'Possum Patch: Therapy

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Therapy

Dear Sister,

I did mention didn’t I that they are doing therapy on my shoulder and knee injured in that run-a-way shopping cart attack in May?

I was pretty nervous about it but found the first session very reassuring. The therapist was just the cutest thing. After being tenderly analyzed and gently led into the least painful manipulations possible by this really cute therapist, I decided therapy wasn’t so bad. Except for his being married and the 40-year age difference I think we could have developed a relationship but I decided against it.

During the process Chris, (the really cute therapist) chatted away about me and my torn rotator cuff and me and my tendons and me and my pain and suffering and (well, you can see why it was of such interest to ME). And like I said, he was very cute.

I soon took my cue from the other therapy recipients sprinkled in among the mechanical contraptions that crowded the room and learned not to shriek and by the end of the first session had the pitiful face contortions and mumbly groans down pat. Chris said I was “great” and “doing very well” and it was perfectly obvious that no other patient had EVER been so great or done so well.

So far so good.

The second session was disappointing at first in that Chris had abandoned me and put me in the care of Barbara, a plump, friendly person who was very good to talk to. We continued the conversation about me and my torn rotator cuff and me and my tendons and me and my pain and suffering and (well, you can see why it was so interesting).

Over the next three weeks two more therapists continued to monitor my walk toward total rotator cuff health and kept up the chit chat about..you guessed it.. me and my torn rotator cuff and me and my tendons and me and my pain and suffering and by now I am sick and tired of my torn rotator cuff and tired of not being able to do what I want to do and totally tired of therapy eating up all that time..it was taking entirely too much time..so changed my appointments to 8:00 am instead of the original 10:30 that seemed to just eat up a whole morning.

Thursday was my first 8:00 am and I felt unwell. I remembered why the original 10:30 was decided upon. Although I am still at my best early in the day, my best is not what it used to be and early in the day is not as early as it used to be. 10 a.m. seems to be the high-water mark anymore.

On top of that I had a totally new therapist and she was very brisk, studied my chart, held the little right angle yard stick up to my shoulder and announced that I “was not doing well” and that I “had not improved much at all bilaterally” etc. I was filled with dismay. I was stunned. She never mentioned a thing about how great I was or how well I was doing.

She kept talking about Dr. Lingenfelter, the bone and joint man who ordered the therapy, and how he was “not going to be happy” . Didn’t she know we weren’t supposed to be talking about Dr. Lingenfelter and whether he was happy or not? Didn’t she know we were supposed to be talking about me and my torn rotator cuff and me and my tendons and…well you remember..

Anyway, she wound up devising this torture exercize that was supposed to make up for my earlier dereliction and while I was laying on their little hard couch doing my best to get my left hand behind my head and back ten times, my peripheral vision caught a glimpse of some very nice man legs, smooth and tanned, just hairy enough to be interesting with a medical boot on one foot.

I rested from my behind-the-head thing long enough to check out this really slim guy with beautiful white hair. Except for the medical boot he looked perfectly healthy and mighty fine. It was his first therapy session so Chris took him through the same procedure he had with me. That Traitor. He asked him all about his stupid foot injury and talked about how well he had done and so on. It sounded very familiar if you know what I mean.

I listened to the guy’s story and how he had been injured and what his life style was. A retired Geography professor, he had a place at Lake Viking and a place at Orlando and a small farm somewhere. He had almost fell off the roof of his place in Orlando two months ago while trying to fix some kind of communication device up there.

The only thing that saved him was catching his foot on a rung of the ladder and although this was hard on the cartussel bone in his foot, (I’m not too good at medical terms) it did spare his head and I thought he should have been grateful enough to leave it at that but here he was, eating up my therapists time.

Chris asked him how active he was and he talked far too long about his swimming pool and his boat at the lake and scuba diving at Orlando and his golf game and the small business he ran to “keep busy”.. I hated his guts.

Yes, I hated his guts. How in the world could anyone compete with a tale like that? Getting run down by a shopping cart is in no way comparable to dangling dangerously from the roof of an Orlando mansion. The closest thing I get to scuba diving is when I can’t get the shower to turn off. My version of golf is the stray rocks that careen off the mower blade.

Yes, I hated his guts and therapy is not going well.

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A Bedtime Story for Chickens

Once upon a time there was a little red hen. Each morning she woke early and left the special chicken house and worked hard scratching all day and laid very nice eggs in the special nest in the special house for chickens. But she had one bad habit. She did not like to go to bed at Chicken Bedtime with the other chickens. One morning she did not wake early. She did not wake at all. Fluffy red feathers blew in the breeze beneath the apple tree where the racoon liked to perch at night.

