Golf Course Gorts

“Wake up.  They’re back and they need our help again.”  

I could hear Dad growling in a groggy fugue while she repeatedly bumped his shoulder nudging him awake. 

“Well, go get my bag then. I thought you told them last time we were done with all that…” 

“I did but this is serious.”

Mom trained us up early about unexplainable things.  In fact, she was certain all could be explained if she just got a shot at interrogating the parties involved.  She always quizzed us thusly -

“What are you going to do if a UFO lands on the golf course out back?”

“I’m to say, ‘Wait right there! I’m getting my mom and she’s got some questions for you…’”

“Correct!”

Unidentified flying objects were never poo-pooed in our house. Mom, ever the romantic, was fascinated by the topic.  So much so, I think besides A Wrinkle in Time and anything by Maurice Sendak, the book I most remember reading at a tender age (although forbidden to, I snuck it by flashlight under my bedspread) was Mom’s copy of Interrupted Journey.  It is the story of Betty and Barney Hill, a married couple who were allegedly abducted from a rural country road in Connecticut and experimented upon by space aliens. The experiments they recounted under hypnosis stood my hair on end.

Science fiction had me in thrall. For an “active” child with a hummingbird span of attention, this was a miracle.  I was dedicated to movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Plan 9 from Outer Space on our local horror flick channel late on Saturday nights.  Robinson Crusoe on Mars still does it for me.

Me and my brothers:  Typical homemade costumes created by Mom

So between Mom and me, anything super or extra natural, or even paranormal with all its idiosyncrasies, was worth poking with a stick.  Still is.

“Mom, who’s out there?” I called out from my bed that night hoping to halt her sprint down the hall to get Dad’s doctor bag.  She didn’t miss a beat.

“Just one of the golf course workers. He hurt himself. Dad’s going to take a look at it.”

“Oooh! Can I come see?”

“Nope. You stay there.”  She didn’t even look in my room at me on the return trip with the bag and towels. They were the nice towels reserved for guests. I'd get whooped if I so much as dried my pinky finger on them.  

Naturally, I planned to sneak a look if only I could kick my way out of the bed sheets.

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t move my feet or arms, just my head and eyes.  The cats, my fat warm Siamese cats were pinning me down, one on each side of me stretched out the full length of my body, their bottomless Siamese blue eyes sparkling. They purred and calmed me.  Funny, I never even felt them jump up on the bed. The frangipani tree blooming outside my window sent a sweet cloud of fragrance drifting in.  I felt sleepy, like waves of warm water were rocking me, but resisted with every piece of me.  Then I pinched myself in the thigh – Hard!

Oh no, this all was too good to let sleep get in the way.  

I listened really carefully so I would remember.

The usual night sounds on this suburban golf course were just the lonely scree of night hawks and the wind slapping around the eucalyptus trees and Australian pines.  Occasionally the putt-putt sound of gas fueled Cushman carts would jangle by carrying the night shift golf course workers to their assigned chores. Every once in a while, on a normal night, I could hear them talking in low tones with each other in foreign languages as they groomed sand traps, mowed fairways and moved the holes around on the putting greens. That course was “play ready” every morning by 7 a.m. with only tire tracks left on the wet grass telling the story of the night’s tasks done there by shadow workers.

The Cushman cart that brought the injured golf course worker to our back door that night sounded slightly off to me as it idled in our yard; more like George Jetson’s cartoon commuter jalopy. The headlights on the cart sprayed light across the ceiling of my bedroom, but it wasn’t the usual tired yellow color. The light was intensely white, and a shadow play danced on the ceiling. Dad and Mom rendered assistance to the person outside who was moaning in pain, their shadows and others, expanding and contracting...

“How did he get this?  Mmm-hmm. Ok. As he came through? Ok. Well, I can’t stitch him up as you know, his skin is too delicate, stitches won’t hold, but keep pressure with these towels on the wound until you can get back. I can set the bone though. Mmm-hmm, yes, it’s painful but you guys can block that right? Do that now so he’ll stop making those sounds. The neighbors…”

And the moaning stopped.  I heard some shuffling and a muffled wet crack and then Dad.

