-
Happy Birthday, Grandma
My maternal grandmother, Emma Bell Lane, was the last baby born to David W. and Callie Sawyer Lane in Crawfordsville, Arkansas, on February 9, 1898. She was baby sister to Elmer and Frankie. She would be 121 years old today, and my great grandmother, her mother, passed 119 years ago yesterday and was buried the next, on my grandmother’s second birthday. The following letter was handwritten by her father, my great grandfather, to his sister and brother-in-law, T.S. (Tom) and Minerva (Minnie) Frizzell, during a devastating period in his life. I have left spelling and punctuation as accurate and true to his hand as possible: Crawfordville Ark 3=11=1900 Dear Sister.…
-
Hypothermia on the Chilkoot
This week’s extreme temperatures had most of the nation under seige. Fears of frostbite and hypothermia were very real and hearing the word “hypothermia” took me to another season and time when winter temperatures weren’t necessary to be affected by hypothermia. It was summer in southeast Alaska, so the nights were cold and the days were absolute perfection–as long as lots of sunshine isn’t mandatory for your mental health. Three days in a row were the most I saw the sun shine over the three months I made it my home. I had just spent three months of an environmental education internship in northern Minnesota and decided to travel with backpack…
-
PEE-YEW!
Each time the stench wafted up my nose in an intermittent wave, I furtively sniffed around me. It had to be me. I was the only one sitting on that end of the couch. Once, twice . . . my nose quickly scanned each armpit as I reached up into a yawn or pretended to pull my hair back. My alarm didn’t go off, so arriving at my cousin’s house late for brunch was a given. There was no time to shower, pick out clothes, or put makeup on. I hurriedly scrubbed a toothbrush around in my mouth, put clothes on from the night before, and combed my hair…
-
One Tiny Breath
The baby was battered black and blue and thrown on a table for dead. My mother always said thrown, but it must have been for effect; she wasn’t even there. Well, she was in the room, but she still wasn’t all there. My mother had been so heavily sedated, she missed all the excitement. When she woke two days later, she felt like she’d been hit by a Mack truck. The story was pieced together for her. She remembered going to Lightner Hospital to give birth to her second baby. The baby was not positioned correctly and was coming arm first. Many doctors and nurses were called to assist and at one point my father…
-
Win Big at the Raffel
Looking out the superintendent’s office window, our science teacher asked me how to spell raffle. Being a sucker for spelling, I spelled it–r-a-f-f-l-e. He smiled wryly and said, “That’s what I thought–it’s misspelled on the marquee outside.” Attempting to protect the school’s image (and let’s face it–I’d probably go into your yard and change a “For Sell” to “For Sale” sign or climb a billboard with a bucket of paint if it were misspelled), I went out to transpose the letters. The sign had been up for days. The message was announcing a softball tournament fundraiser and “raffel” for a former student who’d had a horrific motorcycle accident. The softball…
-
What’s Your Addiction Affliction?
The TV show My Strange Addiction has certainly brought a lot of bizarre repetitive behaviors to light. I don’t believe mine has specifically been included in their menu of episodes, and since they haven’t called me to be featured on the show, maybe mine isn’t quite as bizarre as my friends and I think. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Model of Mental Disorders), the Bible of mental disorders, the authoritative voice of health care professionals, has been updated to include behavioral addictions like compulsive gambling, stealing, buying, and sexual addictions, along with the nine more familiar substance use addictions. The reason for this is both philosophical and medical because there…
-
Sexy L’Eggs
There are legs and a baton in this picture–it is hard to decipher which are which. Some adolescents try desperately to lose weight; I tried desperately to gain weight. Throughout junior high and high school, I despised wearing shorts and wanted to disappear every time we had to change clothes in the locker room. Name-calling and skinny jokes took their toll on any self-esteem not already destroyed by growing up in an alcoholic household. But the pity party ends there, because as the old adage goes, “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” It is also true that it will finally either fuel a sense of humor in you or…
-
Floss . . . Never Leave Home Without It
Chances are, if you have teeth in your head, you are going to need to floss during a really inconvenient time. You may come to regret the rash decisions you feel necessary to get the job done. Such was the night of a very public Christmas party in a local restaurant’s banquet room. It was a dress-up affair and the guests were from every walk of life. We were eating usual banquet fare: baked chicken, steamed broccoli, fried apples, salad. When a piece of broccoli became lodged in the center of my bottom teeth, I very calmly and discreetly tried to unhinge it by using my tongue of steel, as…
-
A Visit from Lex
When I was four, I had my first paranormal experience. I didn’t find it unusual at all, since the spirit sitting in front of me, talking to me, was someone I knew and loved. It wasn’t scary or traumatic and I can’t say it influenced my life in any way other than to comfort me the night it happened and the next days to follow. Over the years, I’ve had myriad “spiritual” occurrences. They did not continue through my childhood or adolescence, but interestingly enough, began again the first time I attended the church I went to as a child. Jim and I felt it was time to raise our…
-
Work ‘n Roll
Foreshadowing was there from the beginning. About ten years ago, a new Asian buffet was getting ready to open in a nearby town and the humongous bright yellow sign out front boasted “Work ’n Roll”, instead of “Wok ’n Roll”. That should have been our first clue. It was unwittingly being established as either a place of hard labor, a comedy club, or both. And we were about to find out. After eating at the new restaurant, I felt like we ripped the place off–maybe we should have gone to the cashier and insisted we pay more money. For the entertainment. First, our son warmed us up by opening for…
