Tag Archive | Daddy

Flirting with Death–Growing Up Boomer

May7

imagesRT5WAQE7If you grew up in the 50s, 60s, or 70s, it’s a miracle you’re alive. There’s a reason for the saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” In other words, raising your children with danger and bad medicine didn’t end with the discovery of seatbelts and penicillin.

I can hear my mother now: “If a little does a little good, a lot will do a lot of good.” This was her rationale for ignoring dosing instructions on over-the-counter medications. To her, a tablespoon was a serving spoon from the table. A teaspoon was the soup spoon. She cheerfully ladled out Pepto-Bismol to reverse my problem, then ladled out mineral oil to reverse the cure. I was almost grown before I knew medicine doses measured like salt and baking powder, not mashed potatoes.

My mother was a helicopter parent long before helicopters were invented. Maybe she was a spiro-gyro or hot air balloon parent. Worrying was a way of life for her, and we were first on her list. A sneeze or cough was enough to make her drag us off to the doctor, where we were guaranteed a penicillin shot. The miracle drug was dispensed for complaints big and small. After all, what’s the use of having a miracle drug, if you aren’t going to use it for everything? And if we were really sick, too sick to go downtown to the Medical Arts building to his office, the doctor would stop by our house on his way home, and he always had a supply of penicillin in his bag.

The bathroom medicine cabinet was full of over-the-counter remedies, too. Pepto-Bismol, iodine, mercurochrome, Little Black Pills, and Carter’s Little Liver Pills all played a role in keeping the family healthy. Bayer aspirin, and later Excedrin, were the cure-alls for headaches. Aspirin, hot tea, and dry toast was the treatment for cramps. Little Black Pills were for constipation, with Pepto for diarrhea. Cuts and abrasions called for iodine. Always. Period.

My parents would have fit right into the Stoics’ society. If there were no bones sticking out and no blood, you were fine. Suck it up and walk it off. Of course, first we had to annihilate the enemy of the Free World–germs. These little critters were a relatively new discovery when my parents were little, and their parents attacked them as if they were going after “Kaiser Bill.”

For a good part of my childhood, iodine was the poison du jour for medical germicide. Unfortunately, iodine felt like having lava poured into an open wound, probably because it had an alcohol base. Screaming because of the injury redoubled when I felt the cure.

There was a kinder, gentler antiseptic–mercurochrome. It didn’t burn nearly as badly, and much of the discomfort it caused could be eliminated by blowing on the wound until it dried. No one considered the fact that blowing germ-laden breath on an open wound was counter-productive. In addition, it didn’t seem to impress anyone negatively that the active ingredient was mercury. Yes, as in “permanent brain damage” mercury. Mercurochrome wasn’t banned as an over-the-counter product until 1998.

And speaking of mercury, we loved it when Mama dropped the thermometer while “shaking it down,”  shattering it on the tile bathroom floor. That provided a really cool, new toy to play with: mercury. We were fascinated by the way it “crawled” when it moved, and even more awed by how well it cleaned tarnish off dimes and nickels when we smeared it over the coins with our bare fingers.

Dental care was high on the list for “better living through chemistry.” When an Air Force dentist looked at my husband’s teeth and exclaimed, “Good grief, boy! You’ve got Cadillac teeth!” there was a brief moment of alarm, before Bryan realized this was a good thing. His hometown, Pasadena, Texas, was one of the first cities in the state to put fluoride in their drinking water. Consequently, cavities were rare, but their smiles looked like a “before” picture in a whitening gel commercial. The recipe needed a little fine tuning.

imagesQ4VRVBCKDDT trucks driving up and down the streets, spraying for mosquitoes, were also part of growing up in Pasadena. Bryan and his friends rode their bikes in the fog behind the trucks for fun.

If being endangered by your parents and health care professionals wasn’t enough, toymakers and Madison Avenue joined in, too. No cool kid would have dreamed of wearing a helmet when riding a bike. I remember my father saying, “Aw, she doesn’t have to wear one of those. Nothing’s going to happen. Besides, she can hardly see out from under it. That thing’s dangerous.” And why on earth would you need child-proof packaging on medications and drain cleaner? “Kids know better than to get into those.”

