Back Yard Loveland

     “Where’s the hospital?” we asked.

     “Right over there,” Carol gestured over her shoulder towards the casement windows by the gas fireplace.  We looked.  Fence, shed, trees, neighbor’s house, his hot tub spa and a small piece of his backyard.  Hmmm.  How do you hide a hospital? 

     We knew there was a hospital somewhere in the neighborhood because we drove right by it on our way to look at the house.  By the time we turned three times and entered the cul-de-sac, we were a bit disoriented.  Where is it from the house?  Right over there.

      Noise was a concern.  Do you hear the ambulance sirens at night?

      Apparently not.  We have never really noticed them.  Maybe they turn their sirens off when they get close to the hospital.

      What we do notice are the helicopters.  It’s hard to miss when a chopper hovers and lowers itself a hundred yards or so from our back yard. 

     At first, when we heard the chopper approaching, we would go to the window and look to try to see where it was going to land.   Did it land on the hospital roof?  No, we can see the hospital roof sometimes.  It didn’t land there.     

     It was August when first we looked at the house.  We never really checked the hospital out.  We liked the house.  The neighborhood seemed pleasant and quiet.  We moved in in October. 

     Then one late October day, when we had lived there for a couple of weeks, the Goodwife exclaimed, “Steven, there’s a parking lot!  Right over there.”

     After deciding her alarm was not because the house was on fire, I went to the window to look out.  Sure enough, there was a parking lot, a big one, and a huge building complex to go with it.  What Aladdin genie had overnight moved a hospital across the alley from our backyard?

    

     Having lived in this house for over a year, we have been around the block a time or two.  Surrounding the hospital complex, including the parking lot, is a nice walkway.  Trees, many of which have small signs identifying their species, border the walk.  Some signs include a donor of the plant and a dedication to a deceased person.

     Our backyard runs into two neighbors’ backyards.  The neighbors’ backyards abut the hospital’s walkway with its pleasant plantings.  If I could scale two fences, I could be in the hospital parking lot in a matter of seconds. 

     To avoid trespassing, we have to walk about five blocks to get to the hospital parking lot. Crossing the parking lot, we pass the helipad just a short distance south of the emergency room entrance.

  I have visited the hospital a number of times, to see a newly arrived citizen, to have blood tests done, to donate my monthly magazine.  It is quite convenient.

    One drawback:  When the Goodwife accompanies me, she always visits the gift shop.  Usually, she finds something that would be just perfect for someone, sometimes herself.    

     In the category of, “Oh wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us”, here is what our house looks like from the hospital walkway.

      When Spring works its magic, the genie will return to take away the hospital and the parking lot.

       

Lyceum

      When I was a kid, the school participated in a service provided by I don’t know whom, probably some government agency.  It was called the National Assembly program or some such name.

     When I went to Kansas to teach, they had a similar program they called “Lyceum”.  Both programs were designed to bring some culture and other world experience to us country bumpkins, I think.  I always welcomed the break from routine.  Truthfully, though, some of the programs we witnessed were less than entertaining.

      I am thinking of a small group of actresses who put on a Shakespeare play with a twist.  They were portraying Nazi soldiers during World War II who were putting on one of Shakespeare’s plays for their own entertainment while avoiding problems with their superiors.  The old auditorium had poor acoustics, which combined with Shakespeare’s original language and the switching back and forth between World War II and the Globe Theatre made the play very difficult to understand.

      Complicating matters, the program didn’t get started until late in the afternoon.  It wasn’t finished when the bell released rural students to catch their buses.  Five minutes later, the athletes made their escape to go to their practice.  By the time the closing curtain fell, there were very few in  the audience.

     But there were the very good programs, too.  Some benevolent agency sent us a storyteller once.  She spent two days in our system, one day with the grade schoolers and one day at the high school.  My girls were in grade school and I was teaching high school, so we all got a good dose of the storyteller.

