dutch beer to thank for so much of my childhood.

Birthdays may not mean quite what they used to. But they usually mean sunblock and shorts and frilly little Hawaiian shirts, and you know what? Considering our geography, that's all right with me.