Swimmingly

Who doesn’t remember the fun times swimming as they grew up whether in oceans, lakes, streams, swimming pools, or rivers? Often we learned by jumping in from diving boards, boulders, beaches, or high banks of earth. I don’t remember where I had my first encounter with water other than being bathed by my mom Sybil Beck in our kitchen sink and later in the family bathtub.

Some of my memories in life were of swimming in the creek below my parent’s house with the neighbor boys. The creek was fed by springs, melting snow, and ice. The stream was in shadow much of the way, gaining very little heat from the sun. The deepest pool under the bridge became the yearly challenge of being in the water by the 1st of May. The water was frigid. The only thing that kept us from hypothermia was the huge bonfire we built before taking the plunge.

Swimming in the local high school pool for gym class was very interesting. The chlorine was so intense that it cleared the sinuses and burned the eyes. Then all of the boys swam naked.

We also shucked our clothes when the boys swam in Indian Creek after playing many innings of softball to cool off. Hot and sweaty, the water was sweet relief. We’d duck under the water playing tag or when the occasional train would pass by.

Other times of swimming, I remember walking a mile to a friends’ farm and climbing onto their primer-gray Ford tractor. Six or 7 kids clung the fenders or straddled the hood for the ride to White Bridge near Roger Mill, Pennsylvania for a swim. There were no nude beaches there. We wore shorts or swim trunks because girls, mothers, and fathers were present.

Several times I swam with our Boy Scout troop. In ponds we would sometimes wrestle with a lard covered watermelon. We occasionally went to a swimming pool at a local park called Cutty’s. It had a wide swimming area having several depths, a slide, and a diving board.

A few times I swam in the Atlantic Ocean. The first was in Florida visiting relatives and much later while vacationing in Virginia.

While in the Navy I was stationed in Iceland. There I swam in a huge pool that had 3 hot tubs along the poolside, each one growing progressively hotter. The only thing hotter than the hot tubs was an Icelandic beauty with long blonde hair wearing a white terrycloth bikini. Now that was swimming.

Hey Baby Cakes

Ever since I was a child, I was introduced to cakes of one sort or another. As a toddler, I was taught to play patty-cakes with my mom, Sybil Beck and sometimes with my grandmother Rebecca Miner. I was small enough to be held on a lap and their hands cupped mine and I was taught to clap my hands together in the nursery rhyme, “Patt-a-cake, patt-a-cake, bakers man…”

I can remember coming inside our house after playing in the dirt and mud and hearing my mom yell, “Get back outside and clean off. You’re caked in mud.” This was okay with me because there was a small stream that flowed in our backyard. I could stay outside for a few minutes longer and play in the water.

Each year as I grew, my mom would bake the traditional birthday cake. My choice would often change from year to year, but my brother Ken always wanted angel food cake drizzled with chocolate glaze. My sister Kathy was either chocolate or vanilla.

There were always the paper muffin tin liners in case mom decided to whip up some cupcakes for lunches. But they rarely lasted long enough and were eaten quickly.

In the refrigerator were cakes of yeast for baking bread. Those cakes have now been replaced with foil envelopes of dried yeast. If the cakes of yeast were unattended for a bit, they would dry out and end up being flushed to help with the septic system.

I can remember the penetrating aroma of moth balls. At one time the crystals of naphthalene were compressed and shaped around a wire hanger. Te moth cake would hand in closets on the clothing rod to ward off moths. The smell was often strong enough to ward off vampires and evil spirits.

And who can forget the cakes of soap used to wash hands and to wash out mouths that said cuss words. In “The Christmas Story” the soap was Lifebuoy for Ralphie’s indiscretion.

Then there was the slang, “baby Cakes.” It was a term of endearment, letting someone know that you loved them and was used by a guy for his sweetheart.

My cakes today are limited to pancakes or buckwheat cakes and if I’m not too cheap maybe some crab cakes at a local restaurant. A few Christmases ago, I did get a really wonderful fruitcake from some friends in Texas. It was wonderful and filled with pecans. Hint, hint.

