The Little Bang Theory

There are times in every child’s life to try to find order and make sense of the universe. I found that many of my questions received confusing answers that only led to many more questions.  When I asked my mother where I came from, she said I started as something smaller than a bread crumb.  I, of course, made no distinction between something smaller than a bread crumb and an actual bread crumb, so it was hard to look at bread crumbs the same way after that.

It’s anyone’s guess how many lives were snuffed out when Mom wiped off the table. 
    At the first funeral I attended, hearing “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return” immediately gave clarity to the dust under my bed.  It was dead people.  How it got there was another problem that eluded explanation.  Liz never had dust under her bed because it was where she chose to hide when faced with adversity, like when Dad brought home flu shots for the whole family.

When she saw the hypodermic needles boiling on the stove, she would scramble under the bed and secure a death grip on the far bed frame leg.  Mom and Dad never had any luck coaxing her out. When Dad would try to slide her out, she and the bed would move along the floor in unison.

I would sit nearby on my bed and enjoy being  a spectator, occasionally crawling under Liz’s bed to see how she was doing or to shuttle messages between them.

Not wishing to escalate the situation, Dad would wait her out in front of the TV set.  To her credit, Liz had amazing perseverance and resourcefulness, and just as a matter of “best practices,” kept a tin of cookies under her bed. While these incidences never ended well for Liz, she learned to take victory from her success in delaying the inevitable.
    My early understanding of the universe acknowledged a scientific side and a mystical side.  My interests were naturally drawn to the scientific side. The scientific side included things that were defined and predictable.  The mystical side included things that were not.

Among those dependable things I included on the scientific side were Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. While the great scientific minds seemed intimidated by these  three curiosities, there were few things as dependable. I noted with frustration that the older one got, the less they seemed to care bout the scientific dynamics of Santa Claus, The Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. 
    Unlike Santa Claus, who constantly judged children morally, the Tooth Fairy was all business. You had to be good for Santa Claus, but the Tooth Fairy only needed a tooth, and I knew of children with moral turpitude that benefitted greatly from that distinction.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what she did with all of those teeth.

    While I had never seen her, I felt sure that she looked like Tinkerbell, but that was because Tinkerbell was the only fairy I was familiar with. I had always assumed that Tinkerbell had started out as a Tooth Fairy before getting a break into show business.

I came to realize that there were many Tooth Fairies and that they were, obviously, assigned territories.  I knew this because the kids next door got a quarter, and we only got 15 cents.  The kids across the street got even less, 10 cents a tooth.
     Our tooth fairy had a more casual work ethic, as it often took a couple of nights after losing a tooth before she would stop by.  The week the exterminator came, she didn’t show up at all.  I waited faithfully, fearing the worst.  Either she expired or had become ill for a few days.  If she had been poisoned, they were pretty organized about getting someone new on the job.  After the mishap with the exterminator, I made sure that our cat stayed inside when the Easter Bunny was in town.
    Three important nature shows commenced in my early childhood.  National Geographic, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins and his assistant Jim.  It was always my hope that these programs  would do a better job of tackling topics that were of particular interest to children, like the Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny. 
    The fact that neither of those creatures were native to the oceans or Lake Titicaca, as far as we knew, did give Jacques Cousteau a pass, but his son Philippe was so good at making friends with the sea creatures, I think he would have liked to know the Tooth Fairy.  Jacques was always saying things like, “In juz a few short minettes, Philippe haz become life lhong frenz wit da sea turtell. He names her Breeget because she haz beautiful eyes.”

You could tell that National Geographic had their own agenda, but Wild Kingdom could have come through. 
    Zoologist Marlin Perkins liked to shoot the object of his attention with a tranquilizer dart and then have his assistant Jim tiptoe in and put a big gaudy collar with a huge antennae and big helium balloon on the animal so that they could track the animal until the battery ran out.  That had to be a little awkward for the animal, returning to the herd with a hangover and a huge set of new accessories it had no recollection of acquiring.  Did Marlin really think the other animals would not notice?  Marlin and Jim always wore safari clothes, complete with pith helmets, regardless if they were hunting lions in Africa or the great polar bear on the North Pole.
    There were two striking things I noticed about  Marlin.  One was that he did not like to get his hands dirty, and the other was that he didn’t like to risk his life.  Apparently Jim liked to do both.  I thought hunting the Tooth Fairy would be a great episode that would minimize the danger to Jim.  The Tooth Fairy would be much easier to manhandle than the rhinos and bears that Marlin normally arranged for Jim, and the only real challenge would be “live” trapping, or determining the appropriate  dose on the fairy dart to shoot her down.
 