     I had reason to recall her visit this past weekend.  The storyteller called her story “Two Rivers.”  It was her goal to involve every student in one of her stories.  She asked for volunteers to help her tell this story.  She selected four and in a whispered huddle gave them their instructions.

    The storyteller acted as the host of a roadside camp.  She had prepared an imaginary pot of stew.  Student one walked into the camp.  The host invited her to join her in some stew.  The girl asked, as instructed, “Are the dishes clean?”   The host answered, “As clean as two rivers can get them.”  Student one enjoyed a bowl of imaginary stew and exited.

     Actor two walked on and the conversation was repeated, “Are the dishes clean?”  “As clean as two rivers can get them.”  Actor two repeated the pantomimed dining scene and exited.  Actor three followed in the footsteps of one and two. 

     As actor three left the stage, the storyteller picked up the imaginary dirty dishes, looked at them, then whistled and called, “Here, Two Rivers!”  In pranced student four, a big guy with an always happy face doing his best impression of a joyously tail-wagging dog.  He commenced to “lick” the imaginary dishes that the storyteller held out to him.

     “Yup!  As clean as Two Rivers can get them,” concluded the storyteller, to much laughter, and a few groans.

      This past weekend, our world’s greatest grandson visited us.  He lacks two months of being two years old.  On Sunday morning, after a good going over with a wash rag, and when the scrambled egg crumbs were brushed from his sweat pants, upon release from the high chair, he immediately set off for the broom closet.  Not many doors he can’t open now.  He got out the broom and flailed the floor in his version of cleaning up.  It was pretty exciting for a minute or two, trying to keep chairs and self out of the unpredictable broom handle’s gyrations.

     His nap lasted into the Broncos game.  He wasn’t much interested in the beef stew we had lunched on.  Orange, apple, cookie beckoned.  The decree came down from above that he needed to eat something of substance before indulging in sweeter treats.  The siren song of fruit or sweet wasn’t strong enough to entice him to indulge in the stew.  He fasted for a while.

     During the second half of the football game, someone mentioned “popcorn.”  “Popcorn!  Yow, yow!  Popcorn!”

     “You have to eat your stew first.”

     Enough of the stew was gone in about five minutes to qualify as having eaten it.  When the first batch of popcorn hit the big red metal bowl, grandson went to the island counter, opened the door and got out his bowl.  For the next 30 minutes, popcorn went from the big bowl to his bowl, then to our bowls, back to his.  He ate a lot of it.

     When all the bowls were empty, the floor between couch and chairs and television had failed to dispose of its share of the second half treat.  Better get the dog to clean up.

     To the stairway went grandson.  “Bella!” he yelled.  The dog dutifully responded and the floor was soon clean.  Grandson decided what was a good way of cleaning the floor was a good way to do the dishes.  He put his bowl on the floor in front of the dog. Bella obliged.

     “Clean!” he said, after picking up the bowl and inspecting it.  Back to the island counter he went, opened the door and put the dish in its rightful place.

     Someone said, “As clean as Two Rivers can get it.”  We laughed.

     After grandson left, the Goodwife remembered to put the clean bowl into the dishwasher.  After he left.  No sense in discouraging the good habits of cleanliness and tidiness with a confusing lecture on the difference between a dog’s tongue and a dishwasher.      

   

The 21-Foot Lightning Rod

       We knew it was coming.  The sunny day darkened.  The calm was followed by the breeze twittering around us.  We weren’t really surprised.

     Once we got started, it was hard to stop.  The pile of pipes lying on the ground was steadily disappearing.  The end was in sight.  If we stopped, then we would have to start again, and starting is always the most difficult step in any project. 

      This project began earlier in the spring.  In March the trees ordered last winter began to arrive.  Spring break also arrived and promised the time to plant those trees, when there wasn’t something more pressing, like a trip to Cancun or to Tuscan to take in a little baseball.