Skid Row

One afternoon the ambulance crew delivered a twenty-seven year old female to our emergency room. She and her husband were returning from a funeral when the A-frame fell out from under the front of their car. The car lurched sideways, the passenger door kicked open, and she was thrown out onto the asphalt roadway. She skidded along the tarmac for several yards on her backside.

All that was left of her panty hose were the toes and waistband and the waistband of her panties. Everything else had been ground away from the roughness of the pavement. Her back and inner surface of her legs had a heavy case of “road rash.” Road rash are dirty abrasions that occur from falling or sliding on a road or on gravel.

After the doctor examined her, he was kind enough to have us medicate her for pain before we began the daunting task of cleaning and dressing the expansive and dirt filled wound.

As we cleaned her scrapes and were picking pieces of gravel and dirt from her wound we noticed that the abrasions ran from her heels to her upper, inner thighs and even into her vagina.

Once her wounds were clean, we started to cover the abrasions with Silvadene cream and to apply bandages. They were bulky, difficult to keep in place, and wouldn’t cover those wounds inside of her vagina.

I began to think, “How was she going to keep the bandages clean when she has to go to the restroom?”

I told the other nurses to stop for a bit. “I need to talk to the doctor.”

“Doctor,” I said. “Did you notice that those abrasions went up inside her vagina?”

When he didn’t answer, I continued. “The first time that woman passes her urine, she’s going to come back in here and punch you right in the face.” Everyone knows what it’s like to get sweat into a scratch. This would be even worse. “You need to stick a Foley catheter into her for a few days until she has a chance to heal.”

The doctor followed me as I went back to help with the bandaging. He re-evaluated the wound and called her family physician. He made arrangements for us to insert the indwelling Foley catheter and have her admitted for pain control.

Trouble

I’ve told my friends that I know just enough in several foreign languages to get myself into trouble. I learned a few words in Russian, reading them in a novel that are not very polite to say. In my youth, those words weren’t to be spoken in mixed company, but now it’s too often those of the female persuasion that use it just as often as their male counterparts.

I took two years of Latin in high school. Since no one speaks it, I’m safe there with a sheltered education learning only some Christmas hymns and songs. The same was true with the two years of high school French I took. I was harassed by the Spanish students who said I’d have to travel to France to use it, but reminded them I only needed to go to Canada to sharpen my skills while they’d have to travel to Mexico. Today, the Spanish language has come to us with the influx of Latinos from our southern border. My troubling knowledge of Spanish words came from the John Wayne movie, The Cowboys. It isn’t polite to speak either.

I was reminded of this because while at PNC Park in for the Pittsburgh Pirate and San Francisco Giants game. During the rain delay a young couple sitting behind me was talking in French. I was only able to understand one in about two-hundred words. My recollection of the French language has deteriorated from the last time I needed to use it. As a corpsman at the Naval Hospital in Orlando, Florida, a woman and her child fell out of a moving vehicle. They were Arabic and didn’t speak English. The doctor and I didn’t speak Arabic. The only common language was French. It was a struggle to examine mother and child with limited abilities to speak and to understand.

My grandfather Raymond Miner was Pennsylvania Dutch. I picked up some German words, but not enough to speak full sentences…just a few, counting from one to five or calling someone a rubber nose, “gummi nase.”. While stationed in Iceland, the key phrase I learned was Ég skil ekki Islensku,” “I don’t speak Icelandic” and “Gledileg Jol,” which means “Merry Christmas.”

A phrase I learned from a Greek Orthodox coworker was “Christos Anesti” which means, “Christ is risen” and the response is “Alithos Anesti,” which means, “Truly he is risen.” Although it is a day late, I say to you all Happy Resurrection day and Easter blessings to my friends.

Slobber Dribble and Drool

I remember as a child pulling a red-ripened tomato from the vine in my Grandmother Rebecca Miner’s garden and feeling its firm flesh warmed by the rays of the summer sun. My mouth watered in anticipation of that first bite, wanting the pleasure of the rush of juice trapped inside. I would lick my lips in anticipation of the juice flooding over my taste buds when my teeth finally punctured its smooth skin to release its tang. I was careful to avoid the gush of nectar to keep it from trickling down my chin and leaving a telltale trail on my shirtfront. The spots would tell Gram that I’d been in her garden and the stains would upset my Mother, Sybil Beck.

