My memories of my childhood and even later, some deep into adulthood, are few and fuzzy. There are so few that are sharp, fewer still that I can be sure are accurate. I don't know whether any of the following are truly sharp or accurate. But they are in my head somewhere, insisting on spilling onto the page.
Ice Cream
I remember helping make ice cream in the back yard one day, using a hand-crank freezer. Our preacher (a young Methodist minister) was visiting [this was when I was very young and before I decided that church was a load of ya-ya-goop). Being the five or six year old that I was, I was bouncing off the walls and climbing trees. The preacher decided it would be fun to tickle me as I was hanging upside down from a large limb. And when he did that, I fell. It couldn't have been too bad, but vaguely remember crying and knowing the preacher was very concerned about whether he'd caused me to break something. I believe his last name was Lewis. It's odd what the memory drags out of the mud sometimes.
Cut Lip
Another memory is from my young absurdhood, when I was a bad-ass high schooler. Some friends and I went out for a weekend bash of beer-drinking. I got hammered on lager beer and somehow ended up getting into a fist-fight with a friend while the group of five or six of us were getting gas. He belted me in the face and I bled profusely all over my shirt. We went to the home of one of our friends, where a girfriend's mother nursed my face but couldn't remove the blood from my shirt. I went home later and claimed I had tripped over a speaker wire at a drive-in movie. My mother accepted it, but I knew she knew I was lying.
The Bully
Yet another time my mother didn't buy my innocence for a minute when a kid accused me, via his father, of beating him up. The kid couldn't walk and I was accused of being the reason. The fact was that I had bullied the little bastard, but had not hurt his foot...he had stepped on a nail. But he was getting back at me for being a purebred prick. And so the kid's father spoke to my mother on the phone and threatened to sue my parents. My mom refused to let me go to the Buccaneer Days parade and carnival because she believed I had beat the kid up. I deserved the treatment, despite the fact that it was meted out for invalid reasons. I was the sort of kid that, today, I would forcefully euthanise if given the opportunity to escape prosecution.
Gay Friend
My first exposure to a gay person (to my knowledge) was while I was in high school when I developed a friendship with a guy, probably 8-10 years older than I, who taught at the local college. He recognized that I was heterosexual, so there was never anything between us except friendship. I, of course, had no idea for at least a year or two that he was gay. He was an Hispanic guy whose primary interest was in English literature (he taught English and literature). It was probably because of my friendship with him that I developed such an affinity for literature (that, and the fact that my mother was an English teacher). And it was probably my friendship with him that enabled me to escape the normal homophobia of life in Corpus Christi in the early 1970s. For reasons I don't still don't understand, over the years he stopped returning my phone calls; we haven't spoken in 20 years or more. He really did understand I was not gay and I am pretty sure he understood we were simply friends.
Diabetic Episode
My mother was diabetic. One time, when I was in elementary or the very early years of junior high school, not long after visiting our family doctor and being given a prescription for a pill-form drug called diabenese, she awoke one morning unable to move. She simply made noises, loud noises. She was conscious, but could not move or communicate. My father called the doctor, who had an ambulance sent to the house. We had a dog named Buck who went apeshit as the ambulance attendants moved my mother on a gurney to the ambulance to take her to the hospital. It scared the shit out of me, both her being taken to the hospital and the dog trying to kill the ambulance attendants. I had to go to school that day, even though my mother was taken to the hospital. I was pissed and scared and so utterly in the dark about what was happening. That was a very, very scary day. The problem was that the doctor had prescribed a dose that was too much.
Mastectomy
On the morning that my wife had her mastectomy folloowing the diagnosis of breast cancer, I completely fell apart. I was not the stoic husband. When the doctor came out say the surgery was successful...but...I fell apart. He said the cancer appeared to have spread to the lymph nodes and she would need to undergo extensive chemo-therapy if she was to have a chance of survival. I was just unable to keep any semblance of composure. I came apart. My sister-in-law was with me and one of my sisters was easily available by phone and, between the two of them, they kept me from falling into an abyss from which there would have been no escape. So many fragments of my memories surrounding this awful experience are too fuzzy to recall, but that after-surgery moment is so clear it takes my breath away whenever I think o it.
Why do these memories flood back somtimes? I don't know. They just do.
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