      The Kansas house had its own well dedicated to tree watering.  It was instrumental in establishing the windbreak that surrounds that house on three sides.  Some time every year, usually in June, I would go out, uncoil the electric cord hanging around the pressure tank and plug into the exterior outlet on the house’s west side.  I would be rewarded by the musical hum of the submersible pump reverberating through the nearly 200 feet of pipe and the pressure tank.  The tone would change after about 30 seconds as the water finally made it to the surface and with an audible splash began to fill the tank.

     Originally, the well was intended to be the house’s main source of water, but yielding only about three gallons a minute, it was deemed inadequate.  The driller had already cased the well before he informed the property owner of its poor production, so rather than plugging the well and abandoning it, the previous owners went ahead and equipped the well with submersible pump, piping and wiring.  Instead of being plumbed into the house, it was connected to a drip system dedicated to watering trees.

     When we first moved there, a few cedars and many Ponderosas still needed the irrigation.  When we bought the place after renting for a couple of years, I put in two more rows of Ponderosas, all of which depended on the well for life.

     Meanwhile, the main well was located a hundred yards to the north, in the neighbor’s pasture.  It was a much better well, but it took a small fortune to pipe and power it with heavy copper cables running from house to well.

     This particular June, when I plugged in the tree well, I was not rewarded with a musical hum.  Instead, deadly silence hung in the air.  This had happened before.  I unplugged the pump and let it rest a minute.  I tried it again.  Same result.  A series of plugging and unplugging failed to jar the pump loose.

     I put in a call to the local well man who came out one day when we were gone.  He left me a message on the telephone answering machine (cellphones were still science fiction).  The pump was locked up and was no longer any good.  A trip to the well site revealed a bunch of lengths of pipe lying in the grass along with a coil of electric wire and the no good shiny chrome pump.     

      I called the well man and he said it would be X number of dollars for a new pump plus installation.  I declined the offer and asked for my bill for pulling the pump out of the well.       

     On a trip to Limon, I took the no good pump to the local well man’s shop.  He took the pump and tapped it a few times here and there with a rubber hammer.  He took a big pair of pliers and grabbed the drive shaft with them.  He worked the pump’s drive shaft back and forth until the impeller moved a wee bit.  He then dropped the pump into his sump tank, hooked it to power and flipped the switch.  It struggled momentarily, then took off.  It was pumping again.  He said it wouldn’t pump quite as well as it used to because when it jammed like that, it usually broke an impeller blade getting unstuck. 

     By the time we returned to Kansas, grass had grown up all around the pipe lengths lying beside the well.  There were nine sections of inch-and-a-quarter pipe lying there.  I had come prepared to put the pump back down into the well.  I had a pipe dog and a couple of heavy pipe wrenches with me.  But that was a two-man job.

    Lucky Uncle Bill.  I called him and up he came.  I had screwed the stub pipe into the bottom of the pump, and I had rewired it and taped the wire joints hoping they would be waterproof.  Now came the two-man part of the job.

     We set the pipe dog beside the well mouth and lowered the pump tailpiece down into the well.  One man held the pump in this position, being very careful not to drop it (or down the well it goes!).  The other held the pipe dog movable jaw open while sliding the dog over the well mouth and positioning the stub pipe between the pipe dog’s jaws.  With everything in place, the pump holder released his grip, and as the pipe tried to slide down, the pipe dog’s movable jaw dropprd down and clamped the pipe so it couldn’t move.

       Next, we had to stand one of the lengths of pipe up vertically, pick it up and thread it into the top of the pump.  We tightened the pipe-pump connection with the pipe wrenches.  Then came a dangerous maneuver.  In order to get the pump down into the well, the pipe dog had to come off the pipe and be shoved aside far enough to allow the pump to pass into the well.  During this move, there is nothing save human hands to hang onto the pipe sticking 20+ feet into the air. 

      To get the pipe dog to release its bite on the pipe, lift the pipe up.  One person has to hold the movable jaw open once it has released and move the dog to the side.  The pipe is lowered until the pump is below surface level.  Then the pipe dog has to be repositioned over the well and on the pipe, all while one person is holding the assembled apparatus.