Also in Gram’s garden grew several large clumps of rhubarb. These mouth-watering treats were planted at the far end of her garden, making it far more difficult to claim the prize without being spotted, but the risk was always worth the scolding. After selecting the stalk I wanted, I would wrest the stem from the plant root. The stem was cool to the touch, being sheltered from the sun by its huge elephant-eared leaves. My mouth is watering now as I recall the taste of the sharply-tart stem as it crunched between my teeth. Rhubarb always lasted longer than eating just one tomato.

I’m not sure if it’s only the recollections of childhood, but it seemed that peaches and plums were always bursting with juice that would trickle down my chin leaving a sweet, sticky rivulet. Of course most times the fruit from my youth was plucked fresh from the fruit trees. Ripened apples, peaches, and plums sometimes released their grasp on the limbs and fell to the ground. Their split skins parted to reveal the savory flesh and the nectar stored inside. I wasn’t the only creature seeking their bounty. Honey bees, ants, and birds of all kinds would join the bounty.

There were times that birds would start their feast while the fruit was still clinging to the tree. Almost as bad as finding a worm in an apple bite was the realization that the large, beautiful apple that I’d spied already had been defiled by the beak of a bird. The spot of devastation was always on the far side of the apple not seen until picked.

I imagine that one day as I age, there may again come a time when the drool, dribble, and slobber will trickle down my chin, but not yet… although I have occasionally found a crumb lodged in my beard.

When Shadows Fall

When purple shadows fell and fireflies came out to dance in the deepening summer evening sky, I would listen to a whippoorwill sitting on a fence post at the edge of my grandfather’s field. Sometimes a pair of mourning doves would add their sad tones to the chorus of crickets and frogs from the swampy area behind the chicken house. I remember sitting on one of the large, green Adirondack chairs that claimed spots on the wide concrete porch that extended across the front of my grandparents Miner’s large farmhouse. They had another settee made of twisted grapevines and sapling pieces, but very few people used it because the ribs of the vines made the seat uncomfortable for the person’s sitting.

Four tall hemlocks stood guard at the entrance of the walkway spreading their branches to protect the house from the heat of the sun and the chill of winter winds. The porch became a shady haven where I often played or sought a quiet place beneath their thickly needled limbs. It was a cool sanctuary on the hottest of days, a dry refuge when the rains poured down, and even a haven from the cold winter winds.

Grandma Miner would store her rugs on the Adirondack settee in the winter. It made a great cocoon where I could to burrow deep into their warmth, away from the cold and the noise of aunts, uncles, and the horde of cousins inside. It was a relief after the boisterous voices or the accumulated heat of Gram’s wood burning cook stove and the mass of people gathered inside.

Gram’s house had one other sanctuary in the sitting room where children were forbidden to step foot, but if I was careful and quiet enough, I could slip inside and crawl behind the sofa. The sofa was bulky clad in pale blue, stiff, almost porcupine-feeling plush fabric. It was prickly and rough for any kid to sit on wearing shorts. The stiff fabric caused bare legs to itch almost to the point of being unbearable and eliminating a child’s ability to sit still for more than a few seconds.

Sometimes my memories fade as I age and shadows fall blurring or hiding names and places from my remembrance. That’s why I share these recollections in writing as they emerge from the past. I want my thoughts to be captured before they become lost or that darkness falls and the lights fail.

 

Getting Brushed Off 

 Dot was one of the nurses with whom I worked in the emergency department. She was an older woman who was extremely neat. Every hair had to be in place, her uniform was spotless, and her shoes were shined within an inch of their life. She always wore her nursing cap securely fastened to top of her dark curls.

            One of our emergency room doctors was her complete opposite. If you remember the television program, “The Odd Couple,” then you can understand what I am trying to explain.

His clothing was always rumpled and more often than not covered in dog hair. His gray hair was longer and unkempt. Sometimes he even sported a couple of day’s growth of whiskers.

            He had one big bug-a-boo. He hated when restroom doors were left ajar. He wouldn’t just close it, but he would slam any bathroom door that was open. You could tell when he made rounds, because somewhere on the floor a door would bang shut.

