Of Mice and Dad, The Tail of the Tale

^{You got here half way through the tail, uh, tale. For the first part, click here.}

^{Dad: "Now here's what we're going to do..."}

Seems mice get territorial when cooped up seventy-five to a cage and begin to eat the newborn offspring of competing mouse clans. 

We kids never saw them do it, but dad did.
 
It must’ve happened as soon as each baby was popped out, dispensed like PEZ into the waiting jaws of a dominant marauding mouse lord.

The Great Mouse Experiment became a two-tiered teaching opportunity on a sociological level as well as biological. 

Population explodes, things get sketchy.  Take note.

“No problem,” announced dad, undaunted by the sheer surreal horror of it all. 

And the “Maternity Ward” cage was instituted.
 

New litters went there until everybody calmed down.

 ^Awww.

Jump cut:  One Saturday morning.  The Time of the Mice.
  
“AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!  John! JOHN! Come quick, come here!”

Mom screamed gloriously while running down the hall with her bathrobe flapping and her coffee and pink sponge rollers spraying everywhere.

“Whu? Huh?! What the hell?  What’s the MATTER, damn it?”

“There’s a snake on the counter!  S-S-SNAKE!”

He stomped to the laundry room in his saggy boxers grumpy from the “screaming mom catapult express” that launched his half conscious body out of bed.

He looked at the spot where she swore she saw a giant coppery red snake coiled on the counter top.
 
“It was staring at me!”

No snake. 

Just the busticated clothes dryer and the Big Mouse Cage.

But the door on the Maternity Ward cage was nudged up slightly, and three new mom-mice and their pups were gone.

“I swear to GOD there was a snake, John!!”

Mom was quickly triaged and diagnosed with anxiety of some sort and got the day off with cool cloths on her forehead.  She received a little help from dad’s doctor bag to calm down and she carried on nice long one-sided talks with us all day long from a reclining position as I recall…And dad finished fixing the clothes dryer.
   
We, the boys and I, were thoroughly blamed and shamed for allegedly leaving the Maternity Ward cage open.  We were tasked with tossing the entire house to find the missing mice.  They never reappeared.   Oh well.

Later that night, mom and dad returning from a dinner party greeted me in the foyer and were less than happy that I was still up and awake past the usual bedtime.   But they put a hold on discussion of the matter until they paid our sitter, Mrs. Jackson, and walked her to her car. 

I stood like a soldier in the foyer as I had been told to do, readying the half dozen or so excuses for defying the bedtime order.  What could I yank out of my butt before they came back in?

Improvisation is a skill, and I revelled in it.

Just wanting to watch “Bewitched” to prepare for Halloween wasn’t going to cut it, however. 

It had to be good. 

All kinds of things danced in my fevered little head:   Monsters , aliens, chocolate ice cream, the devil, growing pains in my legs, cat puke under the pillow  –  They were all at the tip of my tongue.

Never got to use a one of them.

Mom’s eyes, which started out squinty as she readied her signature barage of lambaste on me, suddenly bugged out on stalks like a cartoon. 

Her mouth twisted to a hissing fissure of fear:

“John, look above her head! ABOVE HER HEAD!!”

“DON’T. MOVE. DAMN. IT.”

Of course I moved. 

And above my head draped across a slat in the room divider was a thick full grown coppery red snake.  It was about four feet long with silky black diamond-shaped markings, a flicking tongue, and flaunted three distinct lumps at intervals through its body. 

It was sleeping off the mouse pup appetizer and the mice-mom meal of that very morning.  Mystery of missing maternity mice solved.

“I told you!  I TOLD you!  I TOLD YOU!”

“You sure did, Lois.  Now here’s what we’re going to do –“

Moving in slow motion like those guys on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, dad eased out the door to the garage to get a cage.  Check.

I was to watch the snake closely so it didn’t get away.  Check. 

The boys were to continue sleeping like they’d been knocked out by cough syrup. Check.

Mom was to go sit in the car.  Check. 

We worked out our tactics carefully. Dad was still sore and fragile from a painful slipped-disc surgery and we didn't want anything to mess with that.  So...

“Ok now, I’ll hold the cage, and you grab the snake behind its head and put it in. On my count…1-2-…”

“Um, dad?”

“What?”

“Question.”

“Oh, come on let’s go! “

“Is it poisonous?”

“No.”

“Ok.”

“1 – 2 – …”

“Dad?”

“WHAT?”

“How do you know?”

“It doesn’t have a triangular head.  No venom sacs.  Non-venomous.  I think.”

