No, this isn't about Wauwatosa's real Cool Pool at Hoyt Park, whose friends invite everyone to a Valentine's celebration and fundraiser on February 9.

(Though if you go there, you'll get to hear West and East high school students sing and watch Roosevelt's fifth graders tap and fox trot their Mad Hot Ballroom hearts out. And what could be cooler than that?)

 It's about the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Cool Pool weekly round-up of consumer participation opportunities the Cool People recommend. Since the paper is desperately seeking younger readers, the main criterion for coolness seems to be youth--and unlimited disposable income. There's the occasional token Senior Cool Person, such as art gallerian Katie Gingrass. But for the most part, I'm thinking you have to be pretty young to keep up with the exhausting dinner-theater-bar-shopping marathon pace.

I've never been a Cool Pool qualifier. In college, I didn't have the temperament for social engagement-saturated weekends.  There wasn't money for spas, dinners out, and cocktails. Though I did know the Madison bars with great free hors d'oeuvres where you could buy one beer and get fed to last the weekend. Porta Bella comes to mind

This weekend, in addition to avoiding getting caught double dipping during Super Bowl, I'll spend most of my time at a convent facilitating a retreat. About a dozen other people in the four county region think that's a Cool Thing to do.

That leaves a visit to the dog park behind the Ronald McDonald House as my one recommendable Tosa Cool Move. It doesn't cost a thing.

If you want to jump into the Wauwatosa Cool Pool, regardless of your age, I'd love to hear what you are doing around town this weekend. Plugs for Wauwatosa business places from people who patronize them are welcome! So are tales of competitive snow-blowing.

No, I don’t know a thing about what happens to Harry Potter and friends.

But I’ve just seen the Hoyt Park pool bath house and the plans for the new pool.

No trench coats, disguises, and diversionary tactics were involved, so I guess the meeting wasn’t really sneaky. Denise Lindberg of the Friends of Hoyt Park Pool knew I was interested, and she invited me to join her there when she dropped something off this afternoon. I jumped at the chance to see it “first” and to meet Denise.

Having spent pleasant days at the poolside not long ago, I knew the changing areas, concrete with wooden seats and always damp. But like most people, I’d never seen the heart of the building. Few people, Denise said, had.

And what a wonderful surprise. Who’d have expected a big room with a vaulted ceiling, elegant wood paneling, terrazzo floors, a fireplace, and one remaining art deco wall sconce? The windows capture morning and afternoon light, and it’s a space that makes you want to linger a bit.

Each of us sets our sense of beauty and rightness in childhood. We spent a lot of time in parks, so for me, that means loving the big, solid, arts-and-crafts inspired structures built by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) during the Depression. And this place is part of that history, part of that tradition.

The plan is to preserve this charming space and make it a year-round community gathering place, a coffee house probably.

The pool plans are wonderful. My one concern was that the project would be too ambitious and overbuilt, either a frenetic attraction like Cool Waters or too posh to be supportable. It’s neither. There are a few amenities, but for the most part it’s just a beautiful, well designed swimming pool, with a third of the area set aside for lap swimming.

That means you might have to know how to swim a little, a good thing indeed, to be in that section.

Please go see for yourself: the Friends are hosting an ice cream social this Sunday from 1 to 4. I think most of you will be delighted.

It’s a funny thing: the whole purpose of swimming pools is to cool down. And yet the Hoyt Park pool has become a hotbed for contentious dispute in the Tosa Town Square.

I don’t think the discussion there reflects the thoughts of the community. It only shows what a few people who are dogged arguers think. And I happen to be one of those people. It’s no surprise to anyone who may have read my blogs that I’m one of the pro-poolers.

A thoughtful and articulate reader sent this commentary:

If Hoyt is going to become, through innuendo, hostility, de facto segregation, et al., a space for middle class white folks from Wauwatosa, I think the gift from the Mordridges, people of magnanimous civic spirit, is pretty hard to justify. Public is public. Period.

He’s referring to the concerns some have expressed about keeping “bad” people out of the pool and surrounding neighborhoods.

