My 6-year granddaughter was recently invited to a birthday party by one of her first grade class-mates, and the party was to be held at Splash, our local swimming pool.

Her older sister and a neighborhood friend, although not taking part in the birthday celebration, came along to swim in another section of the pool for the afternoon.

Splash isn't an ordinary swimming pool. It is a state-of-the art pool equipped with a wave-making machine that does a great job of mimicking a trip to the ocean. The wave machine is turned on every few minutes during a swim session and the kids who are mostly decked out in life jackets are swept, via a few fairly big waves, to one side of the pool. The pool has a number of clear plastic inner tubes that the kids can ride on if they wish.

As you might guess, Splash is wildly popular, not just in the local area, but throughout the state, and we often have visitors from out of the area. But, I digress. Back to the skort.

Elizabeth, my grandaughter, loved her afternoon of swimming, and was sadly disappointed when I pulled her aside and said it was time to go. Then, after two or three, "just one more" trips down the slide, I convinced her to head for the dressing room with me to exchange her dripping suit for some dry clothes.

While Elizabeth was busily squeezing water out of her braids with her towel, I delved into her swim bag and began to lay out her street clothing on a nearby bench. T-shirt, panties, flip-flops, and... hmmm. What was this strange looking thing? I tried to remember what she had been wearing when we came in. Oh, yes. She had come prepared, already dressed in her swimsuit.

I held the strange garment up. Oh, it was a dress, but the top was stuck down inside the skirt. I pulled the top up, and straightened the garment to be sure the armholes were where she could easily slip the dress over her head.

Over her head? Oh no. Where was the hole for her head? I must have missed something. I turned the dress inside out, and then outside in. No hole for the head. I broke the news to Elizabeth.

Hands on hips, and an exasperated look on her face, she enlightened me. "Grandma, that's not a dress. It's a skort!"

"Skort?" this college degree holding grandma asked. "What in the world is a skort?"

Taking the garment in her hands, Elizabeth patiently explained that a skort is a skirt with shorts built in under it. She shoved what I had thought was the top of a dress back down inside the skirt, gave it a little shake to make everything fall into place and slipped it on over the panties she had already donned. Slipping a T-shirt over her head and flip-flops onto her bare feet, she declared herself ready to go.

The other two girls were already finished dressing and waiting for Elizabeth and me by the dressing room door.

Later, with the three of them tucked into their seatbelts in the back seat, I overheard Elizabeth say in what was intended to be a whisper, "You know what? Grandma doesn't even know what a skort is!"

"You're kidding! Didn't she go to college?" one of the others replied. Then, unable to contain themselves, all three broke out in raucous laughter.

"What's so funny?" I asked, pretending I hadn't heard their muted conversation. "Oh nothing," came a rapid reply, "Nothing important anyway," accompanied by a lot more giggles and then an eerie silence the rest of the way home.

Poor children. Not only had they discovered they had an "unhip" grandma, but now, because their friend knew about it, the news would spread like wildfire around the whole neighborhood.

When I got home, I lost no time in heading for Google and found, to my dismay, that skorts were all over the place. Even Hello Kitty made them. How had that bit of information escaped me for the last several years when I had been buying Hello Kitty items for practically every kind of gift-giving occasion that came along?

Feeling further over the hill than I had thought I was, I wandered into the living room and asked my husband if he knew what a skort was. His reply was, "Huh? What are you talking about?"

For some odd reason, his reply made me feel better about myself, knowing that at least one other person in the world shared my ignorance. Time enough to educate myself on skorts, later I decided as I headed for the cookie jar.