            One afternoon Dot was fastening her hat in the nurse’s restroom when the doctor entered the adjoining lounge. He poured his cup of coffee and turned to leave and saw the door was open. BANG, he slammed it shut. Turning on his heel, he took his cup of coffee and walked to the desk at the nursing station.

            A few seconds later Dot stormed out of the lounge. She was as hot as the doctor’s coffee. Her face was red and there was dirt and debris nestled in her hair, scattered on her hat, and across the shoulders of her crisp, white uniform.

            When the doctor slammed the door, the air pressure lifted up the ceiling tiles and dirt that had collected on the top side of the tiles rained down on her.

            She stood beside the physician till he sat his coffee down, then grabbed his coat sleeve and dragged him back to the lounge, shoving him into the bathroom and slamming the door. WHAM, WHAM, WHAM! The noise resounded out to the desk area. She left the lounge and went into a patient’s restroom to brush off her uniform and to pick the dirt out of her hair.

            A few minutes later, the much chagrined doctor emerged from the lounge with a sheepish smile on his face. He was covered with large amounts of dirt and dust on his head and shoulders. Unfazed, he rolled his eyes, ran his hand through his hair, and brushed the dirt from his jacket.  He seemed rather amused about it all and picked up his coffee to take a sip.

In the Palm of My Hand

Easter’s almost upon us. Our church like so many others are preparing special worship services for Easter morning. Some churches have Sunrise Services, breakfast, then a regular service or Sunday school. Our church has a regular Easter Sunday service and in lieu of Sunday school, we have a cantata and drama presentation.

Usually the church is decorated with flowers that line the altar rail. The aroma of hyacinths and Easter lilies fill the sanctuary while tulips, daisies, and hydrangeas mingle their varied blossoms into a tapestry of vivid colors.

The front of the auditorium is being readied with props for the drama. A cardboard cutout replica of the borrowed garden tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea fills one side of the platform. Wednesday evening, I said to our Pastor, “Isn’t the tomb to be a garden tomb?”

When he answered, “Yes,” I said, “It looks bare. Would you like a palm tree to place at one side?” He answered in the affirmative. I promised to create one from cardboard stock I keep in my basement. I have the large cartons that protected my sofa, my chair in delivery, and from the supplies used to remodel my upstairs bathroom.

Wednesday evening after returning from church, I searched the web for photos of date palms from gardens of the Middle East. Doing a quick sketch, I went to the basement and chose pieces of cardboard I would use. Gathering supplies and several cans of spray paint I readied the cardboard, applying a light spray of greens and brown for background colors, then set them aside to dry.

Thursday morning I chose the craft-paints from my horde and began to detail the palm fronds from three colors to vary each frond in color and shape. I’d thought of adding bunches of brown dates, but the fronds filled the cardboard piece. Dates would have looked too busy. Sometimes adding too much detail is as bad as not enough, especially for stage props. While the palm fronds dried, I used a thick permanent marker to simulate the rough trunk of the tree.

I don’t have a truck or van to transport my large creations, so I designed the tree in three pieces. Two pieces formed an adjustable trunk and the third piece was the palm fronds. If you’d like to see the tree, our Easter Sunday service is at 11 a.m. April 21st at the Mt. Zion Community Church, 159 Kreinbrook Hill Rd. Acme PA 15610. You’re welcome to visit.

Feeling Good

On one of my Facebook posts, I asked my friends to pray for a close friend of mine. I have known her all of her life and she has known me most of mine. Her parents and my parents went to the same church. She was born during that time, so I have known her since her birth. Our friendship has grown closer over the intervening years and she is one of my best friends. Because of multiple health problems caused by several and various accidents, she needs to have a service dog for balance and I have become a sometime travel partner and sometime chauffeur.

Last Saturday she developed a severe episode of vertigo and spent much of Saturday night in a local hospital. One automobile accident caused head injuries that gave her a compromising concussion. The force of the rollover impaired much of her normal life. The amount of trauma she received from the accident was like a football player being concussed four or five times in a few minute time span. Periods of vertigo are only one of the residual problems that remained.