The Moral of the Story is: Go to bed when you're supposed to.

Memoirs

These are my memories and even though others have their own, perhaps contradictory, memories these are mine.

Memoirs Chapter 1

Our House

Unlike many people, I spent my childhood in the same house in which I was born. My childhood was encompassed by the sameness of each room, the never-changing porches, ragged lawns and roughly wooded acres and the multiplicity of a neighborhood comprised of families with names that told the history of the Midwest without even trying.

As an adult I’ve been fascinated by those old names: West, Woods, Rogers, Yates, Mathews, Alexander, Shields, Faucett and of course ours, descendents of the Lewis’s, Allens, Bakers and McDonalds, all reaching back to the English and Scots Irish Kentucky and Tennessee immigrations of the very early 1800s.

The other names were newer, German or Irish and with German and Irish mores: Rittermeir, Rintschler, Stock, (Dad’s name), Ostertag, McGosker, Kirkpatrick, O’Dell, Coopersmith, Mylars.

Many of these German and Irish families, fleeing hunger and conscription, lured by land and wages, came a decade or two later in the 19^th century during and shortly after the building of the railroads and stayed to build the Midwest after the end of the Civil War.

Dad built most of our house. I understand it was just two small rooms sitting on a brushy five acre lot at the edge of a dirt road when Dad, Mom and my six older siblings moved in. He later bought an adjacent forty acres.

He dug a basement, added two upstairs rooms and two downstairs rooms and a porch at the back. The path from the back porch wound down past the walnut tree and through the tall weeds to the out house. A very large family of spiders owned one whole corner of the outhouse so I never sat on that side.

Dad had a lot of help from friends that worked with him as laborers at different building sites that evidently had a lot of “left overs.” His friends were generous fellows and made steady contributions from those sites in the form of left over buckets of nails, left over gravel, left over lumber and so forth. The day the guy came with the concrete truck with the left over concrete for the basement floor was a banner day. Thank heavens for left overs because we really needed the room.

I can just barely remember a pot bellied stove into which went old newspapers, little sticks of wood and sometimes bigger chunks of wood or a scuttle of coal. Dad’s big heavy coffee pot sat on the stove top and the smell of the coffee mixed with the smell of the burning wood and the steam from the coffee made the rooms seem a lot warmer than they were.

Before long the house was modernized even further and a monstrous coal stove taller than either of my parents lurked just under the basement

stairs. Heat rose into the house through a large grate in the living room.

A few steps away from the furnace was the coal bin accessed through a low basement window that opened onto the driveway. The coal truck would be backed down the drive and the driver, usually a black man, would shovel the coal by hand through the window.

Many people say that they can’t remember anything before they were four or five years old and I don’t know why. I remember a great deal before that. They say people remember intense experiences and that is probably true.

My first actual memory was of standing, crying in my crib, gripping the top rails, dressed in a little white flannel gown that tied at the back of the neck, and being very scared. It was bedtime and my crib was in my parents’ room. Mother came to me and lay me down and pinned the blanket to the bottom sheet on each side of me so I would not get uncovered in the night and told me, “Shhh”.

Soon after that my bed was moved into what later became the bathroom. It was a tiny room that opened off of my parents’ room with just enough room for my crib to fit along one wall. This was the room in which I slept during the Chicken Wars.

We had no well and water was saved from rain or hauled in I guess but stored in the cistern near the back porch. It had a large square concrete top with a smaller concrete square that could be moved to check the level of the water and to remove anything unsavory. Two cinder blocks placed on this cap kept it in place.

Frogs and toads lived in the inside rim of the cistern and Daddy said they never hurt anything but the snake he found once had to be removed. He did not like snakes.

During the Chicken Wars of my infancy me and my brother, just a couple of years older than I, would run to the concrete of the cistern top to evade the old Banty rooster. The rooster was very protective of his hens but the hens always came to people expecting to be fed. It was a no-win situation for us.

Even though we were forbidden to hurt the old rooster my brother always fought back hard, throwing dirt clods and sticks and even once throwing a pan of water on him that had been set out for the dog but we always lost and wound up high tailing it for the cistern top.

There we would wait until either someone came to rescue us or the old rooster forgot we were there and wandered off.

My nightmares at that time always involved that wretched rooster and the safety of the cistern.

