Mother’s Day, 2013

Ten years ago, I wrote a Mother’s Day column. When I wrote it, my brother and sister were alive to enjoy what I had to say. Today, I’ve pulled the column out of my archives but now I’m the only remaining member of my immediate family and I have no one to share it with. So I’m going to share it with you.

Mother’s Day

The engine roared as the pre-war Indian motorcycle flowed smoothly up the hills and through the curves of Southern Indiana’s scenic Highway Fifty. The man hunkered down over the handlebars smiled at the throaty, powerful response of the machine. It had barely been running when the owner brought it to him to repair. The wind was invigorating as it struck his face and flattened his hair back against his head. He had on a pair of goggles but they weren’t in the best of shape. The glass was fogged and they didn’t provide much protection. He considered taking them off but didn’t want to take a chance on some object hitting him in his good eye. He had only one eye left, the other having been being destroyed by an errant welding rod some ten years earlier. The sleeves on his flannel shirt billowed out and flapped at his forearms in the wind. It didn’t hurt but it stung enough to make him decide that five miles of testing the machine was enough. The roadside picnic area at the bottom of the next hill was a good place to turn around and head back to the automotive repair shop.
Rounding the curve at the top of the hill, something happened. No one ever knew what caused him to lose control but the cycle skidded down the highway on it’s side throwing the rider off and over the side of the embankment. The man flew headlong into a maple tree about halfway down the steep hillside. He died of a broken neck on the way to the hospital, some fifteen miles from the accident scene.
Back home, his thirty four year old wife, eight months pregnant, had taken advantage of the warm day and had given the boys a bath in the backyard. The boys were six and four years old and along with the couple’s thirteen year old daughter, were the light of the couple’s life.
She heard a car door close and walked around the house to see who was there. The couple that played cards with them every Saturday night stood in the front yard. Both of them were crying but managed to tell her about the accident. In what seemed like only a few minutes, the priest arrived and the house filled up with friends and neighbors.
Three days, of which she remembered little, passed. There was a funeral and five days after that, a stillborn baby boy was delivered by the new widow. Now she had to bury another giant piece of her heart. The sorrow was almost more than she could bear. First, her husband and now the baby boy.
Almost overwhelming the grief that consumed her was a feeling of hopelessness. She felt like climbing into her bed and staying there but for the sake of her family, she had to go on. She had three children depending on her and there was no money nor did she have any idea how to get any. What was she to do? She had never worked outside the home. She had only an eighth grade education and had never traveled more than fifty miles from home. She had a brother and four sisters who could be depended on for moral support but they, like a lot of the people in the area, were doing good to provide for themselves. In this year of nineteen forty-six, social welfare barely existed but it would never have entered her mind anyway.
There was nothing for her but to do the best that she knew how. She sold the family car because the sale provided a little money and because she didn’t know how to drive it anyway. She took in laundry from people in the town. She rented her bedroom to a couple who were in town on a temporary job and she moved into the boys bedroom. She and her daughter planted the garden and prepared to do even more home canning than they had in happier years. The family managed to get through the summer but it left little or no time for the woman to grieve.
In December of that year, she sold the house and moved eight miles west to her hometown to be nearer to both her and her husband’s families. There was enough money from the sale to make a down payment on a house that provided a roof over their heads and little else. No running water or central heat but it was home and it was close to her sisters. The two older kids were enrolled in the Catholic school. The woman fought a newly developed fear of something happening to her family. She worried incessantly. A fear of thunderstorms, along with other natural disasters, kept her awake nights. But she persevered.
She found work that winter cooking in a local restaurant only a mile or so from home. For the next eight years, she walked to and from work at six o’clock every morning six days out of the week. Rain or shine, hot or cold, she made that walk. On Sundays, her day off, she walked her family to church. A year after the accident, a monthly check for fourteen dollars and ninety two cents arrived from Social Security to help provide for the children.
Eventually, she landed a job at the telephone company. It was a little farther to walk and she worked a lot of split shifts but the money was better and life got a little easier then. Indoor plumbing and then central heat were introduced into the family’s life.
Her life went on. She never remarried, never gave it a second thought. She paced the floor with worry when her children were out. She never learned to drive and was to scared to try. She never learned to conquer her fear of storms and spent many a night waking her family and leading them in a prayer that some approaching storm wouldn’t blow them all away.
But she persevered and accomplished the task that fate had handed her. This timid, worry wart of a woman got her family raised and even managed to provide a place to live for her mother-in-law’s later years. .
She had a year of retirement before she died in her sleep at age sixty-four, more than likely of that broken heart that had never completely mended. Was she a hero? To her way of thinking, she wasn’t. A lot of people had endured as bad or worse and it never occurred to her that she had accomplished something out of the ordinary. But she did.
It is for people like her that we celebrate this day set aside to honor our Mothers.
Even though I’m sorry beyond words that she never heard it from me when she was alive, today I’m proud to say that she was my mother.