“Ok! That should keep you until you can jump again. Let’s wrap this up with an Ace bandage…Good. Done. Would you guys do me a favor and quit using that damn thingamajiggy until you work out the kinks? Too many of your guys get mangled in it still…Thanks. And maybe find another doctor who lives on a golf course please?”

And then Mom.

“Oh no, he’s just kidding. You are welcome anytime. Never mind about the towels! Come when you can stay longer, I have a few questions…”

Fabulous photo courtesy of deserttrumpet at Flickr, Creative Commons





 

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 and the Purple Schwinn

For Dad, with love, on his 90th birthday.

“Let’s take a bike ride!”

Dad liked to ride bikes along the golf course road before dinner some nights.  Since our house was one of the first built on this new course on the outskirts of Ft. Lauderdale, he enjoyed checking out all the new home sites rising up from those scrubby sand lots. 

He had his English racing bike painted rusty brown and equipped with impressive toe harnesses on the spiky corrugated pedals.  My brother had his banana- seat high-handlebar Easy Rider thrasher. My younger brother still had a fire engine red tricycle so he was stuck rolling around the driveway in circles under Mom’s watchful eye. 

And I had my brand new shiny purple Schwinn girl’s bike with the saddle bag baskets over the rear tire.

Or did.

“Ready to go?  Where’s your bike?”

It was my birthday present and I hated it. 

All my friends had ten-speed boy’s bikes with handle bar brakes. I asked for one of those. But somewhere my request got lost in translation, or Dad got a good deal, and I was burdened with a prissy purple Schwinn girl’s bike.  It had only one speed and to stop I had to brake by backpedalling.  

Ungroovy.

I was expected to ride that pixie dust and moonbeam mess to the school bus stop every morning, lock it up, and then ride it home every afternoon along with everybody.  I felt like a sparkly unicorn leaving a slip stream of rainbows amidst a herd of sleek racehorses.  It was humiliating.

But the purple Schwinn was gone. And, I only just then remembered what happened to it.

“Where’s your bike?”

Half way home that afternoon, the chain fell off the purple Schwinn and made me fall down. I was miffed and had two skinned knees to show.  So I left it by the side of the road and walked home. I meant to tell Mom right away but forgot. I was easily distracted at that age by things like snacks, cartoons or dust particles floating in sunbeams.  And looking back, I wonder if it was semi-subconsciously on purpose to forget about it.  I just put it out of my mind.  Now I had to ‘fess up.

Bike ride cancelled, Dad loaded me into his car and we went to pick the purple Schwinn up.  But, oops, it was gone.  Stolen. Apparently a shiny new purple Schwinn lying on the side of the road for three hours was too much temptation for those so inclined. 

“Oh no, Dad! It’s gone. Gosh! Darn! Shoot! Maybe we can get a new ten-speed boy’s bike with handlebar brakes for me now?”

He gave me the “look.”  It’s the one perfected by every pissed-off disappointed Dad since time began. He cleared his throat and issued the edict in a measured, yet intimidating, tone -

“You could not take care of the bike you had and you think we’re going to just run straight out buy you a damn new one? No. Now you will be walking…everywhere.”

Thus began my wilderness weeks of walking across wet golf course grass and vacant lots prickling with sticker burrs in the dank Florida heat to and from the bus stop.  Much of the trek was spent swatting clouds of mosquitoes that lay in wait to chew me up and suck me dry.

No matter how much time I spent on my grooming each day, I always arrived to school a disheveled wreck with pie plate sized pit stains and soaking wet saddle shoes speckled with golf course grass.   After school, I pretended I didn’t care as I watched all my friends hop on their ten-speeds and zoom off to 7-ll for Slurpees and penny candy. Or to the pier.  Or the community pool. I was left to slog home, sweaty and downtrodden. I cried a lot. But only when no one could see.  I still had my pride.

Nights I lay in bed and listened to tree frogs chirp in the eucalyptus trees. On my transistor radio a woman with an airy quavering voice trilled a song: “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…” I fervently wished, even prayed, that my purple Schwinn would miraculously appear in the garage sparkling loyally waiting for me to wheel her out and ride. But no amount of wishing was going to fix it and surely Jesus had more important things to think about.