“Ok.”

“Ready? 1 -2 -…”

“What if I miss?”

“Run. Away.  Now let’s DO it.  – 1 – 2- 3 GO!”

I grabbed that snake behind its head and I felt it wake up.  It whipped its tail around my arm, the tip of it went right down the front of my nightgown and emerged out the right sleeve, thrashing.  The snake was beginning to constrict my arm! 

It felt like an Indian Burn expertly delivered by that bully David Dunmar at school. 

Dad was dancing around with the cage but I couldn’t put the snake in until it was unwound from my nightie. 

So I shifted the snakes head, all flickery tongued and glarey eyed, from my right to my left hand and pulled the thing out of my sleeve like  loose yarn on an unraveling  sweater.  I caught its flailing tail and shoved it and the head of the snake into the cage.  Its coils followed. Dad snapped it shut at the speed of light. 


“Ok.  Time for bed!”

   ^{Ssssooo, what's for brunch?}

Epilogue

“Dad?”

“Huh? Wha?  Son of a…“

“Sorry to wake you, but there’s another snake.”

“No there isn’t.  You’re just all excited about the one we caught.  Go to bed.”

“Yes.  There is. She was in my room. I heard her.”

“You know lying is a sin…?”

“Stack of Bibles.”

“Damn it, girl!  You better be telling the truth!”

“Here, want to see?”

“AAAAaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

And mom took her pillow, a generous shot of Wild Turkey (No. Really the whole bottle...) and slept in the car.

 ^{Family Wood Panel Roadster. Yes. We had one.}

Postscript:
 
Here’s how this happened as far as we were able to figure out. 

Dad’s clothes dryer project necessitated pulling the machine away from the wall leaving an open vent to the outside of the house. 

The rat snakes, which incidentally mate for life and travel in pairs, smelled the bonanza of mouse meals wafting by from the Great Mouse Experiment and just slithered in through the hole ecstatic, no doubt,  for the gourmet windfall.

They hit the least difficult target first:  The Mouse Maternity Ward.

Turns out red snakes (corn snakes if you are from Iowa)  make great pets, don’t bite unless provoked, are silky smooth to the touch and beautifully marked. 

We gave them to a nice young man, along with the mice.  To keep. 

Mom subsequently moved back into the house.

Stack of Bibles.




^{Photos:  Serious dad - personal collection, mouse mom & pups - U of Wisconsin-Madison, red snake - Eckosnake at Flickr creative commons, family roadster - www.classiccars.com}

Click on titles for more family stories starring Dr. Dad:

Dad Flipped a Coin for Mom and Lost

Dad Creates a Stir

Dad's Sunday Lesson or Jesus in My Stomach

Dad Builds Character

Dad's Mandatory Family Dinners
Of Mice and Dad
Of Mice and Dad:  The Tale of the Tail

Golf Course Gorts

Dad and the Purple Schwinn

And from Dr. Dad’s sister, Aunt Polly:

Georgia Justice Hostage Show: Aunt Polly’s Ordeal in Cordele

Of Mice and Dad

“Are you sure they are both females?”

“Yes of course I am! For God’s sake, Lois, I’m a doctor!”

Chris’s birthday gift that year was two white albino baby mice with pink eyes.  My dad was holding them up by their tails and peering seriously at their rear ends.   He nodded.

"Yes. Yes they are. Girls. Both."

They came in a perforated cardboard box nestled in cedar chips looking twitchy and silken and very cute with long pink tails.  

Chris really wanted a rat because he read somewhere that rats make the most loyal pets, will willingly ride on your shoulder, and are very smart too. But as children of the Great Depression, the notion of rat as pet was incomprehensible for both my parents.  Apparently they’d seen some as big as dogs in the day. 

So mice it was. And two seemed like a good number at the time.   

“They’ll keep each other company,” decreed dad.

From then on, the powder blue room with the bunk beds my brothers shared exuded the aroma not just of stinky boy times two, but also a heady miasma of mouse pee paired with tangy droppings notes underscored by a spicy hint of cedar.  Eau de Rodent.

Chris chose to keep his little buddies in his upper dresser drawer which was deep enough that they couldn’t climb out.  It was an open-faced mouse run complete with toilet paper rolls, an exercise wheel, various jingle toys, and the food/water array.

The cats were banished from the room for obvious reasons.

Sometimes their instincts were so overwhelming we could see their paws desperately reaching, claws outstretched, under the closed door just in case a stupid mouse named Dinner stumbled by.

