Category Archives: Childhood Traumas

September 18, 2012 · 0:00

So There!

The memory is still sharp.  Clear.  Painful.

I don’t think my brother Fred ever hurt my feelings as much as he did when he laughed at me that day.  When, as a 4- or 5-year old I shouted at him:

“You’ll be sorry when I wake up DEAD.”

Instead of being cowed, well, Fred laughed at me.  I was devastated.  Confused.  I didn’t understand what was so funny.  Later he explained it to me:

“Lease,” he said patiently, “You can’t ‘wake up dead’!”

“Why not?”

“Because if you’re dead, Lease, you don’t wake up.  You can’t.  Cause you’re DEAD.”

“Oh.”

It was the first time I understood that I had done something incredibly stupid.  I learned my lesson, though.  Never again did I threaten anyone with the possibility that I’d wake up dead.

So imagine my surprise when I read about high school nurse Terry Collins in this article.  I learned that I wasn’t so dumb back then after all.

You see, Ms. Collins woke up dead one day.  Yeah, it’s true!  She got a letter saying that she was taken off the voter registration list because she is dead.  She was quite surprised because, well, she felt just fine!  Coincidentally, her 80-year old father was equally surprised when he got a similar letter.  He had woken up dead, too!  Even more coincidentally, they are both African-Americans registered to vote in Texas!  Or they were until they woke up dead in a state where the Governor is a Republican and the legislature is run by the GOP.

Apparently, there is an epidemic in Texas. An epidemic of waking up dead!  And the number of folks who are caught up in this, umm, problem?  According to NPR, there are about 80,000 Texas voters who woke up one day and found out via the US mail that they were dead.  Most are African American or Hispanic.  Imagine that, they were members of minorities who tend to favor Democrats, and they woke up dead.

I’m calling Fred.  He’ll be so sorry he made fun of me.

*     *     *

The creativity of the folks who try to keep others from voting is quite impressive.  If only they used it to govern, the U.S. might be in much better shape today.

Here is a link for online voter registration

 

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Filed under Awards, Campaigning, Childhood Traumas, Elections, Family, History, Humor, Hypocrisy, Politics, Stupidity

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August 1, 2012 · 0:00

All the Cool Kids Are Doing It

It’s Angie’s fault.  Or Darla’s.  Maybe it’s Peg’s.  Or all three.  Mostly, I blame Angie for pulling this memory out of my subconscious when she entered this post, An Epic Adventure in Babysitting in Darla’s Psst! Hey…Wanna Hear Something Really Embarrassing? contest.  Then Peg threw her story in too, with The Substitute Babysitter.

Since all the cool kids are doing it, well, here is mine.  Don’t hate me.

 *     *     *     *     *

Unlike my cooler blogger sisters, I loved to babysit.  I was born to babysit.  And I had the best job on the planet.

Mr. and Mrs. F went out every single Saturday night, from 7 to 11 or so.  They had two really nice kids, a huge colonial house and a swimming pool.  At about 12 I started supervising kids in that pool, in spite of the fact that I bear no resemblance at all to Michael Phelps.

These folks were rich, but incredibly nice.  And they loved me.

Their house was huge, and quite old, which meant it squeaked and made all kinds of noises at night.  My much smaller house was old, too, so I was pretty much used to the noises.

But it was 9th Grade that year.  I was reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote for English class.  Yup.  Reading about the slaughter of an entire family in their home.

To make matters worse the F’s house was being renovated.  So after the kids went to bed, I hung out with the terrifying book in a part of the house I was unfamiliar with.

There were noises.  Of course there were noises.

There were footsteps.  Upstairs.

Was it in Hadley’s room, at the top of the stairs?

Or was it in Scotty’s room, a few footsteps down the hall?

I knew it was in one of the two.  I could hear it.  Clear as a bell, on the hardwood floor upstairs.

So I did what any dedicated babysitter sitting next to a fireplace would do.  I picked up the poker.

I don’t want to kill anybody, I thought.  So I put it back.

I picked up the little shovel.  The spade.  I was ready to protect those kids no matter what.  And I crept up the carpeted steps.

I looked down the long, hallway.  I didn’t want to alert the killer to my presence, so I didn’t turn on the light.  The carpeted hallway was lit only with one measly nightlight.  But the thick white carpeting helped me see that there was no burglar/murder there.

But there was plenty of space for the burglar/murder to hide.

I walked into Hadley’s room.  She was sleeping soundly, still alive, because I could hear her calm breathing.

I had just walked into Scotty’s room when I heard true, distinct footsteps downstairs.

This time I knew it wasn’t my imagination.  Because I realized that I wouldn’t actually have heard footsteps upstairs because the carpeting was thick and luxurious and the kids were always getting out of bed and sneaking up on me.  (It would have been helpful had I remembered that earlier.)

But the footsteps downstairs were on hard wood.  They were real.