One day Dad stuck his head in while I was moping and reading in my room. 

“Come on out here a minute.”

I spent a significant amount of effort dodging Dad’s attention during this time.  So when he actually addressed me directly, I jumped like a cricket following him to the driveway where he was pulling something out of the trunk of his car.

“Fix this up if you want. One of my patients was going to throw it away, but maybe you might want it? There’s sandpaper in the workshop…”

It was a relic. Rusty from handlebars to wheel rim, this thing was a flaking stinking disaster. An ancient crone of a broken down girl’s beach bike, she was a beast.  No ten-speed derailleur here, no handlebar brakes. She was fat all over, including the tires. And they were flat.

I was never so grateful as I was at that very moment.

For days, with help from Mom and Dad, I worked on her.  I sandpapered all the rust off and found that she had at one time sported black paint.  I soaked her rusty chain in Coca Cola and oiled it, used my saved up birthday money to get the bulbous white-wall tires repaired, and buffed up her pitted chrome parts to a righteous shine. I found an old chamois cloth and sewed a new seat cover.  A smooth coat of black enamel Rust-o-leum paint finished her makeover and a white wicker basket garlanded with purple flowers strapped to the handlebars added a surprise feminine touch.  She was a proud dowager wearing her Sunday hat in the islands; the flowers an homage to the long lost purple Schwinn.

She wasn’t pretty, but she was mine. And she could roll. Big and powerful, I could speed along just as fast as a ten-speed. Better than a ten speed too, I found out, was not having to fiddle with all the levers and pulleys.  I just stood up on those pedals and rode like the wind.

The kids with fancy racing bikes were superior in every way, and they let me know it.  But somehow I shook it off and just appreciated that big beast of a bike. My big beast of a bike.

I think Dad had me figured out.

I love you, Dad.

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

Dad Builds Character

Already told to go pound sand by mom, dad enlisted his first born, me, as the perfect accomplice for a project he was planning for sundown. 

“It’ll take us five minutes, just five minutes, swear.”

 Common family knowledge was that if dad estimated five minutes on a job starting at sundown that meant we might make it back by dawn, and usually in need of stitches, a splint or antihistamines. 

It all started when dad had a rocking chair chat with a couple of the local guys down at Rheinman’s store.  Since that confab, he had been obsessed with fulfilling this mysterious rustic Jeremiah Johnson live off the land dream. 

And without saying exactly what it was, he was hard selling the experience as a wilderness epiphany; an ultimate homage to the local food chain and a pioneer-style boon to family togetherness.  

Mom’s eyes never stopped rolling. 

And grandma, who was raised on an Illinois farm, had been there, done it and preferred store-bought lunch at the club.

 On the front porch of the cabin we had rented at Lake Toxaway in North Carolina for summer vacation, I found dad gazing wistfully at the sun sinking low over Hogback Mountain while sharpening a small three-pronged fork-like tool with a whetstone.  He had inserted the end of a long dowel into the hollow circular bottom of the pointy sharp thing creating a fork on a stick.  It was a trident like those wielded by that seaweed-bearded, flipper-footed bad ass, Neptune, in cartoons.

In front of him on the porch bench were a couple of flashlights, a big burlap bag and (aw, hells bells) my little brother.  He was all duded up in jeans, a sturdy plaid shirt, hiking boots and enough “Off” bug repellent to give him hallucinations.

He was giving me the extra hostile stink eye. 

He had already been told to stand down from this mission by mom and grandma and he was pissed that I, a girl, was getting to fulfill my dominance by birth order.  He could come along but only to watch.  Mom had indicated that she would kick dad’s tall ass if my little brother got so much as a chigger bite.

“I just need you to hold the flashlight for me steady tonight, got it?”

“Sure dad.  On what?”

Mom hollered from the kitchenette, now exasperated because she had not successfully shut this thing down.

“Damn it, John Louis, you’re on your own. I am not going to clean them, or cook them and sure as hell not going to eat them!”