 _{Chris. Third in the birth order.}

Chris was totally in charge of his mice, making sure they were fed and watered and suitably exercised.  That was the “you’re growing up now so you are responsible for your pets” milestone in action.  
Nobody mentioned that mice were nocturnal and the boys put up with quite a bit of squeaking, wheel-running, and cedar chip rustling all night long.   

Chris said that although it sounded sometimes like they were fighting, he was pretty sure they were just having mouse fun. 

Some fun.

“Hey, son, you may be over feeding your mice a little.  The one looks obese!” said dad at the dinner table one night.

“Aw dad, it’s just hungrier than the other one.”

And, it turns out, for good reason.

Very soon thereafter, we were treated to an adorable mouse nativity scene with four pink wriggly babies attached to MamaMouse (who looked pissed by the way) with PapaMouse looking on proudly.

Mom and dad locked eyes for a minute and telepathically "had words" before composing their faces and smiling at us.

“Well, this is great.  We now have an opportunity to study the reproductive habits of mice.”
And did we ever. 

Dad bought two more mice, non-albino with brown spots and black eyes, to vary the mouse gene pool in our experiment.

And off they went. 

Right out of the gate there were two litters of pups, then four, the eight.  Dad built a large mesh cage for the burgeoning population, moved it to the laundry area of the house, and created a log book documenting the various genetic legacies each litter manifested. 

He pontificated at the dinner table about recessive genes and Mendel’s peas and gestational periods and even discussed the mating ritual (sex) to a certain degree. 

Astonishingly, Jon and Chris were immune from getting whooped when they were caught excitedly viewing the action in the cage. 

“Look, he’s doing it!"

" Eewww!"

"Holy crap that was quick. Look, he’s doing that other one!"

"He’s Mighty Mouse!"

"Did you see the size of his equipment? I want to be just like him!”

We were getting schooled right in the face. Our grades in Science were rising up the charts with a bullet to A+.  Our teachers, like  (Insert Nun's Name Here), were actually jovial and not calling for parent's conferences every other day.  Life was good.

But, as with everything, it’s all fun and games until somebody eats the babies. 

What  th'?

(To be continued...)



_{photos:
1 fat 1 Skinny - U.S. Government Public Domain.  Pile 'o mices - howtogetridofmice.com.  Chris - Personal photo collection. Mighty Mouse from Bakshi-Hyde Ventures, Mighty Mouse The New Adventure}

Click on titles for more family stories starring Dr. Dad:

Dad Flipped a Coin for Mom and Lost

Dad Creates a Stir

Dad's Sunday Lesson or Jesus in My Stomach

Dad Builds Character

Dad's Mandatory Family Dinners
Of Mice and Dad
Of Mice and Dad:  The Tale of the Tail

Golf Course Gorts

Dad and the Purple Schwinn

And from Dr. Dad’s sister, Aunt Polly:

Georgia Justice Hostage Show: Aunt Polly’s Ordeal in Cordele

Dad's Mandatory Family Dinners

This post received an Editor's Pick and a Cover from Open Salon July 21, 2010

^{Yes.  It's us.  And a cat.}

“Get in here and eat this!” 

Mom usually let half the civilized world know that she had slaved away over a hot stove to provide grub for our weekday night ritual of MANDATORY FAMILY DINNER. 

The clash of silverware and crockery being slammed around usually punctuated her general well-established loathing for cooking, but we always ate well.

“Put on a damn shirt, hang up the damn phone, put the damn basketball away and let’s go,” said dad after his nightly bourbon and water and Huntley-Brinkley.  

It was like herding cats to break us away from our oh-so-important kid activities for a meal, and dad cracked the whip buckaroo-style when he needed to.   No shirt, no vittles was the rule.  Bare feet were ok though. 

We never wore shoes.

Every “school night” my little brothers and I would troop into the chic burnt orange and avocado colored kitchen to sit at the FAMILY TABLE that I had previously set with plates, glasses full of milk and utensils. 

We each had our places and never deviated for fear of knocking the earth off its axis or something even more dire.   Dad across from Jon,  Mom across from me, and Chris being the odd third kid born later, sat on the end of a big brown Formica rectangle. 

That worked out best as he, more often than not , had to make a hasty escape.

Dad had his iced tea in front of him, brewed very dark and sweating with cool droplets of condensation.

“Who’s saying grace?’ 

I would just stare at his tea until someone else volunteered. 

Chris, the youngest and, by birth order probably the most reckless, rose to the occasion on occasion.  He’d reverently fold his grubby hands, bow his curly haired head, suppress a giggle and shout at the top of his lungs:

“GOD’S NEAT.   LET’S EAT!” 