G2 gordongrindstaff@yahoo.com

I have finally arrived.

For years, I debated signing up for this club but never felt myself worthy. Yesterday, I decided ‘what the hell’ and took the plunge.

Now, I am somebody. I can walk into Costco and rightly say ‘Pardon me while I whip this out.”
It was a great day and I am now the proud owner of, among other things, 48 boxes of unscented Kleenex and 22 boneless pork chops.

A scary time.

A couple of weeks ago, Susie and I took our granddaughter on an outing. It was sort of a self serving trip because I remember how much I enjoyed learning history and since she is getting old enough to appreciate this subject, it seemed like a good thing to do.
I wanted to tell you about our trip to see and experience a bit of history that was very personal to me. I guess everything I wanted to say was said in my columns for the last two weeks so I’ll just put them here where you can read them:
POLIO SCARE

Last week, my wife, Susie and I took our granddaughter to the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History center, the home of the Indiana Historical Society. We were there to see an exhibit on the great flood of 1913 which devastated a good part of the Midwest states, including Indiana and Indianapolis. The exhibit is a part of their ‘You are there’ series in which visitors, along with the folks telling the story, become participants in the narrative which portrayed a relief center where folks who had lost their homes or other possessions could sign up for food and other basic necessities. The idea was to give folks a taste of the experiences involved in that disaster and the presentation did just that.
Continuing our tour of the ‘You are there’ portrayals, we went across the hall to another demonstration of another tragedy, one in which I didn’t need any outside reminders of its effects; the Polio epidemic and the subsequent development of the vaccine that finally ended it. The exhibit was celebrating the 58th anniversary of the release of Jonas Salk’s Vaccine On April 12th of 1955 and was built around the effort that the Eli Lilly Pharmaceutical Company performed in producing several million doses of the vaccine in time for the release.
While Susie and our granddaughter talked to the actors who remained in character for the entire time we were there, I wandered over to a small display that caused the hair on the back of my neck to stand up. It was the symbol of the March of Dimes, one of the millions of small collection boxes that were shaped like a miniature Iron Lung, a device that, more than any other, represented the terror in my soul when confronted with the frightening prospect of coming down with the disease.
The most famous victim of the disease, President Franklin D Roosevelt, had the original idea to establish a foundation that would collect pocket change from the citizens of our country to provide the means for research into this terrible disease. He called this organization ‘The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis’ because most of the victims were very young. The name was later changed to ‘The March of Dimes’ by Eddie Cantor, the comedian who was heading up the fundraising effort. (That last couple of sentences comes from my research efforts, In truth, I had completely forgotten that ‘Infantile’ part and I also had no idea that Eddie Cantor was anything other than an entertainer.)
When I saw that container, the memories came flooding back into my head; the Ritz theater and the newsreels of the bloody battles on the Korean Peninsula pieced together with images of a little girl dragging a twisted, useless limb, making her way across the screen on crutches or that of a little boy, the only visible part of him being his head protruding from a giant machine that was hissing away like a scared snake, providing him with life giving air.
I came home from the History center and began to read what we now know about Polio. The more I read on this malady, the more I was amazed at just how ignorant we were about the causes of it. After all, this occurred in the middle of the 20th century, less than 20 years before we put a man on the moon, and my mother was combatting the threat of this plague with prayers and a bottle of Mercurochrome. She felt that any scratch or cut (and being shoeless most of the summer, I had plenty of those to go around) could be the avenue that the virus would use to wreak havoc on my body. She, like many of her peers, also had a suspicion that the disease was contagious but other than that, I don’t remember that we had any idea what the causes were except that it seemed to have something to do with the hot weather of summertime. That explained the closing of public swimming pools at any hint of an outbreak. But, it wasn’t just swimming pools or scratches, everything was suspect.
Susie’s mom and dad forbade her and her sisters from playing in the runoff of rainwater that filled the gutters lining their street. A friend of mine, a lady named Waynette, recalls her father making all of his children take afternoon naps during the summer to combat the disease. In the city, where the outbreaks were more prevalent, doses of Cod Liver Oil protected my friend, Stan.
I had my own idea about avoiding the problem, as well. Early one summer, a young acquaintance had taken a bad fall at the skating rink and later was stricken with Polio. I felt sure that his fall was somehow the cause so I steered clear of the rink on particularly warm and humid evenings which was, of course, most of them.
Whoops. I’m out of space but I’m not finished. God willing, next week.

