and unable to even wheeze out a distress call to my Mom. But little brother Booger would jump up and run into my parents room, (without knocking I’m afraid…oh well!) yelling, “HE’S DYING, HE’S DYING!” My mother would come in and calm me down and help me breath slower till it was just a low, constant rasp in my lungs and throat. She’d hook up the vaporizer and put it next to my bed with Vics Vaporub in it and for good measure she’d rub about a cup of it on my chest and then put a white t-shirt on so it wouldn’t get all over the sheets. By then I would feel pretty good and sleep was never far away. Someday when my dear sainted Mother has gone to her “Just Reward,” as we sometimes call it in the South, I will remember those times (and I will probably cry a little, and if my children see me, I’ll tell ‘em about Ole Yeller…all men are allowed to cry about Ole Yeller! Just the best movie ever made is all!). So Summer was a long time for all of us. I must offer my condolences to the children of today who will be getting back to the old schoolyard about the middle of August I understand. The bad part of it (for you), is that all fun stuff stops about two weeks before the first day of school. No family takes their vacation in the few weeks leading up to school. So that leaves the end of June or July for Harry Potter World or the Magic Kingdom (days so hot and crowded a family of four can drink up a mortgage payment in $8 bottles of water before lunch!). So there is a five week period for any out of town trips. And why? Well you have to go “SCHOOL CLOTHES SHOPPING,” for what I never could figure out. And if we came home with anything that I remotely liked I couldn’t wear it yet because they were “SCHOOL CLOTHES.” It seemed to me that the jeans and sneakers I wore all summer would be just fine at school if I’d just let my mother wash them on occasion. For example... After my brother and I swam in a muddy creek one hot summer day, we came home calling ourselves “mud monsters” and my mother was not amused! She made us strip our clothes off right there in the backyard and she hosed us down “buck naked.” I SWEAR SHE DID! We had to stand there shivering with that cold well water on us and we had to hose “each other’s clothes” till the mud was off. Before we could use the towels she dangled in front of us we had to, again, hang “each other’s clothes”, (there was some lesson there-she went to Duke you know-but it flew over MY head!). The next morning we had to go and “fetch (a good Southern word) EACH OTHER’S CLOTHES” off the line and bring them into the laundry room. They felt a little stiff and when I turned toward Booger he had taken my underwear and jeans and stood them up in the corner like a little invisible man! We howled and spent the next twenty minutes positioning the stiff clothes in different places around the house, sick and throwing up with laughter! Ah…Summer. Nowadays, kids have a lot more stuff to do in the summer, though. Tennis lessons, golf lessons, art classes, Math Club (just kidding), Vacation Bible School. Oh, we had Vacation Bible School, but it didn’t have a catchy name, like “Ninja Turtles Awesome Trek to Jesus Land” or anything that even tried to be cool. For us Vacation Bible School was poster board, white paste glue, pipe cleaners and stale Graham Crackers. There were no DVD’s of course. We had “filmstrips” of the Holy Land shown through the “filmstrip projector” on a sheet. We had David and Goliath coloring books but just for the junior highs, (too much violence for the little ones!). We would go the cemetery and weed the tombstones, pick up litter, you know, character building stuff like that! The best activity ever was a field trip to the YMCA in the big city to an “indoor pool”. I was really excited because the girls were going along, too! You see, in my day, boys would swim in the same mud hole together but the girls didn’t swim with us at all. We used to think that every little noise was some girl sneaking up to peek at us in our underwear, but it was always just squirrels getting the acorns. So we got to the YMCA and changed in the locker room. We wrapped our towels around us and eased nervously out to the pool. And there they were....local girls in bathing suits, (one piece bathing suits of course, but backless and not a little skirt on any of them, racy women!) We decided to all run and jump in beside them with eight cannonballs and instantly drench them where they stood giggling. (We were some classy dudes!) Well I leapt high, (as high as a little fat boy could and hit the water in incredible cannonball form. In a thunderclap I realized this was no shallow creek in the woods but eight lethal feet of poisonous chlorine water. Before I could close my mouth I swallowed about a quart of the foul brew and popped up gasping for breathe, (great, I thought in a millisecond, I’m allergic to red dirt and pool water!). I flailed and flopped to the edge of the pool and proceeded to vomit, throw up, regurgitate (sounds a little better), spewing out of my mouth, nostril and “ears” it seemed that water (and my breakfast) onto sweet delicate feet of those girls standing by the edge of the pool. There were no longer impressed by our cannonball prowess! So make the best of your summer, it won’t last long and someday, like me, you will reminisce about the good ole days, but for you it will be selfies at the beach and Twittering that makes you throw up with laughter. Go get with it!!!! volume 8
old city life
Issue 8
11