Monday, June 24, 2024

A Blubber of a Balloon

 


Chapter 27

A Blubber of a Balloon

 

Thank you Dr. Brogan of The Dalles, Oregon, for hiring and training me to be a dental assistant. That prepared me for my second job with Dr. Gibson in McMinnville, Oregon. 

Dr. Brogan was the more serious-minded of the two dentists. He and I would get into philosophical discussions over the top of the patient's head, driving some to join in while sounding like the godfather mumbling over cotton rolls.

 Dr. Gibson made a big deal out of holidays, and when his second child was born, he put a stork on the roof holding an "It's a boy" sign. 

 He told me that his daughter was born the day the Korean War ended. He was serving as a dentist in Korea then and said that the doctors knew little about anesthetizing the face. They would infuse the tissue with Novocain until it puffed up like a balloon, making it impossible to find all the shrapnel embedded there. 

 A dentist, however, knows about nerve blocks, so he would anesthetize soldiers with face injuries, and the doctors could easily pick out shrapnel.

 As I said, his daughter was born the day the war ended, and for some reason, the authorities told the soldiers not to celebrate. So, Gibson suggested they celebrate his daughter's birthday, and they partied hardy.

 Every year on his birthday, Dr. Gibson would send a dozen roses to his mother. He was the last of eleven children and figured he would thank her every year that she didn't stop having children before him. His mother was a tiny little thing. He said she only snapped her girdle with her husband's help. 

 Dr. Gibson loved Christmas and bought presents for Irene, the receptionist/bookkeeper, and me. He left the gifts in sight to tempt us, and Irene would snoop by looping her finger between the lid and the box's bottom. One night, he altered the gifts. Her package had an opening cut in the top with a bendable doll crawling in. Mine had a multicolored horse on top. He said, "I was a horse of a different color." 

 Once, he filled my coffee cup with dental plaster that looked like a volcano poking out of the coffee. It was the same color as the powdered coffee creamer we used and had a tongue depressor sign sticking out of the plaster, saying, "Creamer gone bad."

 One day, he had an order delivered to the office. It was a six-foot gray weather balloon. While he was at lunch, I semi-puffed the balloon and stuffed it in the closet where he kept his smock. When he opened the door, he would be met with a walrus-sized blubber of a balloon.

 But he got me back.

 When we seated the patient, he began working without his smock. (Phooey) Soon, he asked, "Joyce, would you go to the cupboard and get the pen out of my pocket?" Well, I faced the blubber, got the pen, and we had a good laugh.

 I thought he had gotten me, but obviously, he had met the blubber when he returned from lunch. But I never got to see him open that door.  

 Dr. Gibson hired me for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Oklahoma State University. Neil could still work at LRI, Linfield Research Institute during the summers, so we drove home during summer vacation and worked in McMinnville, Oregon.

 At the end of the following year of school in Oklahoma, the moment I completed my final Chemistry exam, the professor approached me and said I had a phone call from Oregon. Of course, that gave me an adrenaline hit, for I had never gotten a phone call from home, and a call to the school?! It turned out that Dr. Gibson was offering me a job that summer.

What a guy. Unfortunately, I declined, as Neil had accepted a job as a physicist at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory in Corona, California. That ended my dental assistant years, for I had transferred to the University of California, Riverside twenty-five miles from Corona. And as we were permanently moving to California, I was accepted as an in-state student. Soon, we would be on our way—packed to the brim with all our belongings in that old Ford and with Cassy, the cat, we acquired that year.

 We tried to teach Cassy to walk on a leash, but she balked, and we were grading the road with her, so I gave it up. Once we began our trip to California, she sat frozen for two days on the top of our packed back seat, which gave her about a foot of space between our belongings and the roof.

 Dr. Gibson and I kept in touch for years, as he liked the little The Frog's Song booklet I was writing. (See, I had to use the same title for two of my writings.) Our communication lapsed as we moved around, However I did go to him once as he replaced a dental bridge Dr. Brogan had put in years earlier. (Remember that horse accident? One of my molars died as a result of the trauma.) Dr. Gibson was a brilliant bridge builder, he had built a six-tooth bridge for his wife—I believe that is unheard of in dental publications. I failed to find him for a few years, and recently, I found that both he and Fairy, his wife, had passed away. Fairy's obituary said that Chester Gibson was the love of her life. Dr. Gibson's obituary said he worked full-time until he was 85, then part-time until he was 90, when a stroke cut his retirement short.

 As Neil and I were driving through the deserts of Southern California on our way to Corona, our car lights kept flashing against white images that appeared to be ghosts in the night. We had to stop and clarify what we were seeing.

 It was an array of white flowers growing on a stalk at least eight feet in the air. They were Yucca plants. To Oregonians' eyes, they were aliens.

 Cassy thought so, too. When we stopped and opened the door, she escaped and hid in the bushes. We feared she was too frightened for us to catch, but she was smart enough not to spend the night in the desert. We caught her and carried her into California where she lived with us for the next twenty years.