And if dad could’ve reached him, he’d get a smack on the side of his head.   But because I was in the way, I usually got the brunt of his lunge.  

I am an expert at ducking, which came in mighty handy later in life.  Another story, that.

Everything was usually usual.  Except for what happened on one very unusual night.

The nightly ritual began as usual and went something like this:

“What did you learn in school today?”

“Nothing.”

“Why is (Insert Nun’s Name Here) calling me?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did you feed the cats and the skunk and the guinea pigs and the mice (Insert Other Exotic Pet Here) today?”

“Yeah, dad.”

“How was swim practice?”

“Wet.”

“Who broke a glass today?  Your mom told me…”

“He did!” 

Jon and I point at Chris, who just rolled his eyes and loaded a fork with something to fling at us.

“D’ja clean it up?”

“Yeah, dad.

Then, after contemplatively munching his salad and looking at each of us curiously with half squinting horn-rimmed eyes –

Wait for it, wait for it…

“Want to hear what I saw in the office today?”

Mom: “No.”

All three of us in jacked-up unison, hands clapping with glee:  “Oh yeah! “

Overruled.

Whilst savoring glistening piles of spaghetti noodles covered in chunky red sauce, parmesan cheese and meatballs, he would describe in extra technical (gory) detail a boil he lanced or a hemorrhoid he vanquished. 

Who knew rubber bands were so handy? 

Sometimes he’d tell about drunken puking handcuffed patients whose scalps he  sutured together as the police waited in the corridor. 

Or about the crazy nuts kid who pushed all the furniture up against the examining room door so not to get a booster shot. 

(Dad’s nurse Marty, a wily ex-Navy nurse, tricked that kid into thinking dad was Clark Kent moonlighting as a doctor but on a special mission.  The kid submitted to the needle rather than shame himself in front of Superman.)

We knew hemoglobin, and femurs, and synapses, and the sizes of big bore needles, and pre-eclampsia and metatarsals and uteruses and breech birth and sphincters. 

He spoke of this mysterious virus that was killing men right and left in Ft. Lauderdale and how he could swear it was changing its nature to avoid antibiotic treatment. 

He lavished tales upon us of extracting still wriggling tropical parasites and cleaning out suppurating insect bites and setting compound fractures that looked like broken tree limbs.

He gloried in all things that spewed, smelled, winked, leaked or had to be lopped off to prevent infection…Nothing was too sacred and nothing blunted our appetites for information or for dinner.  All his case accounts, no names attached, were spectacular, the more intricate and invasive the better.

Dad was a medical genius.  Marcus Welby, M.D.  could suck eggs.

As the meal wore on, like clockwork, my brother Jon, every single night would get excited and spill his milk all over the table.  Dad would then routinely end his tales by angrily sending Jon to his room. 

Truth is, somehow dad thought Jon did it on purpose.  He may have.  Jon is the doctor now in the family.

And he always got out of doing the dishes that way!

Here’s what happened that particular magnificently messed up night though.  Dishes were the least of it.

Dad, all spun up from telling tales, expressed his faux-fearsome disgust for the milk spilling with dramatic arm gestures and the threat of getting out of his chair, his hand on his belt. 

Once the moose was loose, run away.

This night however, in mid-bellow, he froze, half out of his chair and his face clenched like a catcher’s mitt.

“OhhhhhDAMNITWHATTHEHELL.SON.OF.A .BITCH???”

Dad flopped back into his chair, threw his size 13 bare foot up on the table, literally splashing down into his plate of spaghetti. 

A thin spray of arterial blood and sauce geysered up from it arcing over the table to gently, like a sacrament, anoint the face of my brother Jon.

Sticking out of dad’s foot was a large jagged piece of glass still sporting part of the Hamburglar decal from a Happy Meal of long ago.

Chris literally dematerialized in a slip stream of particles as though Spock finally got the transporter to lock onto his coordinates on a hostile planet.

Jon sat shocked and staring like Carrie after the prom.  His face was spattered with blood like some demonic fusion of a Pollock crossed with a Warhol, a Dali and a smidge of a Picasso.  

Mom, holding her hand over her mouth, lurched down the hall at a clip.  She could be heard trying to discretely lose her cookies. 

Dad just looked at me, then looked at his spurting foot, then looked at me and said:

“Get my bag.  You’re going to learn how to stitch a wound tonight.”

Cool.