After consulting with her primary care physician, an appointment was made with a therapist that deals with the realignment of the crystals in the inner ear. She needed someone to drive her home after the treatment. I was available and took her to the appointment.

When the crystals of the inner ear become misaligned, tinnitus or ringing in the ear or extreme dizziness and vertigo can and will often occur. I’ve had similar, but lesser bouts of vertigo since my fall in 2015 that caused 2 bleeds in my head. Once you’ve felt these incidents of disequilibrium that happen without warning, dealing with heights or driving can be intensely unnerving and frightening.

A local clinic was able to treat her today. We went to see the therapist who manipulated her with the Epley maneuver. The maneuver consists of turning the client’s head, then placing them on their back. The therapist then rolls the client from one side to the other, repeating the motion a few times as needed until relief is obtained. Afterwards, the client must limit head turning, bending down, several and other body positions. Because of this I became my friend’s chauffeur.

I had several Dairy Queen gift cards from my birthday party and decided to treat her so she could relax when she got home and wouldn’t have to prepare a meal and worry about making a restricted move. It’s something one good friend does for another.

Two Gals and a Guy

Several of my best friends are ladies. Some are fellow writers and some are just long time friends. Saturday two ladies that I occasionally pal around with went to PNC Park for the Pirate baseball game. The Cincinnati Red Sox were playing the Pirates. The day was warm and sunny; great weather to be entrenched in those narrow blue stadium seats to watch the game. As usual, we arrived early to avoid as much of the traffic as we could, traveling into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from the Donegal area. The traffic was light until the expected moderate traffic congestion that appears on the approach to the Squirrel Hill Tunnel. The tunnel is a bottleneck that funnels so many ingresses from the east into Pittsburgh.

I’m now wearing a 30 day holter monitor to evaluate my irregular heart beat. I brought the doctor’s order for it, because my friend has a pain stimulator and she’s not permitted to pass through the electronic scan at PNC Park’s entrance. I thought the same might be true for my monitor. We entered from the gate that avoided the scan. The crew still searched our bags when we were admitted and quickly passed through.

We found our seats and settled in them behind the third base line. The sun filled the stadium and was quite warm. Pirate and Red Sox fans were equally distributed in the seats around us. As the innings progressed and the score see-sawed back and forth, the chatter two rows behind us began to grate on my nerves. Beer befuddled brains loosened their tongues. A constant argumentative babble flowed. Three young men seemed to ignore the game and they bickered as to who should have been entered into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Names were bandied about, argued, then reintroduced. Words became slurred and the pronunciation of the letter S soon became the letter Z.

About the seventh inning I’d had enough. I stood, turned around and said, “Will you guys shut up. People want to enjoy the game.” One smart mouth cupped his ear and said, “What did you say. I can’t hear you.” But they did settle slightly and talked a bit more quietly.

All in all, it was a nice outing; however blowing my top ruined my resolution. I’ve been saying for several years, “If I’m grumpy, I don’t leave home. No one wants to deal with a grumpy old man,” but I wasn’t grumpy when I left home, I was prodded into that frame of mind, slowly and unavoidably.

So Quickly

This year’s winter weather seemed to hang on like a nagging injury. One day types of weather felt nicer, then the next it almost incapacitated me. I am thankful I no longer have to force myself out to face the storms to go to work. The constant teasing of milder days interspaced with the cold snowy days became a fickle menu of days. Often I was even unable to decide the proper wardrobe to wear, especially if I planned to be gone most of the day. Decisions for dressing was no problem if I stayed at home, flannel jammy bottoms, long-sleeved shirt or sweatshirt hoodies, and thick wool socks.

Winter was unusual this year, because although there was some snow, it didn’t come in stormy drifting clusters, it came in dribs and drabs. I only used my snow blower once to clear my driveway. Usually a push broom and a snow shovel was all that was necessary.

What I found was the most wearing on me was the wind. When the temperatures dropped, it seemed to be an open invitation for the winds to hurtle down from our neighbors to the north. I have friends in Canada and don’t want to complain, but I wish you guys would shut the refrigerator door and not leave it open so often.

