This is Lauren, age 4. She’s one of a matched pair who belong to our friends and neighbours, Paul and Carla.

Lauren’s a bit of a daredevil. We’re in our backyard playing in our large inflatable pool. Laurel yells out “WATCH ME!”
dives headfirst into the middle of the red ring with swirls. Not a bad plan, except that the pool is just a foot deep.
She drives her head into the (thankfully) softish bottom and stops abruptly, for a moment suspended almost vertically,
then wriggles through the ring and surfaces. She then turns to see all the adults staring, dumfounded ... is there
spinal cord injury? Brain damage?

She seems to be deciding whether or not to cry as she wipes the water from her eyes and looks up at us. She can
tell by the blank horror on our faces that she’s done something pretty special! This kind of reaction/attention, demands
a change in her reaction ... ‘wait a minute’, we can almost see her thinking, ‘I don’t need to cry, I already have their
attention!’ So she sucks it up, laughs and does it again ... and again, each time with the same potentially
cord-shocking, brain-scrambling result. The adults all cast uneasy, polite smiles at each other. I think, in that moment,
we were all thinking, ‘Should we stop her? Is this too much?’ Right about then comes the moment when she gets
stuck in the ring and is held underwater. It’s momentary, but longer than comfort allows. At that point, and to our relief,
she decides that’s enough of that.

The irony of the bright swirls on this ring seem appropriate. They remind me of the old-time cartoons, when the coyote
takes a swan dive into an invariably empty pool, and above his head circle these very same swirls, stars and
tweeting birds ... SPLAT!    Mark Heine