My brother had a chemistry set. He managed to make his room smell like dead fish for a month, but at least no one was killed. Early Gilbert Chemistry Sets included 56 chemicals, such as ammonium nitrate (a key ingredient in homemade bombs) and the poisonous and flammable potassium permanganate. The “Atomic” chemistry sets of the ’50s came with radioactive uranium ore. They got a little safer in the ’60s but weren’t really reined in until the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.

imagesHT8EWSF6As if the sexy men and women puffing away in movies weren’t convincing enough, we were encouraged to smoke by actors dressed like doctors on television. No one had even heard of secondhand smoke. And remember candy cigarettes? I used to get them in my Christmas stocking.

Car seats and seatbelts were optional. imagesZYTDNG9FAnd lead-based paint, which causes brain and kidney damage, wasn’t outlawed until 1978. It was routinely used on cribs, among other things.

I don’t blame my parents. They only knew what they saw on TV and in the newspaper. I do blame the scientists and advertisers who knew these things were dangerous, even if they didn’t know the full extent. They ignored the fact that people were buying and using their poisons, and it really hasn’t changed much over the years. It seems like every day something is recalled or declared unsafe, something we did to our newborns is now considered deadly, and some medicine our parents gave us is now used to kill roaches.

There are seven billion people on the earth, and the population is growing. How can that be when we are doing our best to kill ourselves off? Maybe it’s the underdeveloped countries, whose people don’t have access to our medicines, cleaning products, and chemical-infused food, who are overpopulating. They better hope the don’t catch up to us. That could be a real health hazard.

Hark the Herald Angels and Demons

Dec14

The holidays sneaked up on me again this year. When do I have to start getting ready for the holidays to have a handle on things when they arrive? The reality is, I could start putting up decorations in early January and still feel like the holidays were sprung on me the following November.

Christmas is a time of reflection for me. I guess everyone gets nostalgic this time of year, missing times long-passed or even ones that never actually existed. The holidays started for me every fall, when my mother set up a Ping-Pong table in the master bedroom.  That table was ground zero for wrapping Christmas presents. It went up before Thanksgiving and was my signal to start getting excited.

In the days before ready-made bows,  Mama made them herself, twisting flat ribbon into a figure-eight, notching the middle, and tying it off tightly. Then, one at a time, she pulled a loop out, bringing it down and across, until she had a gorgeous, perfect bow. Mama was wonderfully good at this, but I got the impression she hated doing it. She was extra-edgy and short-tempered from the time that Ping-Pong table came out until it went back in the closet under the stairs.

My father was philosophical about Christmas, usually just waiting for it to be over. He enjoyed the once-a-year foods–Mama’s fruit cake, boiled custard, and angel food cake. But no matter how hard we tried, he never seemed to get a gift he really wanted.

“Socks with feet in them,” or “Drawers with seats in them,” followed by, “Just what I wanted,” were his standard comments. Admittedly, buying a gift for him was a nightmare. The man had two of everything he’d ever wanted. Plus, he had an annoying habit of going shopping for himself just before Christmas. It was the only time of the year he did this, and it drove my mother nuts.

Only a couple of times did I please him with my gift. When I was in high school, I managed to find a blacksmith in North San Antonio, no mean feat in the late 1960s, and had him make a wrought-iron sign, “T. W. Wheeler.”  Daddy didn’t say much on Christmas morning, but he did hang it on the ranch gate, an indication of approval. Years later, when he had to sell the ranch, he retrieved the sign and kept it in his home office. Later, as an adult, I gave him a Care Package one Christmas. It contained all his favorites: Marshmallow Circus Peanuts, Saltines to crumble into a glass of cold milk and eat with a spoon, Penguins–chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies– rat cheese (Longhorn style), and chocolate-covered cherries. That gift actually made him grin as he unpacked it.

At least shopping has gotten a lot easier over the years. Bryan is easy to buy for. He likes just about anything I get him. My grown kids want money or gift cards, and my grandchildren cheerfully provide me with detailed lists of EXACTLY what they want and where to get it. And the Internet, bless its little silicon heart, brings everything to my door. No more fighting crowds or doing psycho checks in dark parking lots before getting into my car.