 

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

 

 

26

Ten Thousand

 

Oprah Winfrey says that when she walks into a room she expects people to say there goes one phenomenal lady.

She says she never feels out of place, inadequate, or an impostor, for she knows she is only one, but she comes as ten thousand. Those were the people who made her. One, her Great-grandfather, was born a slave and could not read. After the emancipation proclamation, however, he learned to read and eventually became the first of their family to own land.

You know Oprah didn't have an easy life. After being raped as a child, she was taken out for ice cream by the person who raped her, and she stood there with her ice cream while blood was dripping down her legs. She had an illegitimate stillborn child, but she didn't let that stop her forward movement into life and success. And there she stood, proclaiming she doesn't feel out of place or inadequate.

I know that my Great-grandmother was the family's first child born on American soil. 

I know her mother was pregnant on the boat to this country, and imagine pregnancy mixed with the rocking sea. Maybe I inherited my propensity for seasickness from her. I hope she wasn't sick on that crossing.

 I know the little German community in Kansas was a close-knit community, and all through my life, I heard my mother say she cooked as though for a threshing crew—or liked to. Big family holiday meals were fun for her.

 The phrase “Cooking for a threshing crew” came from the years on the farm when, during grain harvest, all the men would band together and thresh the grain first for one farm, then another, and the women would cook for them.

 I know that my grandparents butchered a hog for winter and let nothing go to waste, including making head cheese, which mom tried to make once. I could never bring myself to eat it, and I don't know what happened to the mess she made. It disappeared from the scene. 

 My mother wanted to create a farm for herself, and she began with a garden and chickens. One day, a large box containing 100 baby chicks arrived in the mail. They became our laying hens. All the males ended up in the freezer. Mom had researched how to cut up a chicken. Her carving always had a wish-bone piece, her favorite, but I never see that piece of chicken anymore.

Mom praised her mother's quilting ability, for Grandma's stitches were small and her lines straight; Mom said she was the best of the quilters. The women got together for a quilting bee, which meant the quilting fabric was stretched over a frame. The women sat around the periphery of a frame that took up most of the room, and while their fingers worked, they visited. I thank my lucky stars I don't have to do some of the work they performed, like quilting, darning, and canning, and what must have been endless cooking.

 Women have been credited with creating language. Not only do women like to visit, but exchanging knowledge around the food preparation was essential. The men, being hunters, could get by with pointing and grunting.

 My mother also said her mother didn't teach her about housework, for her mother preferred to do it herself. My attitude was, "How hard is it to clean? You figure it out." However, her mother's attitude probably bothered her more than any teaching she would have given.

 My grandmother liked canary birds; she had one at our house in Mt Vernon who trilled like an angel. So, the story goes, Grandma also had a canary when they lived in Kansas. One day, a cat broke into the house and killed her canary. She picked up a broom, intending to chase that cat out of the house. She accidentally hit it on the head, and to her shock, she had killed it. 

 Mom said her father, Frank Bertsch, would coax her to reveal the contents of his Christmas gifts, and she couldn’t keep the secrets. He would also stand on the front porch and tell her to listen carefully, and she would hear the corn growing. On storm threatening nights he would stand on the porch watching for tornadoes. 

 (The boiling of a purple sky such as happened in Oklahoma was a weird and fearful scene to Oregonians. There were no tornadoes though.)

 Mother's sister was tall—Mom was too, but Marie was also thin and probably looked taller than mom who was buxom. Marie was perhaps self-conscious about her height, as well, for people often asked her, “How’s the weather up there?”

 People can be unkind without thinking about it, especially regarding physical traits people have no control over and feel self-conscious about.  To add insult to injury mom had curly hair and was the prettier one. Marie said she kept stealing her boyfriends.

 I never heard any snide comments or complaints about the people in the family.

 The women in my immediate family longed for a child. Marie's husband didn't want children, so she was childless for years, but eventually they had a son. Marie's husband enjoyed that boy so much that they had two other children, another boy, and a girl. Mom didn't have a baby for 19 years after me, and a tumor took away Dottie's ability to have children, so I worried about my fertility. Thankfully, I easily had two girls.

Mom named me Joyce after her best friend, but I don't know what sort of person she was. I'm honored, though, to be named after someone Mom loved. 

Great Grandmother Hertenstein had arthritic hands, locked up joints bent at a forty-five-degree angle. It was troublesome to see her crippled, and Mom said she couldn't sew anymore, something she loved. She spoke in an accent and visited us at least once, from where I don't know. We have a picture of Mom, Great Grandmother, Grandma, and me—four generations of women. I look to be about six.

She must have visited earlier, for Mom told me that they pressed upon me to be on my best behavior before her visit. I tried hard, not knowing my best behavior, but when she asked me, "Joyce, where are your stockings?" I was dumbfounded. I didn't know about long stockings; I always had bare legs and wore short skirts. 