Click on titles for more family stories starring Dr. Dad:

Dad Flipped a Coin for Mom and Lost

Dad Creates a Stir

Dad's Sunday Lesson or Jesus in My Stomach

Dad Builds Character

Dad's Mandatory Family Dinners
Of Mice and Dad
Of Mice and Dad:  The Tale of the Tail

Golf Course Gorts

Dad and the Purple Schwinn

And from Dr. Dad’s sister, Aunt Polly:

Georgia Justice Hostage Show: Aunt Polly’s Ordeal in Cordele

Lake Toxaway Community Center Bluegrass Friday Nights

Repost for y'all who got the web site address last Friday night!  Enjoy!

This post recieved an Editor's Pick and a Cover at Open Salon July 8, 2010.

Leon Shelton’s church funeral didn’t hold a candle to the real proper send off he received at the Lake Toxaway Community Center last Friday night. 

For mountain folk in western North Carolina, nothing brings your soul closer to heaven, living or dead, than live bluegrass music.  

And on Friday, Leon Shelton soared heavenward smiling.

I expect Leon met up with some familiar faces when he walked up to his Mansion in the Sky.  Last year was hard on this aging Community since in addition to Leon, some other familiar smiling faces were missing, I noticed, leaving wide lonesome gaps in the patchwork.

Tiny, a Navy veteran and his darling wife Mary Ellen weren’t there to tell me more stories of their mutual military careers, how they met in a bar in the South Pacific, and that she fell for a younger man.

 Tiny's White Squirrel Sculpture, one of four we own

Tiny wasn’t there to lure me out to his car to buy his hand painted resin sculptures of the rare white squirrel that lives in that neck of the woods.  I have about four of them now.

He went first I heard, and she very soon after.

And Joe Byers’ wife Mary, an authentically sweet woman whose eyes sparkled with love and innocence, and whose voice now entertains the angels, went on last year too, leaving Joe standing alone, but strong, strumming his guitar on stage just plain missing their gospel duets together.

The Lamplighters promotional picture, Joe and Mary in the middle

For decades based out  of the Lake Toxaway Community, Joe and Mary and some talented relatives toured the southlands as The Lamplighters, a popular bluegrass gospel band. 

I heard a tinge of longing in Joe’s voice when he allowed that Leon now was “gonna get to see my Mary.”

They were so much the fabric of the place, I thought I would see them all there every time I visited, it never occurred to me they’d be gone.

Fridays are when this venerable community of characters meet up, eat up, listen up and graciously greet outsiders and newcomers like long lost cousins. 

Let’s just put it this way:  My dad, PapaJohn, will accept “a hug around the neck” from these folk but outright growls and straight-arms any public affection from the "country club set."

It’s a matter of what’s real and what isn’t for him.   Always has been.

The Center a'hoppin on Friday night.  It's a multi-purpose gathering place and disaster shelter

MamaLo and PapaJohn count Friday nights at the Community Center as their weekly foray out into the world for social, nutritional and entertainment needs. 

MamaLo has long ago quit actually cooking food and defiantly, against all universal Grandma Rules, simply warms things up in the microwave.  Her days of cooking meals from scratch are long gone. 

She’s over it. 

Got a problem with that?

So any chance to eat out and eat good home cooked vittles provokes a Pavlovian drool response in the both of them.

Supper at the Center on Friday nights is hand-made by pink-cheeked apron clad volunteers and served cafeteria style on those paper plates with compartments. 

You can flat-out taste the love.

PapaJohn demands lock-step precision in his approach to the evening.  He annoyingly obsesses on insists on arriving a full half an hour early to be first in line to buy his dinner ticket and fling down pillows on the chairs in the front row of the stage area to claim them for later. 

When the music starts.

This works out great since MamaLo gets to flit like a hummingbird from one conversation to another in the supper line snaking back through the place and out the door on some nights.  She gets all the skinny on who is fighting, who is making up, who has cancer, who is dallying outside of their marriage, whose kids are coming and going for visits, how many people have been washed over the Falls and killed of late. 

All the juicy stuff. 

MamaLo, in this way, “tops off” her very real need for verbal interaction. 

At 89, PapaJohn is not inclined to talk much anymore.

Little no-nonsense white-haired Rose supervises the ticket table and the cash box with eye brows clenched and mouth pursed with stern authority.  No ticket, no supper.  (But everybody knows that in hard times, Rose would be the first one to quietly set a tray of food in front of you no charge. That’s the way it’s done, no question, no hesitation, no judgment.)