Doing some heavy remembering, letting myself float back through the years, is my way of honoring the season. Instead of turning up at church on the high holy days because I feel I ought to, I use the time to reflect on my behavior on the other 364 days a year. Have I done enough for others? Did I manage to curb my wicked tongue at all this year? Did I hurt someone intentionally or un-? Do I deserve another year of walking this earth? We all have demons to wrestle; mine come decked out in jingle bells and mistletoe.

I hope your holidays are everything you want them to be; I wish for you the ability to determine what that is.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and Happy Holidays, y’all!

 

“President Kennedy has been shot…”

Nov21

 

Fifty years ago today, I came home from ninth grade, and my mother intoned her usual, “What did you learn In school today?” For once my answer came easily.  I had to come up with  an answer to that question every day. Sometimes I couldn’t think of anything special I’d learned, so I’d make something up. It didn’t seem to matter to them.

“I saw President Kennedy today. His motorcade went right by our school on Broadway, and they had us all stand on the curb and wave. He looked orange.”

“Was Jackie with him,” she asked, mildly interested for once.

“Yes. She didn’t look orange. She looked normal.”

I never found out why the President of the United States looked orange that day, or if he always looked orange. Maybe it was make-up, maybe it was a bad artificial tan—they tended to turn you orange back then—but I remember that very clearly, my main impression of the two-second look I got of John Kennedy on his way to the Alamo to make a speech.

When my father came home later, he asked me the same question, “What did you learn in school today?”

“She saw Kennedy today,” my mother interrupted before I could get it out.

My father made a sound somewhere between a growl and a spit. He hated John Kennedy for his liberalism, his privileged background, and apparently most of all for his accent. Daddy thought  Kennedy had to be talking like that on purpose, putting on airs or something, because nobody talked like that naturally.

During the campaign three years before, my father pointed out to me a poem that appeared in the local newspaper:

Since Kennedy says “hawf,” then Johnson must agree,

That a Texas calf is now a “cawf,” as any fool can see.

So when  you go to the butcher’s, do not snicker and “lawf,”

Just go up and say, to be quite genteel,

“Please give me hawf a cawf.”

We all got a good “lawf” about that. My father’s politics, which were slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, meant he hated Kennedy as he had hated Franklin Roosevelt before him. Only 2/3 into his first term, Kennedy had had less time to incur his wrath, but he couldn’t stand him, end of conversation. I was still quite young, fourteen in 1963, and generally parroted my parents’ political opinions. It would be several years before I began to think for myself. From that time on, our conversations were limited to old times, and, like a Jane Austen novel, the weather and the condition of the roads.

The next day started off like any other, but after lunch our principal came on over the public address system. He announced that apparently someone had shot the president in Dallas. Using the cutting edge of 1963 technology, he held his transistor radio up to the microphone on his desk to let us hear the radio broadcasts and updates. It was no time at all before we knew for sure he was dead.

Even today I can’t describe what I felt. I wasn’t devastated like the kids who had actually liked him. I didn’t cry. But I definitely felt weird. It was the first time in my life when someone I had seen one day was dead the next. Things like that didn’t happen in my little world. Maybe during war or if you saw someone off on the Titanic, but people in my world didn’t just up and die. Not yet, anyway.

That night, as we watched the aftermath playing out on all three channels, my father expressed his sympathy. “Well, I hated the sonofabitch, but I didn’t necessarily  want him to die.” All things considered, it was a real gush of emotion.

Like everyone else my age, I can’t believe it’s been fifty years since the assassination. That is the watershed event for my generation. Everyone remembers where they were when they found out about it, as my parents’ generation remembered hearing about Pearl Harbor, and my children will remember finding out about 911.The girl who was barely a teenager in 1963 has five grandchildren now. I wonder what their watershed event will be, whether there will be a place deep inside them that is permanently chilled by it, and whether they will write about it fifty years later.

Politically Incorrect

Oct6

I’m fed up with politics. Everywhere I turn are people telling lies and half-truths. I have to check with PolitiFact.com before I can believe anything any politician says. One candidate says he didn’t mean anything he’s said for the past five years. One says if he can raise as much money as his opponent he can win. So, we buy public office now? I’m no innocent. I know you need money—lots of money—to win a campaign, but I’d like to see a few ideas thrown into the pot, too.

