Stayin' Alive

Having escaped drowning, being shot in the head, and eaten by a bear, I feel pretty lucky to have spent my adult life, and a pretty hectic life, at that, without serious illness or accident. Well, I did total two cars. The first one was in my neighborhood with our only car full of kids, Cissy's car pool going to junior high. Both drivers were cited, but nobody was hurt. A neighbor got the kids to school on time, and I made it to Provo High in time for my first class. I got pretty tired of walking half way across town every day to school and back. I would walk to the neighborhood store and sit until a neighbor came along to take me and supper fixings home. One night a week I had to attend a driver's ed. class, so I stayed at school and caught up until the class started. BYU President Ernest Wilkins was in the same class (for the second time). He was a terrible driver. I had not cried when the accident happened, but when the car was fixed, about a month later, and Ted drove it into the driveway, I sat on the front steps and cried for half an hour.

Despite my being very cautious, a few years later, when we had become a two car family, a big car went right through a red light on the university campus and crashed into us. I was driving Ted to his office. We were pushed into a huge truck which had stopped at the light. Several people saw it and offered to testify that I was clearly in the right. Our poor little red VW convertable was demolished. Neither of us got hurt at all, but I discovered several days later that my wedding rings were not completely round and two little diamonds had been popped off. As the car was the last of the series and could not be replaced, we had it restored. It is now 35 years old, and still spiffy enough to shine up for the grand kids to use as a "get away" from their weddings.

In 1994 we both retired from teaching. We went out with a bang, living in London the last six months where he was to teach until Christmas. Our grandson John was 14 at the time and we decided it would be wonderful for him to go with us. John and I went over a week early, so I could show him around before the BYU students arrived. I felt so smart impressing John with my knowledge of London by taking the tube to Baker Street Station, walking in front of Madame Toussaud's and crossing Marlybone Road at the light to the school where church was meeting while the Hyde Park Chapel was being renovated.

Marlybone Road turns into M l, one of the heaviest traffic roads in Britain, but early Sunday morning there was very little traffic. I saw that the light was yellow and assumed that the car a block away would be stopping for the red light which was sure to follow. It is difficult enough in England where they drive on the wrong side, but I knew we could get across before he got there anyway. What I did not realize was that there is also a yellow light before a green one (two yellow!) The driver had seen the red one and knew the next one would be green, so he sped up! I heard the brakes and John yell "Grandma, stop!"

I do not remember flying up over the car. John watched me go 10 feet above it, fall back down on the windshield and onto the pavement. I only remember sitting like a lady on the street, my dress tucked under me. The taxi driver and John helped me up, found my shoes and glasses which were scattered all over the street, and having no pain I walked to church. My dress wasn't even dirty. The poor taxi driver wanted to take me to the hospital, but I refused. I took his card and called him the next day to tell him I was fine and on my way to catch a train to Stonehenge.

My knees were very bruised, but not painful. I put large bags of frozen peas on them the rest of the day. While lying around watching TV that day I saw a special police report of all the accidents that had happened on that street, many people killed and some were shown in wheel chairs who never recovered. Actually, the traffic signal which would have told us to WAIT had burned out. We decided not to tell grandpa until after we had gone to Paris the next week, for
fear he would not let us go. John still has nightmares where he wonders what he would have done if I hadn't survived. He didn't know a soul in the city, nor where we were living!

The next year found us in China. The year we spent teaching in a university there was the most exciting thing we have ever done. Th whole city of seven million people heard on their radio that the old white headed teacher at the university had fallen down the huge steps of the administration building and had lost several of her beautiful teeth. For the rest of our time there I was recognized by people all over town. They gestured in sign language to ask how I was doing, and some made a box with their arms to indicate they had seen me on TV. It was so hard to keep from smiling. My students said, "Don't worry how you look. No women your age in China have any teeth". My fall could have been worse, but had I fallen on the steps instead of in the broken cement of the street, I could have had a broken neck. The 20 year old surgeon did a great job on my lip, only 7 stitches.

I will tell some of our China adventures later. The experience which came closest to taking my life happened in 1998, just before I turned 70. It is quite a story, and will be my next posting.

Don't know what happened, but I was telling about the big infected heel when I lost the end of my story. I was actually taken to a doctor for the second time in my life. Without any anesthetic he cut all the thick skin off my heel, and I didn't even feel it. I was tough!! Antibiotics had not been invented, or at least they were not available to us, but I got bandaged up and was fine in a few days.