That never-ending discussion always gets mired in the muck of how we know who the “bad” people are.

Some say we don’t until they behave badly. Others say we can assume that people from certain groups are more likely to behave badly, and we can know who they are by statistics. Those statistics lead us to young men. And those statistics lead some to young black men who live in the city of Milwaukee.

Whatever you think about that, it’s illegal to discriminate pre-emptively--most of the time. I for one am glad about that.

Is the “solution” to eliminate public places? I don’t think so. And I’m glad that gifts like the one from the Mordridges don’t have to be justified or “earned.” Sometimes, we are led to being better than we are by the example – and nudge – of people with vision.

And the money to make that vision happen.

Sex. Race. Class. Most of the social shifts in American culture have been mirrored in the waters of municipal pools. So how the story of the Hoyt Park pool plays out may hold a bigger place in history than any of us imagined.

If you’ve been eavesdropping on the conversation in the Tosa Town Square, you’ll know that the Hoyt Park pool is a contentious issue for some.

There’s worry about crime and violence. Some imagine an influx of unnamed sinister groups or persons, while others suggest "you must mean black teenagers" (my words, not theirs). Then the debate swerves off into disputations about who is racist and who is not, whether this is about race or. . . something else.

There’s nothing new about this conversation, according to Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.

Throughout their history, municipal pools served as stages for social conflict. Latent social tensions often erupted into violence at swimming pools because they were community meeting places, where Americans came into intimate and prolonged contact with one another. People who might otherwise come in no closer contact than passing on the street, now waited in line together, undressed next to one another, and shared the same water. The visual and physical intimacy that accompanied swimming made municipal pools intensely contested civic spaces. Americans fought over where pools should be built, who should be allowed to use them, and how they should be used.

According to Wiltse, rather than resolving racial tensions, people began retreating from public places in the 1950s. By the 70s and 80s, backyard pool building took off, and the decline of public pools began.

I know about this because I heard Wiltse inteviewed on National Public Radio, without which I would have no life.

The real question we're debating is whether we want to sustain a rich community life and the ongoing conversations among us. Or would we rather retreat to our fenced back yards and listen to conversations on the radio or in electronic forums?

There's a place for both. But kudos to everyone involved in the movement to rebuild the pool. Whether you know it or not, you’re making a historic statement about faith in civic life. Half naked and warmed by the sun, lying side by side, we just may get to know each other again.

Summers were slow when I was a kid. Seems like we spent most of our time lying on a hillside in the cool grass watching clouds.

That was when parents and children had separate lives most of the time. Back then, parents believed in the value of boredom as an incentive for building character and initiative. That is, if they thought boredom was a problem at all.

When you couldn’t stand yourself any more, you’d come up with something to do. You’d get on your bike or grab a book, wander around the neighborhood to find someone else who was also bored—or whose mother stocked popsicles.

But more often than not, like the divining rods in every cowboy movie of the time, we’d seek water.

In that regard kids in my eastside neighborhood were lucky. The Milwaukee River, various swamps and creeks, and Lake Michigan were within our range. That means we could get there under our own power. So much did we love the water life that on the rare days our parents (okay: our moms) drove us somewhere, the destination always involved swimsuits and parks.

When my own kids were little, some of our best times were spent with other moms, babysitters, and kids at Hoyt Park pool. We had the best part of “country club” life there. Lazy hours alternating between nearly dozing and playing, between the heat of the sun and cool of the water.

Okay: the cold of the water, since they didn’t heat the pool. We were tougher back in the day.

Where was I? Lazy conversations. Soggy peanut butter sandwiches. The coconut smell and sticky feel of suntan lotion. Rough concrete and wet towels. Squeals of baby laughter--then squalls when tiredness or hunger set in.

To hear some people talk, you’d think the pool was gang central. It wasn’t. There were some problems, and there will be again. But let’s remember what things were—and are--like most of the time.

I can’t wait for the present generation of parents and kids—and older kids and teens, seniors, people just taking a day off to breathe—to get back to relaxing at the Hoyt Park pool.

Something about being beside the water that just restores our souls.