There was a motel our family used to stay at on Tucson's Miracle Mile motel strip,called the Lariat Motor Lodge. It was a cheap motel, like many other motels we had stayed at in other towns - towns like Barstow, California and Roswell, New Mexico and Odessa, Texas - with small, drab rooms; and an old swimming pool in the courtyard outside, devoid of water except for a dark brown puddle at the bottom, the concrete lining cracked and rotting in the sun. Clearly, we would not be swimming in this pool.
Next to the Lariat, there was another motel - the Hacienda - which was more expensive and much nicer; and which had a fully-functional swimming pool in its courtyard, full of crystal-blue water sparkling in the sunlight, and lined with guests in sunglasses and bathing suits drinking Coca-Cola on the deck. In the cool water, their children swam and played around on bright rubber float toys, laughing and splashing as their parents watched.
We also watched, I and my sisters, from the courtyard of our motel next door. Since we couldn't swim in our pool at the Lariat, we often thought of going over to the Hacienda to swim in theirs. Between us and the Hacienda's courtyard, however, was a high chain-link fence with a sign marked NO TRESSPASSING. Beyond that, around the deck of their pool was another, lower fence with a gate; and another sign, this one marked POOL FOR HACIENDA GUESTS ONLY. For this reason, we could only stand gazing through the wire as those other children splashed and played in their pool all bright colors and clean blonde hair, shining in the sun, so close you could almost touch them.
Then, after the sun went down we would sit in the rusty old chairs in our courtyard, next to our pool and watch silent dirty movies - Naughty Stewardesses and Sassy Sorority Girls - from the screen of the drive-in cinema on the far side of Miracle Mile.