My three drownings were interesting, only two near drownings, actually, but three good opportunities. I still don't know how to swim, but I was never afraid of water. My favorite thing was body surfing, although we didn't know we were surfing, nor that it was dangerous. We just called it jumping waves. When we saw a big wave coming, we waited until it was almost on us and jumped up to ride it in, instead of letting it cover us. I had never heard of undertow, nor that anyone had ever drowned there. The ocean is not a good place to learn to swim. The mill pond was unsafe, but the boys always learned there. Once, I decided to go into the shallow part and see if I could float. With my face under water I felt my body levitate. It felt wonderful, but when I had to raise my head to breathe, my feet went down and I could not touch bottom. I screamed and went under. A girl I didn't know jumped in and saved my life.

At the beach the next summer I was with a bunch of teenagers and fishing boats on a beach party. None of them were noticing that one of the boys was chasing me with the intent of getting my hair wet. The water was very shallow, maybe less than two feet, when suddenly I stepped into a crater, went down very low and came up just long enough to tell him as loud as I could that could not touch bottom. A man on one of the boats swam over and pulled me out. Paul grabbed my hand to pull me out, but I pulled him in. He didn't come back up. I told the man what had happened, so he went back down and pulled him out. It took quite a while to resuscitate him. Nearly ruined our party!! Neither of us could swim, but none of the others knew. Had they known, they would have told us of the danger. During WWll the military base near there had used the strip for bombing practice, and there were craters all over.

Paul and I had both just graduated from high school, but were headed to different colleges. We wrote for a year and the next summer planned on dating. My family had moved down near the beach while I was away at college. My very, very brief "romance" is an interesting story which I will detail a bit later.

I escaped one more tragedy at summer 4H camp in what Hyacinth Bucket would call a "riparian"
incident. I was in my swim suit and white rubber cap (I hated getting my hair wet) standing on the pier at White Lake watching kids , dive off the end. I knew it was too deep for me, but I wanted to try it, so I chose a spot along the side and went in head first, not realizing it was too shallow. I could feel my head crunching as it dug a hole in the bottom and filled my cap with sand. I was too embarassed to tell anyone what I did; I don't think anyone saw. My head was spinning for a while.

Daddy was not a hunter, so we never had firearms around, but my uncle came by with a rifle, which he left loaded on our porch while he went in the house. I was raking leaves from under the porch. Bill picked up the rifle, got me in its sights and pulled the trigger. I heard the bullet whiz by my head and land in the post right by my head. What an opportunity to pull a joke on him! I collapsed on the ground and nearly scared everybody to death. It didn't seem very funny to anyone but me.

That about covers my growing up years. On my honeymoon in Yellowstone Park I could have been eaten by a bear. We stopped on the highway for me to take a picture of two adorable cubs, but I didn't see the mother until she charged me. Just before reaching the car I fell sprawling on the highway, skinning the palms of both hands on the pavement, losing the camera and my dignity, but closing the door in the bear's face!

Did I manage to go to college four years, learn to drive a car and teach school forty one years without a single disaster? Well, not quite. I managed to total two cars without anyone in either car being hurt. Upon retiring I guess I became more daring than ever. I have three stories of real disasters which I will relate in the next blog, and then you can see how many lives I actually have had.

Nine Lives

Cats, it has been said, have nine lives. Before I reached the age of accountability I had used up four of mine by not being poisoned with arsenic, bleeding to death, breaking every bone in my body, nor dying at the hand of a pedophile. The move back to the Deep Run area where all our kin lived did not improve my chances A farm is a terribly dangerous place for children.

My first crisis was stepping on a rusty nail that penetrated all the way through the arched part of my foot and pushed the skin up like a tent. Daddy pulled it back out with pliers and had me soak the foot in hot water with Epsom salts, thinking that if tetanus was present we would see red streaks climb my leg in a day or so. No need for a doctor until then. I had never had the shot, nor any other inoculations.

We never had shoes to wear in summer, and we did not always know why we had a sore foot, a bit of glass, a splinter ? It must have been a thorn, felt like one when I walked on my heel, so I walked on my toes instead when Mama could not find the cause with a sterilized needle. It will pop out when it gets infected, they said, and then it will get well. A week or so later it had not popped out, and it was beginning to throb. One morning I noticed big infection under the tough skin of my whole heel