My worst rooster nightmare was probably my last as it occurred during one of my parents’ weekly Pinochle game and I was taken up to sit on Mom’s lap and be made over by Aunt Opal and Uncle Frank and the Mylars from next door who had been fortunate or smart enough to leave their kids at home.

And Daddy took noisy little sips of coffee from his saucer and clicked his false teeth at me, making the bottom ones slide almost out and it was always the best of jokes although Mom found the saucer sipping thing and the clicking teeth disgusting.

On Saturday nights we, that is the family, went to Nelsons Tavern where Mom and Dad and sometimes my older siblings and their friends would dance to the juke box and Dad would drink how ever much beer he could afford, generally one or two, and Mom would drink Coca Cola out of cool green bottles, slowly so it would last.

Mostly they danced with each other but occasionally a careful ritual would transpire. During a lull when they were not dancing, someone might come to our table and ask Dad if it was alright if he asked his wife to dance and Dad would always say they could and they would ask Mom to dance and she would leave her Coca Cola to dance. She particularly loved the Polka and the Schottische.

Although both Dad and Mom loved music and loved to dance, they did not dance well together. Mother, a very reserved person, danced rather stiffly and with considerable rigidity. Watching them was a little like watching a happy bee cavorting around an upright zinnia blossom. The bee is busy but the zinnia never quite participates.

Daddy said she danced like she had a poker up her butt but I don’t think he ever said it to her face.

And sometimes Dad would turn to Mom and ask if she cared if he danced with so and so and Mom would say no, she didn’t care and Dad would do the ritual. He would go to the table of the lady with whom he wished to dance and he would ask her husband if he would mind if he asked his wife to dance. Dad would turn to the lady and ask her if she would like to dance and off they would go.

A request was seldom refused within reason. But the ritual was always observed. No man approached another person’s wife without that permission. It made for the most orderly and friendly of situations wherein everybody could have a great time and the risk of misunderstandings was minimal.

Up to the time I got bored with party life and was considered old enough to be left at home with the bigger kids, I had lots of partners myself. Johnny Spoons, known for keeping time to the juke box by rapping out the beat with two spoons held between a thumb and two fingers, often partnered me to the poignant strains of Good Night Irene or Sentimental Journey but we both liked the polkas better. Even though he was very old and because of an injury, unable to keep up with polka steps, he seemed to enjoy it.

Shorty, however, was my favorite partner, partly because he wasn’t much taller than I was as a four year old. Shorty wasn’t really short but he too had been injured and was unable to stand erect. This meant we could pretty much look each other in the eye and Shorty’s eyes were always merry and happy.

Sometimes he would stand me up on the bar and everyone would clap and holler and I would do my four-year-old version of the hootchy cootchy to the music of the Sabre Dance and be rewarded with a bag of chips and an orange Nehi soda.

But I tired of the party life. I didn’t like sleeping on a pile of coats on a hard table and was finally allowed to stay home. I’m the only person I know who gave up the bar scene at such a tender age.

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Memoirs Chapter 2:

A Different Kind of Mother

Our mother was not like other mothers. She was hard to love and harder to like. Independent and unbending, she had few friends and regarded most of the world, including her children, who mostly reciprocated her lack of natural affection, as unworthy of her interest.

She was meticulous about her person and of a late evening, winter and summer, in those days before indoor plumbing, we were all ordered to bed and she began her bath.

The night I, having slipped quietly downstairs on some forgotten errand, saw Mother at her bath changed her forever for me.

Pale and naked in the moonlight from the window above the sink and its small pan of hot water, her body gleamed like the inside of a sea shell, cool and incandescent. The flesh of her breasts, flattened by the needs of seven infants, was only a shadow against her upper body and the smooth roundness of her abdomen shone starkly white in the silverness of the window’s moonlight.

The scent of her bath soap and the vinegar she used to rinse her once-red hair filled the room.

Her very luminescence, in the dark kitchen of our home that night, seemed out of place and time,..a visitor from some powerful other world that valued more a stricter code..a cooler hand and heart..that did not belong here with us and certainly not to us. The hot winds and dry suns of the Midwest were anathema to such a one.

Before me was a person meant for harsh and vicious winters and the pale meagerly glint of a Celtic summer. Such a one required friends more fast and foes more ferocious than the weak genetic pool she was stuck with.

Of course I could not come anywhere near verbalizing these thoughts at the time, even to myself, but the experience was a powerful one and it stayed with me to be pondered upon and sorted out as facts came later, drifting into my life as our lives unfolded.

'Possum Patch

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Therapy

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