     The pipe wrenches come into play again.  They are used to grip the pipe while lowering it. Starting with the pipe wrenches about chest high, both men lift enough to release the pipe dog jaws.  One man has to step on the movable jaw of the pipe dog to hold it open while the pipe is being lowered.  When the pipe wrenches are a few inches above the dog, the guy steps off the jaw and the dog clamps the pipe, keeping it from going lower.  Then the workers repeat the process, getting a chest-high grip on the pipe with the wrenches, releasing the pipe dog and lowering the pipe.  It takes six or seven bites to get the length of pipe down into the well.

    If the pipe has been disassembled correctly, each length of pipe will have a coupling on top.  The coupling acts as a safety collar.  If for some reason the pipe dog allows the pipe to slip, the coupling won’t be able to get through the dog jaws.

      Once the joint of pipe is down the well, it’s time to grab another section of pipe, stand it vertically, place it on top of the pipe in the dog, get it started into the threads properly, and tighten with the pipe wrenches.  Of course the assembly gets heavier with every added joint of pipe.  And at this point, you have over twenty feet of pipe sticking up in the air, again.

     So Bill and I had two or three lengths of pipe left lying in the grass.  We were being careful, concentrating on our job.  The assembly was getting quite heavy.  We weren’t really paying attention to the weather.

    The Goodwife stepped out and yelled something about better quit and get out of the storm.  We looked around.  The clouds weren’t that threatening, it wasn’t raining yet.  True, we could see flashes of lightning in the distance.  The thunder was grumbling but not that close.  She warned us another time or two.

     By the time the last pipe joint was made, the collar screwed on, the pipe dog removed with difficulty because it took both of us to lift the assembled pipe with pump on one end and collar on the other, with not a hand or foot to spare to drag or kick the dog off the well mouth, the storm had nearly passed us by.  Just a gust front we agreed, calling on the meteorology we had both learned getting pilot licenses.

     The real storm hit when we entered the house.  We got to hear how deficient our intelligence was, neither of us having the sense to come in out of the rain.  Every summer idiots like us died from lightning strikes, etc., etc.

     But, we protested, it didn’t really rain.  Lightning bolts had much higher targets than us.  The metal roof of the nearby house stood above us, even when we had 20 feet of pipe sticking up in the air.  Nearby trees were higher than we were.  We were well-grounded, pun intended.

     Our attempts to make light of the situation only served to turn up the vitriol.  Word got around the neighborhood.  We weren’t allowed to forget what we had done.

    When our neighbor and former owner of our place next saw me, he said, “Gosh!  Why didn’t you say something?  You could have used the little Ford tractor.  I have a pipe clamp that hooks to the scoop on the front end loader.”        

     That smarted a little.  Still, there was a pride in having done a difficult job, having completed it successfully, even if it could have been done in a much easier fashion. A little lightning added glamor to the job, maybe.

     The no good well pump was still functioning when we sold the place.

  

Chinese Doctor

     “I detect gas on your stomach.”

     Several replies raced to mind. “Well, Sherlock”?  “I’m still alive!”  “Happens every time I eat.”  Discretion stifled all before any reached my mouth.

      Such impertinence would be out of order.  I was sitting in this rather shabby office with my right arm on the desk.  The speaker, an older gentleman, had his three middle fingers of his right hand barely touching, if touching at all, the vein (or is it an artery?) in the joint of my elbow, right where the vampire (also known as a phlebotomist) jams the needle to take a blood sample.

      He had hovered there for maybe fifteen seconds, feeling God-knows-what in the pulse of my elbow joint. The first step on the journey to the seat beside this man’s desk and in close proximity with him began long ago.  At the time, I was in my mid-twenties, so it couldn’t have been that long ago, maybe.

     Perhaps it began in Oklahoma before I reached the age of twenty.  An unsanitary shower floor in a cheap motel might have been the beginning.  A good case of athlete’s foot contracted from the shower floor turned into jock itch by a thoughtless incidence of improper scratching.