“C’mon, let’s go.  She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  You’re going to love this…”

We gathered up the equipment and scurried down the steps out into the night.  I figured dad was up for some kind of nocturnal spear fishing and since we’d been fishing together before, I was liking this. 

We wound our way down the horse path through the apple orchard smelling the sweet late summer rot of fallen heirloom fruit and the comforting tang of horse poop being careful not to slip.  The golf course lay ahead of us with its obsessively groomed fairways, buzz cut putting greens and shiny rippling water hazards teeming with stocked fish.  Bream, bass, trout – all fun to catch, good eating and I was getting excited.   

The golf course ponds positively thundered this particular night with the cacophonous grunts and squeaks of horny mating bullfrogs bubbling out their chins with aural gusts of seductive sound.  Frog mating calls so loud they echoed across the rills and hills surrounding them.  The whole place pulsed and vibrated with frog song and firefly blinks…HuhRUMPH! Bree-deet! Aerk-aerk-aerk!

My father certainly was enthralled.  Not in a pastoral poetic way though.

We picked out one of the ponds, the biggest, and dad sat the two of us down on a tee box for the briefing.

“Boy, you will sit here and watch.  Girl, you go hunt out the frogs on the bank of the pond, put the flashlight on ’em from behind me, and I’ll gig ‘em real quick like this... “

He demonstrated his technique by sneaking up on an imaginary frog, all Elmer Fudd –like.  He raised the trident up, took aim, and smote the ground with a moist thud.

“DAD!   You’re going to stab frogs?  NOOOOOO!”

“Calm down and don’t be a baby.  They don’t feel it because you gig them in the head, if you’re doing it right.  And they’re just amphibians. OK?

"Oh my GOD, dad.  Eew." 

 "Hey, it's 'oh my gosh.' You know your mom hates that.  Now, after I have them stuck on the gig, I’ll hold them up so you can get a good grab to pull them off the prongs and put them in the burlap sack…”

“Uh uh NO! Dad, I can’t do that…Why are you doing this?”

“Frog legs! They taste just like chicken.  You’ll love them. C’mon now...No guts no glory. ”

I got up on my feet. “No.  I’m not gonna. That’s just gross!”  And I locked my knees.

From out of the tense darkness, a small, grubby, poopy-headed voice piped in.

“I’ll do it!”
 Up stepped my little brother with all the cheeky bravado of one who finally saw his best shot materialize to join the testosterone club in the family.  He was going to earn his eggs right there, right then.

For a second, I think my dad calculated whether mom’s ass kicking would be worth it, determined it was well worth it and some, and made a command decision.

“Well, ok then.  Looks like your brother has more guts than you do.  Go on, son, tie that gunny sack to your waist, grab a flashlight and let’s go.”

Now, I don’t know if it was blood beating through my mortified head or the sound of the proverbial gauntlet smashing down to the ground. One or the other goaded me to snatch that flashlight and bag out of my brother’s grasp, and stomp not only down onto the bank of that pond, but directly into it.  I waded up to my waist in the dark, muddy and, as we came to find out later, moccasin-infested water.

I would NOT be called a coward by my father. 

The burlap bag floated next to me and I turned around to face the bank of the pond.  I could see my father’s silhouette, my little brother a small blob of shadow beside him.

 The frogs went silent.  Thousands of shining amphibian eyes glowed back at me.  

I whispered, “I’m sorry.”

 “OK, dad.  I got one in the spotlight. Let’s GO." 

Next morning, grandma, a half-smile on her lips and her grey hairpiece neatly pinned to her head, was drifting around the little kitchenette in the cabin when I woke up.  I smelled day-old sale donuts in the oven that she had cut in half, buttered, and broiled to a caramelized golden brown crunch.   The table was set and she was scrambling bright yellow eggs in an improvised double boiler.  Next to the eggs, the cast iron skillet huffed and hissed with aluminum foil on top covering the contents for cooking. 

Mom got her coffee and plunked down in a chair. “Hey, what’s in the pan? Bacon?”

