A Lesson in Modesty.

In a lot of areas around the country, this weekend marks the opening of public swimming pools, so dig out your floating devices and the skimpiest swimwear you can find.  This story comes from a time when I lived in a condominium with swimming pools, a wading pool, a cedar-lined steam room, and all the inconsiderations you can imagine.

The elevator car came to a stop on the lobby floor.  The doors slid open, and I was ready to step out, until I froze mid-step.  What made me pause were the three young women standing directly in front of me, momentarily blocking my path, dressed in barely-there bikinis and entirely unbothered by their own near‑nakedness in a public hallway.

They were college‑age visitors, laughing and carefree, accompanied by one of the downstairs middle‑aged neighbors who was wrapped in a thick beach robe.  The trio of girls, I found out later, spent the weekend coming and going, and the next day I saw them again, heading down the back stairs toward the pool.  As those sweet tarts walked, their swimsuits shifted and rode up, leaving little to the imagination between the ripples of fat and even less to modesty, by cracky.

There was even a time in the dead heat of summer where it just happened that an older, senior-type crowd was having a get-together under the heat of the blazing sun.  A group of teenage girls in tiny bikinis made their way down the pool’s stairs, smirking and walking slow and seductively right in front and past the men.  The women were at another corner of the pool and appeared not to notice the bru-ha-ha.

Throughout the swimming season, the indoor pool area itself told the rest of the story.  In the corners were mounds of inflatable toys stacked so high they reached halfway up the walls.  Beach balls, float rings, plastic ducks, water pistols, and abandoned gadgets cluttered the water.  More than once, if you wanted to swim, you had to fish out stray and abandoned toys or dive to the bottom to retrieve whatever had been left behind.  Interestingly, the steam room was always left clean and uncluttered.

Yet, it was the renters and short‑term visitors who were the ones who mostly descended upon the pools and hot tub, and that’s where most of the disorder began and remained.  Sure, they enjoyed all of the amenities but had no real stake in the property, so there was little incentive to care for it.  And, truthfully, the same could be said for the owners who hosted these guests or rented out their units.  The result was the same: a shared space treated as disposable simply because it belonged to everyone and therefore, in their minds, to no one.

In the end, what unsettled me was more than the exposed full butt cheeks and almost-to-the-nipples cleavage, or the toys or even the noise, but the casual indifference that trailed behind them all.  A shared space only works when the people passing through it feel some measure of responsibility for what they touch and leave behind.  When they don’t, when visitors treat the place as a weekend playground and owners look the other way, the common areas slowly erode.  And standing there in the elevator doorway, watching another wave of guests drift toward the pool, I realized how quickly a condominium building can lose its hominess when too many people forget or just don’t bother to care for it.