 It’s deep down adorable when Rose’s stern boss face softens and she shoots saucy flirty glances to her balding bespectacled suspender sporting fiancé, Alan.  Don’t you dare tease her about it though!

Supper on Leon’s night was a ketchup-splashed tight square of meatloaf paired with little boiled potato globes and green string beans dotted with bacon bits.  Dessert was your choice of carrot cake, chocolate cake, apple pie all washed down with sweet tea or lemonade in styro cups. 

No alcohol allowed.

After supper, I sat outside in the “smoking lounge” (an open air gazebo overlooking the ball field) with musician (And unofficial Mayor of Rosman, North Carolina) Clarence and singer Doug. 

I heard enough risqué jokes from Doug to last a lifetime.  With punch lines like “For thirty thousand dollars I’d take everything off except my earrings…”

I ate a bug I was laughing so hard. 

Clarence. a Christian man,  just smiled, finished his cigarette, and high tailed it out of there blushing.

 Clarence, Guitar Man and the Unofficial Mayor of Rosman, N.C.

I looked for sweet dancing DeeDee rolling around in her wheelchair full of hugs and smiles, but her dad had surgery so she didn’t make it this Friday night.  Carl, who usually runs the stage, had a death in his family and was among the absent.  The Beautiful Couple were there preparing to glide on the dance floor like they have every summer and fall for years. But he didn’t look well.  His oxygen tank was still hanging in a satchel at his side. 

I think he’ll be seeing Leon soon.

Musicians from all over are invited to jam

We took our seats once the tuning up began.  Leon’s little wife, Miss Wanda, came up on the stage and bravely, with no words, accepted a plaque from Joe Byers in Leon's memory.   Folks took the microphone and shyly told stories on Leon, but mostly recalled what a regular gem this hardworking family man was.

Then, accepting his mountain inheritance, Leon’s son, Jason was pushed front and center to rip into his banjo version of Foggy Mountain Breakdown in honor of his father. 

Young men and women with guitars, fiddles, mandolins and banjos joined the elders on stage in wave of sound that plucked at my DNA like a cellular memory.  Clogging gals and buck dancing gents clacked and clattered onto the dance floor and set to keeping time with mountain foot percussion.

As much as I worried that Friday nights at the Lake Toxaway Community Center might be approaching that Brigadoon-like culture fade becoming just a smoky memory extinct from this ridiculous frenetic world, Jason’s quick smile and genius banjo playing confirmed that it will go on…

Leon, I am sure, saw to that.

Hey there Tiny and Mary Ellen!  Mizz Mary!  Got some sweet tea for me?

 Clarence's rendition of Blue Moon of Kentucky with cloggers

photo of squirrel by me
other photos courtesy of jritch 77 photostream
video from K0star on YouTube

Mistaken for a Death Angel, I'm No Saint

The door banged open.
 
Rolling in backward was an orderly in hospital scrubs towing a wheelchair filled to the brim with the most ancient black man I have ever seen. 

The orderly deftly placed the wheelchair in front of the waiting room TV.

“Mr. Louis you go ahead and watch the TV there.  I’ll get to your papers here. Now stay put.  Watch the TV.”

Mr. Louis was having none of that.

When he knew the orderly couldn’t see him anymore, he promptly rocked himself up out of that wheelchair and walked right up to the TV and turned around blocking everyone’s view of it.  

It looked like he was used to being the center of attention so I just smiled at him while drinking my contrast drink. 

He was dressed pretty snappy in a black polo shirt and some sweatpants that discretely camouflaged his adult incontinence apparel underneath. 

He was very dark brown with white curls cropped close to his head and furrows of wrinkles cascading down his shiny face.  He clutched a zip lock bag with something like lunch in it.

While I was casually sizing him up, he was doing some sizing up of his own.  His wandering gaze snapped in on me and his face crashed inward. 

It became a mask of a warrior ready to fight.  Mixed with terror.

In a low whispering voice, he blew out two words like smoke from a drag of a cigar. 

“Santa Barbara.” 

And, oh shit, it looked like he was coiling as if to pounce.  I braced…

“Mr. LOUIS!  Now what are you doing?  Let’s sit down ok?  You’re alright man, you’re fine.”

In a low baritone stream of what I think was Creole, Mr. Louis spoke of many different things then. 

Words like orisha and Chango and Santa Barbara stuck out like barbs on fishhooks.  The already heavily magnetized atmosphere in the waiting room became ever so much more charged with something else. 

It looked like those wavy lines you see on a hot day hovering over broiling asphalt.  I smelled ozone.