My mother was a frustrated artist—my evaluation. I don't think she would have acknowledged it, but it showed in her beautiful yards, and how she could prune those apricot and peach trees so their fruit could be picked while standing on the ground. She spent years at the kitchen table designing the house they wanted to build but never did. She taught herself cake decorating, made my wedding cake, and then sold some cakes to other brides. 

Mom liked to cook and sew, and while I was in grade school, she made many of my clothes. I remember her hand stitching the hems of those immense skirts we wore in those days. The last dresses she made for me were my bridesmaids' dresses. 

On the day when I was nine months pregnant and feeling a bit off, I propped myself up in bed to open a box I had received that day from Mom. It was full of old baby clothes she had made for Bill seven years earlier. 

My baby girl was born that night.

 I was disappointed that the nurse wouldn't give me the phone at three a.m. so I could call my mother. I wanted to be the one to tell her that her granddaughter had arrived. I was so energized I could have run down the hall, and I was starving. But they only had a hot 7-Up, and I don't like 7-Up. 

Neil called her later. That's customary, but that wasn't right, I wanted to tell her, besides, I was awake the rest of the night. 

 Did I tell you that my mother was pregnant at my wedding? She was only two months pregnant, and tended to have round belly, so it was not noticeable. Bill was a surprise baby, a happy surprise. An old wife's tale says that babies bring more babies, so it was with mom. It was only about a year after Mikie came that Mom became pregnant. 

 My parents always scrambled for money, but they scraped together enough to adopt their first two Korean children. The little boy, Mikie, arrived a year after Jan and weighed only ten pounds at one year of age. Mom could be credited with saving his life, for he had such severe dysentery she would stay awake nights tending to him, and our family doctor would make house calls. 

 After that slow start, you should see him now. He is a career Military man. Currently, he teaches, but for a time, he was a paratrooper sent to South America to thwart the shipment of drugs into the United States.

 After Mike's father passed, his mother gave her sons, there were four, some of the family money. She didn't want them to wait until she died. My mother had often said that if they had the money, she would adopt another child. Mike agreed, and they used it to adopt the six-year-old girl.  

Mom and Grandma Holt, Bertha Holt of the Holt Adoption agency, communicated through letters. Grandma Holt liked Mom's descriptions of their family and enjoyed hearing how the children were growing and maturing. I was astounded that the agency kept those letters. It was years after mom’s death that they sent the letters to Mike. Mike sent them to Jan who was an adult by them. She gave them to me.

 The letters were photocopied front and back, and many were not dated, so they were a puzzle, but I typed them and made them into a book titled Mom's Letters and Mine. It's on Amazon. (You must also type in my name, Joyce Davis, as the author to find it. It’s Mom’s Letters…and mine by Joyce Davis. The quickest way to find it is by the ISBN number BOOJH1PUK8.

Her communication with Grandma Holt was a bit of history and a time when she laid her soul bare on paper. Now, I may take my commentary out and republish the book from Mom's perspective only. They don't need me in there. It's her voice and her legacy. At the time, I thought telling the rest of the story was essential, but maybe it wasn't.

 (PS It's still there. I bought my own book on Kindle, reread it, and left it as is. DD said my words are essential. Okay.)

 Mike went into military service at fifteen, lying about his age. His mother said she didn’t know what to do with him, so she signed for his admittance.

 Putting an errant boy with a horse is about the best thing you can do for him, and Mike entered the Calvary. I don't know how he or his mother managed that, but it was a coup. I didn't think he was particularly savvy around horses, for he didn't ride, but he knew how to pick a good horse. (He chose Boots.) He said he had a teacher who couldn't ride but could teach others how. Once, he rode Boots to bring home the cow, and he told me that Boots knew what he was doing, but he was falling all over that horse. His unit in Calvary was the last one and used only for ceremonial purposes. Eventually, he was transferred to the army and was stationed in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, where he met Mom.

 He had pictures of his unit at a swimming hole with horses and men in the water. I thought that was so cool.

 He believed that the army saddle, called a McClellan, was the best and bought one for me. It was miserable, hard as a rock, with an opening down the center—for the horse, not the rider. The straps to the stirrups would slide as the horse moved, and a canter would leave nasty bruises on my thighs. So, instead, I rode bareback, which is the best way to teach a child to ride. Luckily, Boots had a perfect back for bareback riding, and that muscle behind a horse's front legs is the ideal spot to tuck your leg. You can communicate with the horse, and having your leg tucked will help you stay on the horse. Notice how many times I use the word perfect? Well, Boots was.

.I've read since then that the misery of the McClellan saddle was the reason the Rangers were in such mean spirits and took it out on the Indians. The Indians who rode Appaloosas--claimed to be a rough ride—set them up to be their grumpiest. Thus, the battle was on.

 

 

“Every oat tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.”--Henry David Thoreau 

From Goddesses 50 and Beyond, https://goddesses50andbeyond.blogspot.com

"Breathe, Pet Your Cat"