The most painful trauma I had resulted fom an unseasonable warm spell occurring just before Christmas. Since the house was not heated, except for a wood stove in the front room, we had feather beds under us and many homemade quilts over us, aided by a hot brick at our feet. In my outing flannel gown I awoke covered in sweat and to my mother's horror she saw bright red spots all over my chest and underarms which burned and itched. She remembered my grandpa had lived with us when I was very small, and he had an itch on his legs that looked similar which he was treating with a bottle of lotion. Half a bottle had been left over, which she moved with us. She never threw anything away. Stripping me down, she shook the liquid which had settled to a pink mass in the bottom of the bottle, and plastered me with it. It was so painful and I screamed and jumped up and down. She tried to wash it off with water, but it would not dissolve, and immediately huge blisters covered the area. I cried and she cried. She put one of her loose nightgowns on me and suspended everything with pillows and boxes, because I could not bear anything to touch me. After a couple of hours the burning eased up, and I got a little sleep that night. On Christmas day I was able to go to the table for dinner with pillows under my arms. Daddy felt so bad for me he suggested they bundle me up and take me to Kinston that night to see the Christmas lights at the rich people's homes. By the end of the vacation, I was comfortable enough to go to school. I never missed school, perfect attendance for nine years!
I was covered in scabs, but I put on a high neck dress. When I raised my arms I smelled the faint odor of dead skin. When teacher asked me to write on the board in math class, a girl saw up my sleeve and was horrified. I told her I had a bad fall and scraped the skin. The only scarring was under my arms, and that has definitely been a plus, because I have never needed to shave there.

My legs have not required shaving either, because something similar happened to them in the summer. Daddy told me to put on a pair of denim pants and help my mother scatter fertilizer on the peanut plants. They were covered with dew, making my pants wet and heavy. Soon there was more fertilizer on my pants than the peanuts. My legs began to burn all around. We hurried to finish the job; the faster I walked, the worse the abrasion and burning. Again I had skin burned off, and I carry some of the scars still.

So Proud to be Here

My first recollection of hearing a radio program when I was very small was a program called Grand ole Opry, broadcast from Nashville. My favorite character on it was Cousin Minnie Pearl. As she came to the mic, she exclaimed in a shrill voice, "I'm jest so proud to be here. So glad I could come." Proud was a word used to mean happy. Nobody would ever admit being proud, a sin. One of the first TV programs broadcast on TV was the Saturday night Opry, and my favorite looked every inch a hillbilly spinster wearing a new straw hat with the price tag hanging down in the back. Although I enjoyed her poking fun at herself and her weird kinfolks, my greatest ambition was to distance myself from anything that might mark me as being from the "sticks".

The fact is I have, through hard work and a good amount of luck mixed with my blessings, managed to be exactly where I have always wanted to spend the last days of my life. I give credit to many people along the way, not the least of whom were those relatives whose ideals filled my head at an early age. Eighty one years after entering the world in a southern"hard scrabble" community in NC, I can say, "I'm just so happy to be here, so glad I am still here and in good health". Before there were child labor laws, I learned to work hard. It gave me amazing bones. My last bone density test showed my bones to be strong as an eighteen year old. The food I ate from the farm, although boring, was perfect to grow on, all kinds of beans, green veggies, eggs, etc.

Recently I came to realize that I have escaped death on at least twenty occasions. I hope I don't bore anyone by recounting some of the more miraculous escapes. Most of them have been falls, but any one of them could have been fatal. I always taught school in high heels. One January morning I was making my way up to the second floor where my food lab was located, my arms so full of groceries I failed to notice that the linoleum had been cleaned and polished, when my feet flew from under me and I fell with the groceries on top of me. With my hair in a bun, I didn't even get a goose egg where I hit. Strangely, I thought about that fall a few months ago, when I had spent several hours at the computer, and as I finished I rolled my chair back and leaned back in the chair, which also swiveled and rocked. Suddenly the large metal shaft sheered off evenly just above the five rollers and down I went. Ted heard me and came to extract me from the chair. I was shaken pretty badly, but although I got a big egg that time, I did not get a headache! Many falls in the yard from slippery rocks have resulted in bruises, appendages I thought broken, but were not, but even having the vine over the hot tub give way when I grabbed it for support and causing me to fall, (on my head again) I have never had a broken bone.

Falling does not indicate that I have been reckless all my life, just busy and unthinking. As a toddler I was into everything, very hard to manage. I noticed that in all my early photos I am sitting on one leg, because it took a bit longer to get from that position, just long enough to snap the picture and I was off and running. My parents left me watching my baby brother when I was two. He was asleep on the floor on a quilt. If he woke, I was to call them immediately. I was so bored I decided to go to a neighbor's house. Before I could get there my daddy saw me and came after me with a switch, burning my legs up all the way home.