The whole episode lent itself to action, adventure, and time-lapse photography, and I would have
gladly offered up Liz’s and my bedroom for the hunt. Sadly, Marlin also lacked the requisite curiosity, so the episode remained unshot, and Mutual of Omaha lost a huge ratings opportunity.   
    That was just the tip of the iceberg....who wouldn’t want to learn more about  the Easter Bunny?  If anyone could find out, it would be Marlin and Jim.

They would find out where he got all those eggs, and how  he hauled so many with so little breakage?  Did the chickens offer them, or did he trick them?  Did the eggs come dyed, or did he do it?  Was there just one, like Santa Claus, who covered the whole world,  or was there a network, like the Tooth Fairies?  Even Santa had elves and the Mrs. to help him.  I asked my father if he had ever treated the Easter Bunny, and he said, no, he did not know him. 
    Santa Claus was merit based; the Tooth Fairy was materialistic, with her need for teeth; the Easter Bunny rewarded hunting skills.  Both of my parents had lost their natural curiosity about these three scientific creatures and were of no help in understanding them.  Were we really to believe that the Easter Bunny worked alone? 
    Without the help of the scientific community, I became resigned to the fact that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy would remain inscrutable curiosities.

Clean-up Editor: Toni Gardner, Author of  "My Fathers" and "Walking Where the Dog Walks"

The Manifest Destiny

In the Fall that I entered 1^st grade, we moved to our farm, 7 miles west,  to be closer to Dad’s work.  Having spent a great deal of time on our grandmother's farm, we were certainly not alien to farm life, however Jack, Liz and I still had our own set of unrealistic expectations.  Jack had grand plans to raise cows and hunt wild animals.  

 Liz was looking forward to living the life of Velvet from the film National Velvet.  She knew a lot about horses from the fiction she had taken out of the school library. 

The horses in those books were  incredibly well mannered, had nerves of steel and were every girl’s best friend.  Liz assumed the ponies and horses our parents would acquire would have no less character or pedigree. She had plans to ride her horse to school everyday on the seven miles of busy roads to the campus.  Mom and Dad had a different set of plans that entailed catching a ride with a chain smoking math teacher in a homely little Corvair where seat belts were an option not selected. The Chevy Corvair had made Time's list of "The 50 Biggest Automotive Mistakes Ever Made".   The latter plan was understandably, far less desirable when  it came to making friends and influencing people.    Liz was also ill prepared for the many vices inherent with an affordable pony, like spooking at butterflies, and the tendency to bolt after they reared and parted ways with the rider.  She soon found that horses were not much more predictable than cats although they did weigh about 1500 pounds more.  After breaking her arm and cracking her head open during 2 separate mishaps, she let go of her National Velvet dream and focused on lobbying (unsuccessfully) for a move to the city where her friends lived. For me, I was looking forward to  my  tomboy / little kid pursuits, enjoying being outside,  raising lots of calves and foals and doing cattle drives to our cousin’s  farm next door.

Cattle Drive

….a lot like living in a western and like many things, one should be careful what they wish for. 

Overall, life on the farm was fantastic.  It was 100 years old, there were lots of places to explore,  I could go wherever I wanted and  there wasn’t a single street to cross. The first week there, Liz and I  found a cat and five little kittens in a stall in the barn.  It was a bit of an adjustment not having neighbors right next door and the noises were different. Instead of horns and car engines we heard cows and  birds during the day and screech owls, locusts,  and bull frogs at night.  

The sound of a siren was so rare,  we would jump in the car whenever we heard one, and go off to find the excitement.  Within a month of moving to the farm there was a barn fire about a half a mile away.  The whole sky turned red that night and you could see the flames from our attic window.  Mom and Dad meant well but every explanation of a life event like the fire, had a Disney spin complete with a moral at the end.  They told us that the fire had been caused by a boy our age playing with matches in the barn. Jack was kind and trusted me with the truth that Mom and Dad didn’t think I was old enough to hear. In what was probably 3 parts testing his persuasion skills and 1 part believing it himself, Jack swore me to secrecy and then let me know that Indians did it.  