     Various home remedies and patented salves and powders had failed to quell the rash, though I continued to try to find a cure.  Absorbine Junior promised to cure athlete’s foot but failed miserably, though it did light a fire that rivaled an ox-acetylene torch when applied to jock itch.

     The best thing was an anti-itch salve prescribed by a physician for a completely different, though yet unsolved, problem totally separate from the fungal infection.  That began with a friendly wrestling match with the landlord on his living room rug.  I had never wrestled as a sport, so even though I was twenty-five years younger than the landlord, former wrestler that he was, he easily got the best of me. 

     The only lasting result of my defeat was a rug burn on my right elbow.  As far as I knew, the only connection between that rash and the fungus infection was the refusal to heal.  The prescribed salve made the itch bearable, but the skin simply would not heal.  When the skin got to looking almost normal, it would start flaking off like a bad case of dandruff or potato flakes coming out of a box. 

     The next step towards me sitting by the old guy’s desk was a trip to Hawaii with the Goodwife to visit her mother.  Obviously, a lot of water passed under the bridge since that fateful day I stepped into the shower in Oklahoma.  I got married, I took a job teaching school in Kansas (not in that order), we had saved enough money to afford a trip to Hawaii.

    The Mother-in-law saw the rash on my elbow and determined I should visit the Chinese Doctor.  About three or four days before we were to depart for home, we made the trip.  At that time, Mother-in-law lived in Aiea in a three-bedroom house overlooking Pearl Harbor.  The automobile trip into Honolulu was about a thirty or forty minute ordeal with traffic.

    The Chinese Doctor’s office, if not in Hotel Street (I think it was) was in the near vicinity.  If you are unfamiliar with Honolulu’s Hotel Street, suffice it to say that Hotel Street made old time Larimer Street in Denver, not today’s version, the 1950’s version, look like Paradise.  Soldiers, sailors, and airmen stationed in Hawaii go there to spend their spare time and their money in the time-honored way military personnel have always spent their spare time and money.

     Hotel Street was safe during the daytime, I was told.  I felt totally safe sandwiched between my wife and my mother-in-law.

     The doctor’s office was an old storefront complete with big display window.  In the window hung a bat wing, snakeskin (I think), bird’s nest and other suchlike things that apparently advertised that the proprietor practiced herbal medicine.

     Mother-in-law and the doctor exchanged pleasantries.  She introduced me to the doctor, and the consultation began.  I told him about the unhealable rashes and showed him my elbow.  He wasn’t particularly interested in looking at the rash. Instead, he had me sit by the end of his desk while he sat on his side of the desk near me.  He carefully positioned my right arm on the desk with my palm face up.  Then he put his wrist on the desk beside my elbow joint.  Carefully he lowered the tips of his three middle fingers down to the blood vessel on the fleshy side of my elbow joint. 

     There his fingers hovered for some time until he removed them and made the pronouncement that I had gas on my stomach.  I certainly couldn’t disagree with that.  I didn’t ask aloud, but I wondered what that had to do with my skin problems.  I thought about the séance phonies who have their subordinates pump the would-be communicator with the dead for all the information they can get to guide the medium in what message he should be receiving from the beyond.

     I kept my doubts to myself.  He announced his recommendation:  no citrus for me.  That was rather an unwelcome dictum to follow.  I love grapefruit and oranges.  If I wanted to be healed, I would have to refrain from citrus, too much acid, he said. 

     I mentioned to the good doctor that my mother once had to take acid.  “What!  LSD?!” he asked in shock.

    No, no, no.  HCL, like in the stomach, at mealtimes.  He sniffed at that, as if to say how foolish. 

     He tore off three pieces of heavy-duty parchment paper or butcher paper from a tan or light brown roll.  He laid the paper out on the counter.  Then with some kind of hand held scale made of something like bamboo, he grabbed a can of this, a jar of that.  Some of the stuff looked like peppercorns, some like green tea powder, maybe something like gunpowder.  Carefully he weighed out each ingredient three times and dumped the contents of the scale onto each of the three papers. He topped off each of the three with what looked like twigs or straw from a bird’s nest.