POLIO SCARE II

Infantile Paralysis or Polio was a terrible disease when I was growing up and the memories of my mother agonizing over the threat of that terrible disease to her children makes me think back to raising my own children and the helplessness my wife, Susie and I felt as our kids worked their way through the childhood diseases of the 70’s and early 1980’s. I cannot imagine, as a father, how it must have been to see Polio ravage your child’s body and not be able to do anything about it. Having no information on the disease, parents had to do whatever they could, including keeping their kids out of the afternoon sun or not allowing them to visit the local skating rink on humid evenings.
Thank God, Susie and I didn’t have to worry about our children thanks to a massive effort in the 1930’s and 40’s to find a solution. In the mid 20th century, while folks around the world frantically continued their efforts to avoid the disease, there was a gargantuan research effort underway in the scientific community fueled in large part by the March of Dimes. The whole nation responded to the crisis by contributing to this foundation that had been set up by President Roosevelt to find a solution. Even today, any mention of the March of Dimes resurrects the image of a a fundraising drive; hundreds and maybe thousands of dimes, more money than I’d ever seen, stretching end to end along the sidewalks of downtown Loogootee, Indiana; coins that would go to ending the illness that was ravaging the nation.
Then, in 1955, all that effort and research came to fruition with the introduction of the Jonas Salk vaccine and a couple of years later, the Albert Sabin oral version. One tidbit garnered from my unscientific efforts at researching this disease; both of these men were direct beneficiaries of grants from the March of Dimes Foundation. I guess those mountains of dimes really did help to produce a serum.
I don’t actually remember getting the vaccine, probably because I was 15 and my center of focus at the time was girls, and would have been even when in line to get a vaccination. I suspect, given the opportunity and had the right girl been in line with me, I might have gotten the shot multiple times.
Receiving the vaccine was not a simple decision. There were plausible reports that some children were contracting Polio from the vaccine. Ann, a friend and retired teacher from my hometown, recalls getting the immunization in school and watching other kids have to stand aside because their parents would not sign the permission slip; the possibility of their children contracting the disease overrode any other considerations.
The vaccine came too late for Billy Simpson, a good friend of mine and a victim of the Polio virus. Seven years (That’s right, 7 years) of treatment while confined to a St. Louis, Missouri Shriners hospital allowed him to have a near normal adult life until the disease in the form of the Post-Polio syndrome confined him to a wheelchair in the late 1990’s. Billy’s revelation about this syndrome surprised me. It had never occurred to me that the while the vaccine stopped the epidemic, Billy was quick to point out that it was not a cure and he is still suffering the effects of the disease, losing a little more of what tiny bit of mobility he has as each year passes.
There was one other effect worth noting about my spending time visiting with the polio outbreak. It brought back the more recent memory of another epidemic, one that prompted a historical, gut-wrenching episode in the 1980’s when a young teenager named Ryan White contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion. No doubt, most of us remember the rancorous, neighbor against neighbor debates about whether Ryan should be allowed to attend classes at his school around other children. Parents in Central Indiana were choosing sides and in reality, it was just another case of us being ignorant about how the disease could be spread. I could see both sides of the argument then and if my children had attended that school district, even today, I still do not know what I would have done.
After going through the exercise of writing this column, I am surprised at how little I knew about polio, a subject that was endemic to most of my younger days. Now, 60 years later, I know that the cause of polio was not the heat of a hot, humid summer day or even a scraped knee from a fall at the skating rink. Instead, the major cause was related to ingesting food, water and other matters that had been contaminated by this highly contagious virus hiding in bits of fecal matter. Something else that astounded me; persons infected with the germ may not have suffered any symptoms at all unless the virus made its way into the blood stream and even when it did, the differences in severity were all over the map.
I guess to sum it up, in the end it appears to me that the chance of contracting this crippling disease was nothing more than a random roll of the dice and all the worrying in the world would not have influenced that toss one way or the other.