 While I appreciated his candor, this new information was very troublesome.  Unfortunately I had paid attention when I had watched westerns, and Indians for the most part were not portrayed well. Savage Indians were not a part of "living my life in a western" that I had planned.  

The Lone Ranger’s friend Tonto was a nice Indian but he was very serious and never laughed, and he only spoke in 1-3 word phrases. Indians were a big problem in another Saturday morning TV show I watched, RinTinTin.  I had seen enough to know what could happen when angry Indians lived nearby.

After becoming privy to our Indian problem I began carrying a feather and a miniature yoyo in my pocket in case I was ever captured.  I  also took our red setter Pat with me when I went outside.  I had heard that Indians liked to trade stuff and I thought I might be able to trade the feather or the yoyo for my freedom.  

RinTinTin was Rusty’s dog and he didn’t seem to mind taking an arrow to save Rusty, and he had always recovered by the next week’s episode.  I was pretty sure my dad had studied removing Indian arrows from dogs and cats when in veterinary school – it was really important to push the arrow all the way through and break it before you pulled it back.  After going a couple of weeks without an attack or even an Indian sighting, I began to get a small level of comfort that maybe the Indians had moved on to set barns on fire somewhere else.

Early that Winter in the midst of a snow storm, I found myself home sick from school.  Due to the weather, my Mother needed to leave me home alone so she could collect Jack and Liz from school.  It wouldn’t be a big deal because  my Dad was expected home soon. Even though it kept snowing harder and harder, they were both gone much longer than what seemed to be a reasonable amount of time.  While a well adjusted child might have chosen to use this time wisely reading a school assignment, I stared at the school assignment and morosely pondered my new life as an orphan.     When they finally got home I was upset and asked what took so long.  My mom replied that she had gotten “tied up” in traffic. 

I was stunned. The Indians were still here and they had captured my mom but she escaped and she was so calm and brave.  I wanted to know how she got away but I was sworn to secrecy about the whole Indian problem.  When my dad walked in I ran and shouted “Mom got tied up in traffic, but she escaped and she’s here now.”   Dad replied that he had gotten “tied up” at the office too.  I gasped.  The Indians - they were everywhere….. but Jack was the best brother ever for trusting me with the truth.

The Perfect Pet (excerpt from "War and Peas")

    After school in first grade, I would ride my pony Beauty over the hill to our cousin’s farm. Beauty was a fine babysitter. If I slipped off her bare back, she would stop and wait for me to climb back on. She was 33 years old and the same brown pony on which my Dad learned to ride. Our cousin and my dad were country veterinarians, and the animal hospital was on his farm next to ours. My father would preside over afternoon office hours and perform small animal surgery. With the exception of having to wash my hands for long periods of time preparing for surgery, I liked to watch him operate. It was usually just spaying dogs and cats. During surgery, I would stand on a chair and assist.  My job was to hand my dad instruments like the Kelly clamps, and wipe up the blood.  When he closed, my job was to cut the stitches; short on the inside, long on the outside.

     One day during office hours, a scruffy old farmer in worn overalls who breathed through his mouth, brought in a little 2 day old piglet. He said “Doc, this here pig done got no hole”. What happened next was like Christmas on a sunny Spring day. The farmer looked at me, and then my Dad. He said “Doc, if you can fix this here pig, that pretty little girl can keep him”... and he pointed at me!  My Dad picked up the little pink piglet – when their eyes met I saw a short exchange of mutual respect. I watched carefully as Dad looked in her ears, nose, and mouth. She looked like a fine pig to my little trained eye. Dad then turned her around to inspect her other end. The piglet looked me in the eye and I am sure she smiled. I felt us bond immediately and I could tell she was just as busy as I was imagining our new life together. Her name would be  "Scout".

As Dad examined her posterior, I soon realized what the farmer meant when he said that the pig “done got no hole”….she had been born without a rectum. As luck would have it, not only was I about to get a pig, but it was a perfect little pig. In my mind there was nothing to fix. This piglet without a “hole” was intelligent design at its best. It would get to be a house pig.  The possibilities for a perfect pig were endless. She was virtually maintenance free and I would be able to teach her tricks and she loved me. That farmer who breathed through his mouth, was the nicest man in the world.
      Before Dad had the chance to explain the inherent flaws of a piglet without a “hole”, I had bolted out the door, untied Beauty and headed home. What was Beauty’s value as a 33 year old babysitting pony, was also her shortcoming when one had important news with which to taunt her older siblings …Beauty had but one speed. Unlike newer models in our stable that could walk, trot, canter, and gallop, Beauty only walked. And, it wasn’t a fast walk. I rushed home as fast as one could rush on Beauty. When we got home I flew in the back door and found my older siblings Jack and Liz sitting at the kitchen table eating our cook Myrtle’s fresh chocolate chip cookies. I shouted that I was getting a perfect little pig named Scout, and she was going to get to sleep with me in my bed, and she would never have to be housebroken like our other  pets, so she would only go outside because she wanted to,

