Which Reminds Me

During high school in El Salvador my family had membership in something killed the "Club Del Prado." It was located in Colonia Escalón and its amenities included an Olympic size swimming pool, patio area with snack bar, tennis courts, a building that could be rented for parties although we never did that, and a room with foosball, air hockey and other such games. As far as I can recall it was strictly a recreational thing. There was nothing ethnic about it that I can recall. We often went there on Saturdays and summers mainly to go swimming although we may have played tennis and foosball a few times also. There were no books involved at our club. Some other Americans also were seen there at times. There were other similar membership clubs in the city perhaps with more and better amenities but ours we thought was one of the less expensive of this sort of thing that become available to us somehow, I don't quite recall how we got started there but it was nice to have some place to go as long as my parents paid their dues. Perhaps my parents remember something about that. Anyway, when I returned to the country a few years ago to visit someone was saying that our former club had later been transformed into a private club for Arab people so we can no longer revisit that place, ourselves not being Arabs. Oh, I had not known about that. It was certainly not an Arab club at the time that we lived there. Anyway, I never really had any inside information about the ownership of the Club Del Prado at any time. For us it was just a place to go swimming so I fail to comprehend the need for all of these bizarre lexicographical gymnastics. However, I do recall Bobby Bueno trying to use that in some political way, making some snarky comments about us being "club" people in order to position himself as a "non-club" person, the Buenos having not been members of the club, only guests of ours on various occasions, even though he knows very well that it was not that kind of club. Interestingly, Bobby also mentioned that after we had left the country he and his brothers sometimes gained illegal admission to the club by virtue of the guard recognizing their faces and waving them in even though they were really never paid members. So it does sort of rankle me that these people are using club cards in whichever way is to their advantage of the moment depending on whoever they are talking to, in other words talking out of both sides of their mouths.