The summer of 2021 finished fast, the temperatures falling like a rock. It was beautiful while it lasted and I looked into the sun for hours on end in the back yard, floating on a lilo as blue as the sky in a Bestway Power Steel Rectangle Pool Set 4.12m X 2.01m X 1.22m. What a lot of fuss and nonsense to have to head to the beach. So much sand, the hot little grains grovelling their way into sandwiches and thermoses all across the country – not worth it, mate. And the tar melting beneath your feet, and the sea slimy with jellyfish. You could drown. You could step on broken glass. If you tried floating on a lilo for hours on end in the sea you might wake up on the shores of Valparaiso – the only thing between New Zealand and that harbour town in Chile is Easter Island. You'd be hungry. You're better off at home in a Bestway.
The summer of 2021 wasn't as long-lasting and lingering as the summer of 2020, which took autumn hostage. It mocked lockdown. Lockdown tried to turn us all into troglodytes, hunched inside our homes, peering through windows at the forbidden day; but summer let us loose, and all over New Zealand there were families mooching hither and not all that yon around the block, and the luckiest relaxed outdoors in the back yard in their Bestway Power Steel Rectangle Pool Set 4.12m X 2.01mM X 1.22m. I had it set up between the jungle bars and the dollhouse, both vantage points for jumping into the pool – a good father always considers his children's wellbeing. She said, "Dad, what'd be really cool is if you built a slide going down from the deck into the pool." I thought of all the really good fathers of New Zealand knocking up all manner of ingenious things to give their kids a golden childhood and felt bad; I thought, too, of all those other New Zealand dads who have boats and take their kids out to lakes and such. She has a name for them: "Boat dads." Boat dads are surely the best dads. I hung my head in shame. She said that she loved playing in the Bestway.
The summer of 2021 was New Zealand's reward for enduring Covid. It was strange to go to hotels and the Viaduct and all the other various destinations that were formerly a soundstage for voices from other lands – the Germans, the Americans, the French and, loudest of all, the Australians – and to only hear our own light and casual honk. We were alone on our island. I mused on these and other angles of modern life upon my lilo in the intellectual framework of Bestway Power Steel Rectangle Pool Set 4.12m X 2.01m X 1.22m, floating and dozing, happier than a sandboy due to the absence of sand, in an island of quiet. I loved that Bestway.
The last I saw of the summer of 2021 was a few days ago on a Thursday morning when the council sent a truck, at my request, for an inorganic rubbish collection and it took away the Bestway Power Steel Rectangle Pool Set 4.12m X 2.01m X 1.22m. I had thrashed the thing to death these past four summers. It was ripped and torn, patched and leaking, really a bit of a disgrace; one side of it had buckled, and its collapse was only prevented by the weight and bulk of the dollhouse. I threw out the dollhouse, too. Tennis rackets, a pushchair, broken toys … I heard the truck arrive. I raced out to the front porch and watched as two guys dragged everything into the back of the truck. The truck sucked everything in with some kind of mechanical pulley and it made a terrible crunching noise. The truck was eating summer. It was eating years of fun, endless hours of sunbathing and splashing, ingenious games and spirited singing; it was eating her childhood; it was eating my attempts at good fathering; its teeth bit down hard, and I caught a squeal of that old refrain: memento mori. It was a lovely day in autumn, leaves snapping from the trees, the ground hard and dry, when they took away the Bestway.