    Carefully he folded the three papers into a rectangular packet one at a time.  He tied the packets up with twine so that they would neither unfold nor leak.  He said to put the contents of each packet into a pot with three glasses of water.  Boil it until there was only one glass of liquid left.  After the liquid cooled, pour the liquid off the residue and drink it.  I should do that on three successive days.

      He wanted me to come back in a week after I had done as instructed.  He wasn’t very happy to find out I was leaving in less than a week.  Did I expect him to heal me with only one visit?

     Having watched what went into the prescription, I wasn’t anxious to try the medicine.  The three packets went into my suitcase and went home with me.  It would be three months or more before I would take the twine off of one of the packets.  School had started when I spied the three packets, stowed away after our return to Kansas.  I took an idea from the kids in To Kill a Mockingbird.  If the stuff killed me now, I would miss school, not summer vacation.

    I poured a glass of water into a pan and eyeballed the level so I would know when to take it off the fire.  Two more glasses of water and the contents of the first packet went into the pan.  It took maybe two hours to get it distilled down to the one glass.  In my guess as to the level of the liquid in the pan to equal one third of the total liquid, I had neglected to allow for the volume displaced by the ingredients.

     I drained the stuff off, but I only had about two thirds of a glass.  It was pretty thick.  It tasted pretty bad, a faint licorice-like taste contributing significantly to that judgment.  “You going to drink that?” queried the Goodwife.  “I held my nose, I closed my eyes,” I chugged it down, to paraphrase “Love Potion Number 9.“

     I didn’t die.  If anything, I felt better.  So I followed up the next two days with the remaining two packets.  I stopped the boiling process sooner so I had closer to one glass of liquid, which was not quite as thick, nor as flavorful, as the first batch.  It was easier to ingest, though still not exactly a crème soda.

      From day one, my rashes did improve.  The one on  my elbow got much better.  With the use of the anti-itch cream, it nearly healed.  I had the feeling that if I had called on the Chinese doctor a second and maybe a third time, he would have healed my elbow completely.

     For sure, he had better results than the dermatologist I consulted had had.  The Goodwife insisted, so I went to the dermatologist.  He took skin samples from all three infected areas  About two weeks later, I got a letter from him saying all three samples proved negative for any kind of bacteria or other infestation, meaning fungus I presumed.  He didn’t invite me to call again, and I didn’t.

       I don’t think the Chinese doctor’s herbs could have cured the fungus rashes.  I eventually called on a local doctor who had been commandant of doctors in Korea, a sort of MASH guy.  I told him my problem.  Like the Chinese doctor, he didn’t care to examine the site.  When I told him my reason for calling on him, he instantly diagnosed fungus.  He launched into tales of his own experience with fungus. 

     He warned me I would always be susceptible to fungal infection (he was right).  He told of having an old pair of shoes in his closet, put there before he went to the army.  After he was discharged a few years later, he saw them and thought they would make great gardening shoes.  He didn’t have them on for more than an hour before his toes began itching and burning.  The fungus remained dormant in the old shoes for years and came to life when an appropriate host showed up.     

      He also mentioned a Catholic priest he had doctored.  His fellow clergymen recommended he consult the doctor.  They thought there was something wrong with the guy because he was always scratching inappropriately, like a baseball player adjusting his jock on television.

      The doctor had me take something that sounded like fulvicin for six weeks.  The jock itch completely disappeared and most of the athlete’s foot.  The medicine wasn’t good for the liver.  He suggested rather than endangering my liver by continuing the oral stuff, I should treat the toes with Clorox at shower time, and use something like Desenex foot powder when I dressed for the day.  

    I followed instructions, and eliminated the problem entirely after a few months.  The battle with the foot fungus is ongoing.  Rarely do I put on my socks without a fungicide powder, especially in the sweaty summertime.

