A muggy summer day at a backyard birthday party in Gilroy. Drinks, barbecue, kids in a pool full of inflated toys and rafts.  I shooed a bee away from one youngster as he sat on a diving board, chomping on a hot dog.

My kids, ages about 5 and 9 back then in the mid-1980s, got to squabbling, so we bugged out early, to Fresno.  Not long after, our phone rang. That youngster on the diving board, he was on life supports.  Seems after we left, most of the party moved into the cool indoors. He'd gone into the pool, but even with a few people around, nobody noticed him. He dived, tried to resurface but couldn't get past the inflated pool gear. He sunk to the bottom for, well, what became a lifetime.

A nurse was able to revive him but the brain damage was so severe he spent the remaining years of his life in institutional care. He would have been about 27 now.

I think about him when the first inferno of summer hits the Valley. A time when sober kids and inebriated others jump into the brisk, frigid waters of the Kings River. And a time when adults leave the back door open a crack and the pool becomes a fatal magnet.

Yes, most communities have laws requiring fences around pools. I had a six-foot, black-coated steel fence around my pool in Fresno. But kids are part monkey, innovative. One day my son showed me how easy he could climb it. 

Community Medical Centers runs the only combined burn and Level 1 trauma centers between Los Angeles and Sacramento. Our docs and nurses are way too familiar with accidental drownings and near-drownings from pools, canals, lakes -- a little water left in a bathtub. How about if you spare them being part of a tragedy by investing in some vigilance?