My first real scrape with death came when I was about three. I was a very early talker and always had the neighborhood kids following me for great adventures. I remember looking into a paper sack in the corner of the smoke house where they hung hams to smoke. The powder inside was the most beautiful shade of green. I called my friends to come in to see it. I wondered how it would taste, so I ran into the kitchen to get a spoon, and when Daddy found us I was going on the second round, administering arsenic as they stood in a row. It was commonly used to kill insects in the garden. Daddy found a neighbor with a car, grabbed me up and off we went to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. The other parents decided to just melt some lard and force it down their throats, causing them to vomit it up. I remember how good it felt to know how much he loved me. On the way home, he bought me a pink sweater and an ice cream cone. It was the only time I went to a doctor in my childhood.

Developmental psychologists argue that children don't remember anything that happens before they are four at least. My very first memory was going to the beach with my cousin Helen and her parents. Helen was five years older. She was wearing a sun dress, white background with little yellow flowers, and it laced up the back to tie at the neck. When I was in high school I was helping her clean out an old trunk in the attic when I saw that dress and reminded her of wearing it to the beach. She said I couldn't remember it, because I was only two. I could recall sitting on the sand under the porch of a dark red beach house with very high underpinnings to keep the high tide from washing it away, and later I actually was able to show them the house, which was still there, only partly washed away. They had taken me with them to the beach because my mother was having a baby, and desperately needed me out of the way. It was in July, the height of the tobacco harvest.

I also remember the day he was born, being taken to her bed to see my brother. My uncle wanted me to sit on his lap, but his clothes were covered with yellow mud where he had been digging a well. I hated to be dirty, and I screamed until he put me down.

A few months later we moved to Craven County to rent another farm which I have written about in my mother's story. The four years there were spent tending my two brothers, and doing chores. My one experience there which could have been tragic happened when my parents went to New Bern and left us with a hired man. Bill was not a year old yet, and could be contained by piling an old tire in top of another one, a makeshift play pen, and plopping him inside. I will not try to describe the man's actions, but he was aware he was irritating me and told me if I told my parents, my dad would shoot him. My dad would be sent to prison and I wouldn't have a daddy. I have always been blessed with a knowledge of right and wrong, even when I did not understand why it was wrong. The memory burns as fresh still. I tried to never be in his eyesight, and was so glad when he didn't live with us any more. In high school I saw him at a dentist's office, but was careful not to let him know I recognized him.

Two more incidents during those four years could have had terrible consequences. My dad had to build a barn for the mules. I think the farm we rented had been fallow, because there was no place to keep animals, and the house, which had been a very nice antebellum home was crumbling. It was fascinating to see him and some helpers cut down the trees, skin the bark off and put together the log barn with two rooms for animals and a loft for the hay. When the loft was full I figured out a way to get up there and play in the hay, although the ladder had not been attached yet. The logs were small enough and the spaces were large enough I could get my hands through. Bill was two. I pushed him up first. When we were ready to come down from the place where nobody figured we could go, I could not see well. I slipped and fell. Unfortunately a barrel had been placed right beneath the hole, and I fell smack across it, one leg on either side. Bill screamed, but didn't dare follow me. I was too traumatized to scream, but they heard him and scooped me up. I was able to satisfy them that nothing was broken, so there was no need for a doctor. For several days they were afraid that I would never be able to walk, because just trying to move either leg was excruciating. A neighbor who had a radio had heard an ad for Crazy Water Crystals, a cure all, so Daddy flagged down the train which came a few miles from our house, went to the drug store in town and bought a big bottle. By the time I had consumed it, I was able to walk just fine.

Twice in my life I have come very close to bleeding to death. I will tell about the first time, and that will be the end of this episode. We moved back to the Deep Run area when I was in second grade. I was in first grade when I sliced my left thumb open. We did have a pair of scissors in the house, but I was in a hurry to cut a picture off a box to make a paper doll, and a razor blade was handier. I remember seeing the blood gush, but Mama bound it tightly, kept me home from school, and although the scar still measures over two inches, it wasn't deemed necessary to get stitches. It ached something awful all day, and that night, so I could get some sleep, she used one of her folk remedies. She removed the rag and taking a raw Irish potato she scraped a quantity of it on a clean rag and bound it up again. With my hand on a pillow, I was able to go to sleep. Mama came to check on me during the night and found my hand in a pool of blood, soaked through the pillow and into the mattress. I remember her saying, "Oh, My Lordie" and crying. Daddy jumped on the horse and rode to the train tracks where he tied the horse to a tree and flagged down the morning train. A doctor gave him some white powder to stop the flow of blood, which worked right away as soon as he returned. All that time, Mama cried, and my grandpa, who was living with us read a scripture from the Bible about "the blood of the lamb" which was supposed to stop bleeding. The tourniquet hadn't worked and I could not stand, I was so weak.

That covers my first six years of trauma. Next time I will try to finish this theme and return to my experiences growing up and getting an education.