My father had no respect for politicians. He defined elections as the process by which we “take some rascals out and put some rascals in.” I always suspected he cleaned up that aphorism a bit for my benefit. He always told my brother he could be anything he set his mind to, except a politician. (We girls were to get married, learn to cook really well, and raise kids. It never entered his head that one of his daughters might go into politics.) My mother never said much about it, but I think she would have disapproved of my becoming a politician for the same reason she disapproved of a career in nursing: I would see naked people. She was inordinately concerned about that.

You know things are bad when you look back with nostalgia at the election of 1960. I was just a kid then, but I could understand the Kennedy-Nixon campaign. It made a lot of sense that some miner in Appalachia asked John Kennedy if, as president, he would obey instructions from the Pope even if he thought they were bad for the country. We were much less politically correct in those days. Today, only a barbarian would question a candidate’s religion, race, or birth certificate. Right? (The Birthers don’ t scare me much. They will, eventually, find out Hawaii is a state, too.)

Politics is inherently full of pitfalls. Nixon lost a lot of ground after his debates with Kennedy, because he looked like a crook on television, which, as it turned out, was type casting. George (Daddy) Bush lost points for what the media called “the wimp factor.” He came across on television as a milquetoast. Frankly, as a former head of the CIA, he certainly had backbone and was dangerous. If you go all the way back to the campaigns of Eisenhower and Stevenson, Adelai Stevenson lost the 1952 election because he came across as too smart, an “egghead.” Only in America are you denigrated for being too intelligent. (At least we seem to have put that issue behind us.) And considering Richard Nixon made the “egghead” comment, we should have been forewarned.

So, when I can’t stand another minute of today’s rhetoric, I’ll remember the good old days and a presidential campaign that was cogent, dignified, incisive, and even inspired memorable poetry:

Since Kennedy says “cawf,” then Johnson must agree,

That a Texas calf is now a “cawf,” as any fool can see.

So when you go to the market, do not snicker and “lawf.”

Just go in and say, to be quite genteel, “Please give me hawf a cawf.”

Droughts and Druthers

Sep16

I’ve been enjoying the latest spate of rainfall. There will always be a part of me, buried deeply under the years, which breathes a sigh of relief every time it rains. Even if we’re in the middle of El Nino plenty, it still looks good to me.

I grew up in Texas during a drought that began in the Fifties and lasted, to the best of my memory, well into the Sixties.  Now when we slip into even a dry spell, much less a bonafide drought like now, something stirs in my brain, and half-remembered images and snatches of overheard adult conversation come back to me.

We weren’t exactly farmers living in a soddy on the Plains. We lived in comfort in San Antonio, but my father was a gentleman farmer and rancher. In Texas, that meant we had “a place” about an hour outside of town that we visited most weekends. My father would hunt, fish, and eventually meet with Felipe, his foreman, to see how the crops and cattle were coming along. During that long, dry time, the cattle herd got smaller and the crops had to be irrigated just to keep them alive.

Not that I worried much about it, since it had no apparent effect on my little life. I was just aware that Daddy got up even earlier than usual, made the first pot of coffee of the day, and doodled numbers on more pages than usual on the Yellow Transit pads his brother gave him. Uncle Charlie was a salesman for YT, having the family gene for selling ice boxes to Eskimos, and replenished my father’s supply when he hunted at the ranch. I could never understand my father’s notes, but when he stopped writing numbers and started drawing boxes filled with criss-crossed lines that resembled the struts of oil derricks, I knew everything was under control, and he would soon start the second pot of coffee that day.

I remember so clearly when that drought broke. I was away at college and had heard on the news that it finally had rained in Central Texas. I called Daddy to congratulate him. It was always good to hear his laconic voice.

“Yeah, it rained three inches down at the ranch. But now we’ve got another problem,” he explained.

“Oh, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Well, the grass has grown up so tall, we’re afraid it’s going to lift the cows up off their feet, and they won’t be able to walk to water.”

If I could see him and read his face, I could usually tell when I had wandered into one of his minefields. But over the phone, he drew me in every time. I heard him chuckle just a bit, and then my mother groaned. She never really appreciated his sense of humor nor his gift for laying verbal booby-traps.

I inherited his sense of humor to a great extent, but I can never quite bring myself to make jokes about that topic. Rain is still very serious business to me. Rather than make a joke, I’m much more likely to smile and whisper, “It’s raining, Daddy!”