He never took his eyes from mine as he sat, and he kept on talking, even while the orderly soothingly patted his back and reassured him, until his head nodded and he slept.

The peace on his face as he slept was one hundred eighty degrees from the prowling terrified electrified scene of minutes before.

After untangling myself from the indisputable crazy of the episode, I womaned up and asked the orderly what the hell was going on.

“Oh no biggie.  Mr. Louis thinks you are an angel or a devil or something come to take his soul away.”  He chuckled.  “You’re not, are you?”

The door to the inner sanctum popped open as if on cue from some cosmic stage manager  and a cheery voice said, “Mr. Louis we’re ready for you now.”

He snorted awake at the sound of his name, fixed me with a steely glare and climbed into his wheelchair so the orderly could push him in for his test.

I looked around and no one seemed to behave like anything was out of the ordinary.  Stress.  Must be. Putting a rope around it, I waited my turn.  I’ve been known for this kind of thing and telling anyone just brought me a load of derision that I didn’t need right now.

“Mizz Linda?  We’re ready for you now.”

A smiling no-nonsense nurse sat me up in the  hall at a nurse’s station and ran a big line into my arm for dye injection later.  She was apologetic about this, and it didn’t hurt, but I bled all over the place during the “pinch.”  So, I looked like a disaster all bloodied up and sporting plastic lines running down my arm when who rounds the corner? 

My favorite angry old jaguar man in his wheelchair.

His deep set terrified eyes, swivelling like metal bb's, darted from my face to my arm.  I was paralyzed, locked in place, couldn't move.

So  much so the nurse ran into me and bounced right off.

Something changed. The electrical jolting waned.

Slowly he crumbled.  His face totally relaxed.

 He hooted with genuine joy. 

Issuing forth a torrent of French sounding sentences, he gestured and smiled and almost levitated out of his chair.

“What’s he saying?”  I asked the orderly.

“Oh nothing much."  He sucked his tooth. "Just something about how the saints don’t bleed, and you obviously do, so you are no saint. He gets to hang around another day.”

 

 

Postscript:

West African slaves brought to the Caribbean had to camouflage their so-called pagan religious deities from the overly-zealous Christian influences of their owners.  Many Catholic saints became the alternative names for the entities they prayed to.

I was evidently mistaken for Saint Barbara or Chango, a god uniquely of two genders who is patron over lightning.    

Bluegrass Friday Nights At The Lake Toxaway Community Center

This post recieved an Editor's Pick and a Cover at Open Salon July 8, 2010.

Leon Shelton’s church funeral didn’t hold a candle to the real proper send off he received at the Lake Toxaway Community Center last Friday night. 

For mountain folk in western North Carolina, nothing brings your soul closer to heaven, living or dead, than live bluegrass music.  

And on Friday, Leon Shelton soared heavenward smiling.

I expect Leon met up with some familiar faces when he walked up to his Mansion in the Sky.  Last year was hard on this aging Community since in addition to Leon, some other familiar smiling faces were missing, I noticed, leaving wide lonesome gaps in the patchwork.

Tiny, a Navy veteran and his darling wife Mary Ellen weren’t there to tell me more stories of their mutual military careers, how they met in a bar in the South Pacific, and that she fell for a younger man. 

 Tiny's White Squirrel Sculpture, one of four we own

Tiny wasn’t there to lure me out to his car to buy his hand painted resin sculptures of the rare white squirrel that lives in that neck of the woods.  I have about four of them now.

He went first I heard, and she very soon after.

And Joe Byers’ wife Mary, an authentically sweet woman whose eyes sparkled with love and innocence, and whose voice now entertains the angels, went on last year too, leaving Joe standing alone, but strong, strumming his guitar on stage just plain missing their gospel duets together. 

The Lamplighters promotional picture, Joe and Mary in the middle

For decades based out  of the Lake Toxaway Community, Joe and Mary and some talented relatives toured the southlands as The Lamplighters, a popular bluegrass gospel band. 

I heard a tinge of longing in Joe’s voice when he allowed that Leon now was “gonna get to see my Mary.”

They were so much the fabric of the place, I thought I would see them all there every time I visited, never occurred to me they’d be gone.

Fridays are when this venerable community of characters meet up, eat up, listen up and graciously greet outsiders and newcomers like long lost cousins. 

Let’s just put it this way:  My dad, PapaJohn, will accept “a hug around the neck” from these folk but outright growls and straight-arms any public affection from the "country club set."  

It’s a matter of what’s real and what isn’t for him.   Always has been.