not because she had to….and, they could never pet her unless they asked me first. They each helped themselves to another cookie without ever looking up, as if I wasn’t even there and they hadn’t heard me. Jack looked up and said to Liz “did you hear something?”  Liz looked back at him and said “no, I don’t think so.” But they heard me just fine.
     That night at dinner Dad brought the good news with the bad: for reasons I did not completely understand, the piglet had to get a “hole”. Dad explained it in professional medical terms. The gist of it was that if food went in one end there had to be an exit point at the other. It must have been some kind of swine rule. Not to be discouraged I suggested that we get around the problem by not putting anything in her mouth, thus eliminating the need for an exit. Who would have thought I could improve on the intelligent design? I now had a pet that I didn’t need to clean up after or let out, and thanks to my enhancement, Scout no longer even needed feeding. She wasn’t going to cost a thing, less work even than my ant farm or sea monkeys. Everyone would want one. I started planning for Scout to have babies. Before I got too far, Dad came back with more obstacles - the surgery was complicated and a very high risk procedure. The good news was that the surgery would be the next morning. I had no worries, the Doctor was my Dad, and he could fix anything…..as it was, anything but this little pig. It turns out that Scout had a number of other birth defects that prevented a successful outcome. Life with my perfect little pig was never meant to be.☹

Extreme Profiles in Courage - excerpt from War and Peas

On occasions when it was New Papa vs. the grandchildren, the grandchildren always presented in impenetrable front. When New Papa was not conspiring to complicate our lives we were quite accomplished at filling that void.

            The youngest 10 of us fell into 2 categories: “Character” donors and “Character” recipients. The older 5 were donors and the youngest 5 were recipients, however to some extent all of the girls were recipients at least some of the time.  The recipients were home schooled by the donors in a number of subjects including:

·      Knot tying

·      Tennis

·      Gymnastics

·      Brain teasers

·      Marksmanship and conductivity

Jack: “As you can see, Chip and Stain, using a half hitch followed by a square knot makes escape virtually impossible.” 

Penn: “However when working from branches above, nothing quite beats the hangman’s noose.  Any questions Margaux?  Don't forget to be at the car in 10 minutes for miniature golf”.

            

Preparing for kindergarten in the Fall, Little Sinner liked to play school. Older siblings and cousins were all to eager to oblige:  

Looper: “Little Sinner, we believe you will learn much more if we use true stories to challenge you: The police made us take you when you were 1.  They said they would come back to get you in  2000 days.  If it takes one week to pack, when should you get started?”

                                                            Marksmanship

“To get a steady shot at the blackbird, rest the bb gun barrel on something firm, like that 1000 volt cattle wire”.

           As one might surmise, the lure of hanging out with older cousins and our absence of cause and effect reasoning, contributed to endless opportunities for acquiring character.  Of course we were always eager to learn when Nick and Toad rode into town.

 

The Dungeon - In the Belly of the Beast

      Having been exposed to my veterinarian father’s patients at a young age,  I,  more than most children,  had developed some theories on what creatures made up the genus that liked to prey on children (pediavore).  As was the case with most of my early theories,  it was based on age-appropriate methods of research:  deep thought,  wild imagination,  and inquiries to my older cousins.  My theory of pediavores hypothesized that there were three primary classes:

GENUS PEDIAVORE

1) Larger than me,  foams at mouth,  growls and or stalks - Han’s VanderTease’s Dog
2) Smaller than me but sucks blood or sets trap - Mosquitos and Spiders
3) Hides in water and chases me with an open mouth full of teeth - Snapping Turtles

      When it came to domesticated animals,  I assigned the pediavore classification on a per-animal basis according to my proprietary assessment based on size,  speed,  and growl decibels.  As it pertained to my grandmother’s farm,  there was a pediavore around every corner.  Bom Bom’s  basement was no exception,  but it was also  a wonderful place,  full of amazing things that dated back to the late 1800s.  There were old Red Cross stretchers, wooden picnic plates,  Victrolas,  vaults,  and giant trunks.  My cousins and I suspected that the giant trunks and vaults,  that were too heavy to budge,  were filled with gold that other generations had forgotten about.  Either gold or lost copies of the Declaration of Independence,  or King George’s marriage certificate….important collectables. On a regrettable day in 1960,  however,  the magical nature of the basement changed forever.  That was the day when New Papa  procured hundreds of two-watt light bulbs from  a Port William Boy Scout named “Little Billy May.”  