      I have had to resort to an oral fungicide once since then.  The doctor who gave me my physical said that  “topical” treatment wouldn’t do the trick.  He prescribed a newer product, but it was still hard on the liver.

     Since my visit with the Chinese doctor, I have discovered my lactose intolerance.  Today, the sight of a nice juicy grapefruit starts heartburn without me even tasting it.  I still indulge in an orange or tangerine, but they too can cause me stomach problems.  Too much vitamin C gives me canker sores in my mouth.

     I often wonder what the good old Chinese Doctor would find  if he analyzed my arm joint today.  For sure, I’d lay off the citrus for a week or two before I called on him. 

      

Haunted House

     Vibrating and bouncing down the road, I fought back the claustrophobia as I tried to make myself comfortable on the wooden floor of the wheat truck.  Dust in the glow of the truck’s taillights was visible through the back of the truck bed where the tailgate had been removed.  A tarp spread over the top of the truck’s side racks kept the wind and some of the dust off us.

     I was not alone.  Eleven of my classmates accompanied me.  It was a Friday early in September of 1961.  We were nearing the apex of our “initation” ritual that “welcomed” us to high school.  We were freshmen.

     In 1961, upperclassmen still “hazed” the freshmen.  We didn’t call it hazing.  We called it freshmen initiation. 

     We had survived the school day and football practice for some of us, had had our suppers, had gathered at the school where we were helped into the back of the truck and were on our way somewhere out into the country.

     The whole thing began as soon the school year began.  Sometime in the first week of school, we freshmen got our “assignment”.  It was in the form of a handwritten note in my case.  It came from Donna Henry.

     Each freshman was assigned to a sophomore.  It was that sophomore’s job to dream up a demeaning costume for the freshman to wear on initiation day.  “Dream up” is probably not accurate since every sophomore had been through the same process, and as underclassmen, we had all watched the initiation ritual unfold, sometimes with trepidation and dread of when we had to take our turn in the ceremony.  Most of the “costumes” we wore were rehashed from previous initiations.

     In my case, I was instructed to wear a woman’s dress, hat, and shoes.  I had to carry a purse.  I had an onion on a string that I wore as a necklace.  I think I was spared the duty of wearing makeup.

     Fellow students were dressed as babies carrying baby bottles, as farmers or scarecrows for the girls.  During the morning, we had to do, or try to do, whatever an upperclassman instructed us to do, such as carry her books to class for her, or take a bite of the onion, or crawl on our knees from locker to water fountain. These activities took place in the break between classes.  We experienced a respite in the classroom where we tried to concentrate on the subject.

     Right after lunch, we were paraded downtown where we were subjected to trials on Main Street in front of schoolmates as well as any of the citizenry that cared to take in the spectacle.  I remember having to roll a jawbreaker through a trail of pepper.  Try to, anyway.  A fit of sneezing interrupted the process early on.

     I don’t remember too many of the other tortures we were subjected to.  I do remember that one fine fellow had a bottle of alum water that he made us take a swig of.  He was a junior.  Normally, juniors and seniors spectated while the sophomores put the freshmen through their paces.

      After the noon spectacle, we were allowed to take off our costumes and don our civvies.  Still to come were the evening activities, beginning with, the haunted house.  In the meantime, we did our best to get through the afternoon classes, and for most of the boys, football practice.

     So it was that we had all had our suppers, had been loaded into the back of somebody’s wheat truck and found ourselves headed out into the country where the sophomores had found an appropriate old abandoned house, which they had diligently prepared with haunts suitable to scare and disgust us.

     After a fifteen or twenty minute ride, the truck slowed, turned, came to a stop.  I was grateful to get out into the open.  We were sequestered and led through the house one at a time.  I passed through a door full of “cobwebs” when my turn came.  Early on, I was blindfolded.