The time seemed to drag through those dark frigid winter months. It seemed like spring would never arrive. March, my birth month seemed to drag on interminably. The juxtaposition of cold and mild weather teased me to think old Man Winter had finally capitulated beating a hasty retreat, he would return with force, saying, “Got’cha.”

Robins returned very early this year. I heard them singing, but didn’t see a single one until several weeks later. My miniature daffodils managed to peek above the dried autumn leaves that had accumulated in my flowerbed and a few bright blue crocuses shyly popped up. The grass has started to turn green.

It seems like spring has finally arrived quickly lightening my winter blues and making me feel more lighthearted. Now If only I can get my winter weary body to cooperate, I will start my outside clean-up chores.

Playing Games

Many of my most pleasant memories go back to my youth when school, home chores, and playing games were at the center of my world. Outside games of hide n’ seek, kick the can, dodge ball, red Rover, football, and even skinny dipping after a long game of summer softball to cool off were my pastimes. I enjoyed snow ball fights and sledding in the winter, games of war by throwing green apples, or playing king of the mountain as the weather warmed. Swinging on ropes and falling into of hay in the barn or grabbing onto grapevines and arcing over the stream before letting go and dropping into the water.

Many games were played indoors, but some were designed by grandmothers to keep us busy when it was raining, like button, button, who’s got the button or the card games of solitaire or war. The games that made the most impression were the games we played by the light of an oil lamp, gathered around my grandmother Rebecca Miner’s large oak dining table. These game nights occurred when our electricity went out for extended periods.

My parent’s house needed electricity to keep the heat from the coal furnace pumped through the house. The furnace was warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing, but Grandma had a wood-fired cooking stove and a coal furnace that kept her house toasty. Our family stayed with her because she had an electric water pump that was useless and needed people to carry water from the springhouse. It was mutually beneficial arrangement for both.

Old board games were pulled out to fill the day between hauling water or fetching wood for the stove. Pollyanna, Parcheesi, but my Grandma’s favorite game to play was dominoes. Muggins dominoes was most often her choice. Looking back, I believe it was a way for her to underhandedly keep our math skills sharp. Of course it was Grandma who kept score using a pencil stub and writing on the back of a used envelope, there would be no wasting a sheet of tablet paper.

I remember that she would start to cook one of her delicious meals. I believe she would use the aroma to draw our attention away from the games. I won’t say she cheated, but she used every advantage she could think of to win. Although she only had schooling through the 4th grade, she was a talented and intelligent woman. I’ve shared many stories of her creativeness many times.

Plots, Subplots, and Red Herrings

Work on my next Tommy Two Shoes Mystery has been going excruciatingly slow. I was somewhat burned out after completing my other four books. I took a hiatus from Tommy and resurrected two others that had been trapped in my files, thinking I couldn’t retrieve them. With the help from the Mt. Pleasant Library stall and my computer repair men I was able to open them to review and to revise.

I’m glad that I was forced to wait to publish them. They stank. I’ve learned so very much since then. After rewriting them, I think they are very good. The first rewrite is called The Walls Came Tumbling Down. It fictionally fills in the blanks of how Rahab the harlot from Jericho falls in love and marries a Jewish enemy. She is named in the lineage of David the King and Jesus.

The second book called Addie is a fictional novel set in the 1940s. It is local and the story line runs from Confluence, Pennsylvania to Mt. Pleasant. A woman who had never known what the word love meant met and began to care for an orphan. When he was taken away by the police, she was at a loss as to what to do.

I am now back to work on the next Tommy Two Shoes Mystery. This one may be a full length novel and not the series of mysteries, but it will have several mysteries wrapped into one cohesive mystery. There are several mysteries that fold into each other with overlapping plots and subplots. I may be including a few rabbit trails just to make things more interesting.

Tommy, Cora, Anna, little Johnny, and many of the previous characters will be revisiting Tommy as well as several new people and “movie stars.” Tommy is hired by a movie production company to be liaison between the city of Pittsburgh, its citizens, and the movie company to facilitate the shoots with minimal interruption to Pittsburgh. Vera and her café, Ed her husband, and they will be introducing a new character to the series…in about seven months.

The writing is slow for me, trying to integrate each detail to fit the story and align them with past facts. Who knows, the movie just may make a real killing.