       Little Billy’s gift in door-to-door  sales has never been the subject of debate. After his visit with New Papa,  Billy enjoyed a sales award trip to Disneyland,  and went on to successfully sell lightning rods and encyclopedias door to door. 
       Little Billy’s gain was our loss,  for from that unfortunate day in 1960 when Billy “asked for the order” from New Papa,  the basement became a dungeon.  A two-watt bulb radiates no more light  then a birthday candle,  but it doesn’t use much electricity either,  and that was all that mattered to  New Papa.
      Along with the kitchen, the basement and swimming pool came under New Papa’s jurisdiction.  A quick visit to the basement and pool was all it took to realize that New Papa had no interest in either.  The pool was built in 1939 with the use of horses,  who would drag a large industrial shovel across the ground to dig the hole.  The pool had straight sides,  so telephone-pole-sized logs were floated in the pool in the winter to prevent ice from cracking the sides.  The water was always zero-visibility because New Papa did not enjoy swimming and felt that chlorine was an unnecessary amenity.  Without the burden of a scheduled chlorine regimen,  New Papa’s pool maintenance schedule consisted of having Uncle Owl remove the logs from the pool in May and replace them in  October.    
 

 
       Preparing to swim in the zero-visibility pool under New Papa’s rules presented its own challenges.   All children and adults were required to change into their swimwear in “dressing” cubicles in the dungeon. There were  three entrances.  One was from the porch,  another from the pool,  and the third from the kitchen.  It was an unpleasant trip for all ages,  but a journey fraught with danger for a small child.  Entering the basement from the porch required us to go down three steps and pass a huge vault on the left.  I am not sure what was stored in that vault,  but it could have been 60-watt light bulbs.
       Fully lit with the two-watt bulbs,  the dungeon was still frightfully dark,  with a strong hint of mildew in the air. If it had rained recently,  the changing cubes became registered wetlands.  One didn’t dare remove their flip flops.  It was impossible to  get to a changing room without walking through a thick network of cobwebs.  The  cobwebs against the two-watt light produced very eerie,  spooky effects. The dungeon was also an ideal natural environment for the super race of spiders that were a testament to  Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest.”  I would never go into the dungeon alone,  because I knew there was safety in numbers.  Jen and Liz warned us that these spiders were more fit than us and  had very real expectations of trapping and eating a grandchild.  

 Because  the darkness assured complete and total privacy, the changing cubicles were really nothing more than a formality.  
      One of New Papa’s many rules was that all swimmers had to take a shower before entering the pool. His premise that we were dirtier than the pool water was simply not true,  most of the time. 
      Swimming in the pool was equal parts fun and fear.  The fear element sprang from warnings from our older cousins that  snapping turtles frequented the pool.  While these pediavores had little interest in the “adult” swim,  we were tipped off  that they had great enthusiasm for the “kid” swim.  The water was so murky I had no way of knowing if they were there stalking me,  but it weighed

heavily on my swimming experience.  It was no help that Toad and Penn liked to yell out in pain and disappear below the surface as though pulled by an attacking snapper.  I had seen a few snapping turtles on our farm and they were a pediavore to be reckoned with.
      While we were preoccupied in the pool,  the spiders were busy repairing and fortifying their entire network of webs...making them bigger and more sophisticated than before,  ever hopeful of capturing the big prize,  an Upham grandchild.  These super spiders were  results driven and thrived under tight deadlines. When we returned to the basement to change, our one and only goal was to get out of there as quickly as possible.  In the darkness and haste, our clothing often took an unexpected turn. 
 

      As was my lot, the pediavores reserved their optimism and patience  for another day, and I was resigned to my vulnerable place in the food chain.


Clean-up Editor: Toni Gardner, Author of  "My Fathers" and "Walking Where the Dog Walks"