     My blindfold was slipped long enough to show me a bucket of fish worms.  The blindfold went back on and I was told I couldn’t go any farther until I ate one.  So I reached down into a bucket I couldn’t see and grabbed a worm.  I put it in my mouth.  It tasted amazingly similar to a spaghetti noodle.  I had the good sense not to mention the similarity to my tormentors.  (They may have made me eat a real worm.)

     Moving along to the next station, my blindfold was slipped long enough for me to remove a shoe and sock and stick my bare foot into a bucket of slimy moss, readily available from any of the stock tanks in the area.  My blindfold restored, I had to reach down and grab a handful of the moss and eat it.  I’m not sure, but I think I put my foot in the pan of wet bread that had been placed over the bucket’s mouth.  Anyway, I grabbed a handful and gagged it down. 

     After being subjected to other such terrors, I was shown a ledge of some kind.  In the brief glimpse I got, it looked to be a two or three foot drop.  The blindfold in place again, I was twirled around a few times to thoroughly disorient me and led to the ledge and instructed to jump.  As I landed after about a six-inch drop, two of the sophomores on either side of me grabbed my arms and held me upright and I was back outside.  The blindfold came off and I was done.  I had been officially initiated into high school.

      There were probably other minor tortures I endured in the haunted house that I don’t remember.   But, it was over.  When all of my classmates had been through the gauntlet, we once again mounted the wheat truck and headed back to school.  There the sophomores treated us as guests of honor (I think we got to go through the punch line first) at a “sock hop”, a dance with records on a record player providing the music.

     It was probably called a sock hop because walking on the gymnasium floor with street shoes was strictly forbidden.  All participants removed their shoes to walk or dance on the floor.  There probably wasn’t much dancing.  We mostly listened and watched.  The usual sock hop consisted of the boys in one area, the girls in another, and only the pairs “going steady” danced out in front of everybody.  Of course, the lights were turned down so it was semi dark. 

     We were now bona fide high school students.  There were still indignities for us freshmen, like going last to anything that required a line, or getting the oldest sports equipment, football pads, basketballs, etc., having to clean up after every sports practice, bringing in the tackling dummies, putting away the basketballs, sacking and hauling in the bat collection and the baseballs. 

     After being cocky eighth graders, we were put in our place on the lowest rung of the social ladder.  Besides keeping us in our place, the tradition gave us something to look forward to, when we were sophomores.

      While I remember a lot about my own initiation, I can remember very little about the tortures we put our year-younger classmates through. 

    The only incident I can remember involved a shy, quiet girl we considered “weird”.  In the haunted house, she had to break an egg into a bowl while blindfolded.  She was then instructed to put her hand in the bowl with the raw egg, grab a handful, and eat it.  While she hesitated, a bowlful of cold plain gelatin was substituted for the egg bowl.  She put her hand into it, but the thought of putting the stuff into her mouth was too much.

     She knocked away the bowl, shoved her tormentors away, ripped off her blindfold and generally went berserk.  With difficulty, her keepers got her out of the house where she calmed down.  Her initiation was over.  The haunted house portion of freshmen initiation was over too, I believe. 

      The principal-superintendent accompanied us and our freshmen to the site.  (There was a teacher or two with us when we were freshmen, there to see everything was safe and didn’t get out of hand.)  The principal was appalled by the state of the old house we had chosen to rig up. He felt everybody, not just the freshmen, was in danger in the rickety old building.  We carried on under his wary eye, but he vowed that such a practice under such unsafe conditions would never happen again under his watch. 

     Thereafter, he would inspect the house before the sophomores could fix it up for the freshmen.  I don’t think a suitable house was found the next year, or the next, and the practice of the haunted house died.       

    The truth is there was a dearth of suitable old houses in the countryside.  All the old houses were destroyed either by the elements or by a farmer who wanted to convert the site to farm ground.  The last old house in our neighborhood went down in 1989 during the storm that spawned the tornadoes that ripped through Limon.  Today, remnants of the roof brood over the collapsed shambles beneath it like an old mother goose protecting its nest even in death.  

      Like the old houses, freshmen initiation has passed into eternity.   

     In pace requiescat.