Grandma went to show her, but was upstaged by several loud tapping sounds. The tin foil on the fry pan dimpled up with each tap like dings in a cheap car door.  Then it flew off,  just levitated, and fell to the ground as though of its own accord, revealing last night’s quarry, breaded, frying up, and twitching reflexively in hot bacon grease.

“Ha!” said grandma, “I forgot they still like to be a-kickin’ while they’re a-cookin.’”

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 Sunday Lesson or Jesus In My Stomach and the F Word

That creepy smug expression on my younger brother’s face gave me a solidly foreboding hint about how the rest of that Sunday was going to go. 

When he flopped down on the car seat with his arms crossed, and sat completely still with that damn prissy Chiclet-toothed grin, he purposely trained his eyes to stare out the windshield with that annoying superior glint he knew I hated.  He was calculating his amazing windfall of leverage over me.   He was silently patting his suddenly very full ammo bag ready to shoot the first volley once Dad came back.  He was loaded. 

He was going to tell.

Sunday mornings meant Dad stopping by each of our rooms at 6 a.m. to snatch the bedcovers off of us in one deft yank yelling, “It’s time to pay the piper!” 

That was Dad code for:   “It’s time to go to Mass!” 

We’d roll out moaning and scowl at Mom, who was Lutheran and exempt, as she put out our dress-up clothes. Mom even got the morning off of breakfast duty since, in those days, one fasted before taking communion. 

Sister Aloysius Gonzaga de Josephina Maria said it was so that the chunk of the actual body of Christ we were eating had a nice unobstructed pure entrance into our stomachs and could do the most good with our little heathen lives.   God forbid Jesus had to work around a bellyful of Fruit Loops!  Or bacon, for the love of Pete.  He was Jewish after all. 

Starving, I buttoned myself into a jumper or skirt with blouse, yanked on white socks and screwed my beach roughened feet into black patent leather baby doll shoes.  (Jesus, I liked to think, really enjoyed the occasional pixie stick or Jolly Rancher candy I kept stashed and ate before Mass to keep my stomach from roaring in church.  Must’ve been much like getting a nice courtesy basket when visiting somewhere.)

My brother had to wear seersucker shorts, shirt with tie, a jacket, white socks and the dreaded White Buck Shoes with Orange Soles, like Dad’s.  They looked like Atticus Finch and mini-Atticus Finch together.  I was a dour Scout bringing up the rear,  all wrinkly and mopey wishing I were barefoot in my swimsuit.  i was not happy being hustled off in Dad’s rust-colored Oldsmobile convertible  to church where everything smelled funny .

Church was in a hospital for us.  The aroma was a mélange of incense, bleach, flowers and pee.  Dad was a General Practice Physician and would put all his patients in Holy Cross Hospital.  He was pretty crafty to make us attend Mass there in the chapel so he could multi-task and do a complete set of “rounds” checking on his patients after services. 

Luckily, Father “Machine Gun” Kelly said the Mass at a light-speed pace like he was unloading a clip on a Gatling gun and we were usually done in twenty minutes.  Saying goodbye every single Sunday, he couldn’t say enough about our chlorine green hair since being on a swimming team had given our white blonde locks an absinthe colored tint. 

“Oh! Look! It’s me little leprechauns come to see Jesus!”

We loved that Lucky Charms priest.  

As he disappeared into the green tile environment of the hospital to do rounds, Dad always gave me the keys to the car so I could “be in charge” and listen to the radio until he came back.  My brother and I would start off fairly calm in the car waiting patiently, since we were still in a “state of grace” from Mass.  (No, actually our blood sugar was hitting rock bottom from the fasting so we were hot, weak and dizzy.  Even though Jesus was in my stomach redecorating my little soul, I was working up the meanness anyway.) 

I wanted to listen to Rick Shaw on 106.7 because he played beach music and that’s where I was headed that day once I peeled my jumper and shoes off.  My brother wanted to listen to anything other than what I wanted to listen to, so he started jabbing his fat little finger at the radio mashing the buttons changing the channel just to infuriate me. 

“My turn!” he would shout in that little boy voice.

(Click! Cuban big band music…)

“Dad gave me the keys, I’m the boss!”

 (Click!  “Yer makin’ me Dizzy!  My head is spinnin’…)

“You’re not the boss of me!”