What the Hell??

While watching the news this morning, I read the following sentence on the news crawler across the bottom of the television screen:

‘Taliban announces start of Spring offensive in Afghanistan.’

Did I wander into some kind of alternate universe? I would have thought they would want to keep stuff like that a secret. I’ll bet Eisenhower and Patton are shaking their heads.

Where’s Heloise when you need her??

Yesterday afternoon, my wife, Susie, made a pot of coffee using a package of some stuff we got for Christmas. The package contained Raspberry Chocolate coffee. I am not a big fan of flavored coffee, having been raised in a small town where real men liked their coffee hot and right out of the pot at the Arrow Cafe. I’ve always had the notion that if God wanted us to drink flavored coffee, he would have built it right into the coffee plant. Nonetheless, I don’t object when Susie wants to try those sissified drinks, she is female after all, but this raspberry chocolate stuff she made yesterday did terrible things to the coffee pot.

I am one of those folks who cannot get their morning going without a good cup of coffee to start the day. I was up early today and had the coffee brewing by 7 o’clock. The smell coming from the pot was kind of sweet and sickening, reminiscent of raspberry and chocolate. The odor was overpowering. I had made the coffee so I knew that was Folgers in the coffee filter so I let the pot perk away, figuring that the real coffee would dissipate the other stuff.
I poureed a cup when the the pot quit making its noises and the smell about knocked me down. Still, I needed coffee to get my blood flowing so I took about two sips of that fruitcake brew and found myself wondering where I might go to get my nails done.
Huh. Maybe this stuff isn’t so bad after all. I had a little more and picked up the yellow pages looking for pedicures.

Then I stopped. GOOD GOD! The remnants of that sissy-ass coffee was brainwashing me.
I quickly poured out the coffee and rinsed my mouth with a good slug of Scope. Then I scrubbed the pot with soap and ran half a jar of vinegar thru the coffemaker’s innards. It didn’t help. I still could not get rid of the taste. I ended up driving to McDonald’s for a cup of their Senior coffee with one sugar and one cream. It cost fifty cents plus a nickel for the sales tax. A NICKEL! That is a ten percent tariff. What in the hell is this world coming to?

On top of that, the clerk wanted to put the cream and sugar in the coffee for me. For Pete’s sake, I’m not that old.

I’ll put my own damn sugar in and…., and……
Oh yeah. Now I remember. I still don’t know what to do about my coffeepot.

A question for the masses.

It’s a rainy day leaving my wife, Susie and I with some time on our hands. Might want to take in a movie. Checked the listings at the 2 dollar theater. Not much there but did note one title I had never heard of. ‘Warm bodies’. I don’t know.It could be one of those little gems that pop up from time to time. So I went to the Synopsis page on the web site. Opening line of the Synopsis:

“A terrible plague has left the planet’s population divided between zombies and humans.”

What do you think? Should we go???

Probably Not.

In today’s news — Another reason for me not to wear one.

That idiot in North Korea wants to blow us out of existence but our top story today is even more important:

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/braless-best-study-says-bras-breasts-saggier-161300096.html