When I was a kid growing up in what would eventually become an increasingly dysfunctional family in Los Angeles, there was a short period – maybe a year, maybe two – when I experienced something that I want to remember as blissful.

My father had decided that we needed a swimming pool in the backyard of our house at 849 Alfred Street. It wasn’t very big, maybe 2.5 by 5 meters, and not extending more than about 3 meters at the deep end.

According to my mother, I could swim before I could walk. I had first been taught by a local kid I met in Topolobampo, Mexico, where we stayed for several months while my father was completing one of his early Art For Children books.

Having a pool in our own backyard felt magical.

A few years later, after my father had left and what remained of our family was slipping into a crumbling chaos, I remember sneaking out of the house at night and turning on the pool heater. It may have been the winter of 1975.

I waited a few hours, then watched the warm water meet the cold Los Angeles night air, steam hovering just above the surface, almost ghostlike.

My mother was furious, of course, that I had turned on the gas heater in the middle of the energy crisis.

But it was that first and maybe second year with the pool I remember most clearly.

I must have been five or six, so around 1968 or 1969, just before my parents’ divorce. Clearly, the pool did not turn out to be a particularly effective marriage-saving project.

I spent as much time in that small backyard pool as I could. I remember challenging myself to see how many underwater laps I could swim before coming up for air, lengthwise and across.

There are a few photographs from my parents’ pool parties, where everyone is smoking, smiling, and looking almost impossibly happy.

I think of these silver-lined memories whenever I see clear blue water like this, which I captured during my week in Greece. They are distant faded and easily drowned by other, less blissful episodes from my childhood, but nonetheless good memories.