(Click!  And now the news:  President  Johnson signed civil rights legislation…)

“Oh yes I am, and I get to listen to what I want!”

(Click! “Love grows where my Rosemary goes…”)

Then he brought out the big guns:  The White Buck Shoes with the Orange Soles.  He twisted his little chubby seersucker shorts-clad butt around and began delivering a hail of efficiently well-aimed kicks with those infernal shoes.  To my shins, my chest, gasp! my incubating boobs! and my butt which I had turned toward him as a shield.  Scuffs of orange stained my blouse and stormclouds of bruises were coagulating on my arms and legs.

“Stop!  Stop!”

“Make me!”

“Cut it out, you little FUCKER!”

And that’s when his eyes glinted, he went still, and the chiclet teeth shown in an evil little perma-grin.  I was toast.

Dad jumped into the car with the airy energy of a guy who knew his day was going to be all kinds of swell with football games on TV, puttering in the yard, and maybe a nice bourbon and soda for happy hour.  My brother turned to him with puppy dog eyes and a look of pure baffled cherubic curiosity on his chubby little face.  Ignoring my impassioned pantomime to zip it, he asked this pivotal, and might I say the most masterful question in the universe of sibling passive aggressive assaults:

“Daddy, what is a fucker?”  

I saw my Dad just deflate.  His whole day  blew away like so many dandelion seeds.

“Where did you hear that bad word?”

His little fat radio tuner finger rose up and pointed directly at me. 

“She called me a little fucker!”

I had to think fast.  I didn’t know what plausible deniability was at that time, but I went for it like a natural. I willed my face into the incredulous how-could-he-say-that-face, looked him square in the eye and said:
 
“I DID NOT!  I would never say that!”

“She did, she DID, SHE DID!” 

My brother was red faced and fighting hard now.

Dad, without taking his eyes from mine, not a blink, said:  “Well, son, she says she didn’t.  So we have to believe she didn’t.  Maybe you misheard her.  Let’s go home.”

My brother ranted and raved the whole 3 minute drive home and then sulked in his room the rest of the day. 

But Dad was not done yet.

No, Dad knew this day was coming and a mere spanking wasn’t anywhere near effective enough to curb the oncoming tidal wave of bad language.  He had prepared the ultimate scorched-earth of emotional psychological ops strategies to tackle what he knew his headstrong defiant daughter would gleefully perpetuate for the rest of her life if he didn’t nip it now.  If he botched this one, who knows where it would go?  I could’ve become one of those hippy people uttering strange things about free love and pot and LSD and…Well, the orchestrated take down was executed with relentlessness.

Over lunch he asked me, “Did you call your brother a little fucker?”

“NO, I did NOT.”

At halftime he asked me:  “Did you call your brother a little…?”

“NO!  I didn’t.”

In the yard at the frangipani tree he was trimming he asked:  “Did you call your brother a …?”

“No, Dad…”

At the end of the day, with his bourbon cocktail he asked me:  “Did you call him that?”

He wore me right down.  I was a quivering pudding of abject defeat. Broken.

With bottom lip trembling and resigned to the punishment I knew was coming, I said in a squeak –

“Yes I did, Dad.”

With that, Dad sat me down as he left the room to retrieve the "persuader" as Mom called it...The belt.  I made a pact with myself that I would not cry no matter what.

As he came back into the room, he brought out instead the pink album of pictures that chronicled my life from birth, My Baby Book, and began flipping through it.  In the most effective example of child discipline ever, Dad said: 

“Never did I think that pink little bundle I brought home from the hospital all those years ago would ever say a word like that, especially right after Mass, and then lie about it.” 

I had won the trifecta of damnable behavior with one short utterance. No spanking.  Just the worst feeling I had ever felt in my short little life.

The disappointment of my Father. 

Jesus in my stomach shrugged and sighed.

 

Epilogue:

And for about 10 years after, that word almost never came out of my mouth. 

Well, only sometimes. 

When really provoked, you know? 

I had to really have a reason to…

Ok, fuck it, I said it!  Sorry Dad. 

Sorry Jesus.

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