The Center a'hoppin on Friday night.  It's a multi-purpose gathering place and disaster shelter

MamaLo and PapaJohn count Friday nights at the Community Center as their weekly foray out into the world for social, nutritional and entertainment needs. 

MamaLo has long ago quit actually cooking food and defiantly, against all universal Grandma Rules, simply warms things up in the microwave.  Her days of cooking meals from scratch are long gone. 

She’s over it. 

Got a problem with that?

So any chance to eat out and eat good home cooked vittles provokes a Pavlovian drool response in the both of them.

Supper at the Center on Friday nights is hand-made by pink-cheeked apron clad volunteers and served cafeteria style on those paper plates with compartments. 

You can flat-out taste the love.

PapaJohn demands lock-step precision in his approach to the evening.  He annoyingly obsesses on insists on arriving a full half an hour early to be first in line to buy his dinner ticket and fling down pillows on the chairs in the front row of the stage area to claim them for later.  

When the music starts.

This works out great since MamaLo gets to flit like a hummingbird from one conversation to another in the supper line snaking back through the place and out the door on some nights.  She gets all the skinny on who is fighting, who is making up, who has cancer, who is dallying outside of their marriage, whose kids are coming and going for visits, how many people have been washed over the Falls and killed of late. 

All the juicy stuff. 

MamaLo, in this way, “tops off” her very real need for verbal interaction. 

At 89, PapaJohn is not inclined to talk much anymore.

Little no-nonsense white-haired Rose supervises the ticket table and the cash box with eye brows clenched and mouth pursed with stern authority.  No ticket, no supper.  (But everybody knows that in hard times, Rose would be the first one to quietly set a tray of food in front of you no charge. That’s the way it’s done, no question, no hesitation, no judgment.) 

 It’s deep down adorable when Rose’s stern boss face softens and she shoots saucy flirty glances to her balding bespectacled suspender sporting fiancé, Alan.  Don’t you dare tease her about it though!

Supper on Leon’s night was a ketchup-splashed tight square of meatloaf paired with little boiled potato globes and green string beans dotted with bacon bits.  Dessert was your choice of carrot cake, chocolate cake, apple pie all washed down with sweet tea or lemonade in styro cups. 

No alcohol allowed.

After supper, I sat outside in the “smoking lounge” (an open air gazebo overlooking the ball field) with musician (And unofficial Mayor of Rosman, North Carolina) Clarence and singer Doug. 

I heard enough risqué jokes from Doug to last a lifetime.  With punch lines like “For thirty thousand dollars I’d take everything off except my earrings…”

I ate a bug I was laughing so hard. 

Clarence. a Christian man,  just smiled, finished his cigarette, and high tailed it out of there blushing.

 Clarence, Guitar Man & the Unofficial Mayor of Rosman, N.C.

I looked for sweet dancing DeeDee rolling around in her wheelchair full of hugs and smiles, but her dad had surgery so she didn’t make it this Friday night.  Carl, who usually runs the stage, had a death in his family and was among the absent.  The Beautiful Couple were there preparing to glide on the dance floor like they have every summer and fall for years. But he didn’t look well.  His oxygen tank was still hanging in a satchel at his side. 

I think he’ll be seeing Leon soon.

Musicians from all over are invited to jam

 We took our seats once the tuning up began.  Leon’s little wife, Miss Wanda, came up on the stage and bravely, with no words, accepted a plaque from Joe Byers in Leon's memory.   Folks took the microphone and shyly told stories on Leon, but mostly recalled what a regular gem this hardworking family man was.

Then, accepting his mountain inheritance, Leon’s son, Jason was pushed front and center to rip into his banjo version of Foggy Mountain Breakdown in honor of his father. 

Young men and women with guitars, fiddles, mandolins and banjos joined the elders on stage in wave of sound that plucked at my DNA like a cellular memory.  Clogging gals and buck dancing gents clacked and clattered onto the dance floor and set to keeping time with mountain foot percussion.

As much as I worried that Friday nights at the Lake Toxaway Community Center might be approaching that Brigadoon-like culture fade becoming just a smoky memory extinct from this ridiculous frenetic world, Jason’s quick smile and genius banjo playing confirmed that it will go on…

 Leon, I am sure, saw to that.

Hey there Tiny and Mary Ellen!  Mizz Mary!  Got some sweet tea for me?

 Clarence's rendition of Blue Moon of Kentucky with cloggers

photo of squirrel by me
other photos courtesy of jritch 77 photostream

video from K0star on YouTube