“Elyse?  We’re home!”  Mr. and Mrs. F had come home.

And there I stood in their son’s bedroom, with a shovel in my hand.

Trust me, it’s scary at night. Alone. While reading In Cold Blood. (Google Image)

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July 30, 2012 · 0:00

Run! Hide! Fight!

Some tasks only seem Herculean at first glance.  Then they become impossible.  Take the one I got this morning.

“You gotta help me with this, Elyse,” said Robert, our Human Resources Manager.  “I spent the better part of a year editing and improving this, and still nobody will read it.”

“It’s our Employee Manual, Robert.  Of course nobody will read it.”

“But they need to read it,” he said.  “Otherwise the staff  won’t know when they’re breaking rules.”

I stared back at him blankly.  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, thumbing through the four-inch binder for the first time myself.

“Give it some pizzazz, make is shoot off the page.  You know, Jazz it up!”

“Robert,” I said, holding up the tome, “this is the written equivalent of Muzak.  Elevator music.  It cannot be jazzed up!”

He looked so pitiful that I added, “I’ll see what I can do.”  Guilt gets me every time.

Robert left my office, and I plopped the Manual down on my desk and ignored it.  It was an impossible task.  So I clicked on the internets to gear myself up for drudge work.

And what to my wondering eyes should appear?  Someone else was working on their office manual and making recommendations!  Seriously!  I couldn’t believe my luck.  I knew that all I had to do was add this information to the front of the Manual and it would certainly capture everybody’s attention.  Yes, I can follow the lead of the City of Houston Mayor’s Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security!  That’s how I can jazz up our company manual.  I’ll include information on “Surviving an Active Shooter Event!” 


That will certainly catch that unsuspecting new employee’s interest!

Whoo-hoo!  “I am so underpaid,” I thought.

Don’t you think this is a wise prep for life in today’s workplace?  Shouldn’t we all be trained to “Run.  Hide.  Fight”?  I don’t know about you, but “Duck and Cover” served me really well way back when.  And nothing at all happened to me then.  So clearly these Public Service Announcements work.

That’s all you need, isn’t it?  Isn’t it?

Or did I get that moral wrong?  I’m trying to remember what happened.  Let’s see.  Duck and Cover.  Duck and Cover.  Oh yeah.  That came out after the Soviet Union developed its first nuke!  When they could hit us with one too!  Me, I got my exposure to it during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962 when the threat of nuclear war was real.  Funny thing, though. Duck and Cover was actually way less effective than President Kennedy’s blockade.

And what has happened since?

Hmmm.  Let me think.  We and the Soviet Union (now Russia, in case you missed something) have been behaving ourselves, more or less.  Nuke-wise, anyway.  Because a nuclear war?  That’s unthinkable.  We all know that.

You know what else is unthinkable?  Random gun violence every day in America.  It is unthinkable that we have to worry every day that some crazy person is going to come into our offices, our schools and our movie theaters and start shooting.  And that others will defend their “freedom” to do so.

Just like governments have learned how to co-exist with nuclear weapons, we need to figure out how to get along with guns (because they, sadly, ain’t goin’ away) but without gun violence.  To me that means we need fewer guns, especially fewer of the sort that can shoot and kill lots of folks without much effort. But I am willing to compromise.

Because these other precautions?  They are closing the barn door after the horse has run out; and I for one am tired of beating that dead horse.

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Filed under Childhood Traumas, Criminal Activity, Elections, Family, Gun control, Health and Medicine, History, Humor, Hypocrisy, Law, Politics, Stupidity

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July 25, 2012 · 0:00

Primal Scream

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  PTSD.

I have it.  Yup, it’s true.  And these days I can hear Lost In Space’s Robot saying “Warning!  Danger!”  And he’s talking to me.

What is it that sends me back, brings on the flashbacks, makes me scream “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo”?  The Olympics.

I blame Mitt Romney.  I blame the Olympic Committee.  I blame the Raisin.

Yes.  The Raisin.  That is the name John and I gave Jacob’s teacher for 6th class (which is Swiss/British for 5th grade.  Go figure.)  It was a slight bastardization of her real name.  We gave it to her because we hated her and also because she was the cause of the “Trauma” in my PTSD.  And in our family, it was contagious.  All three of us had it.

It started on Back to School Night in September, 2001, when she told us her plan for the entire school year.  John and I exchanged skeptical glances when she told us that they would focus on the Olympics. She was a big sports fan and what do you know, that very winter, the Winter Olympics would be held!

It wasn’t my cuppa, but I figured that a few exercises around the Olympics might be interesting for the kids.  And after all, world HQ for the Olympics was just down the road in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Lausanne, Switzerland, Lake Geneva (Google Image)

But instead of a few things, though, everything the class did involved the Olympics.  Everything.  For the entire year.

Google Image

Learning about the human body?  Let’s learn that the leg bone is connected to the hip bone by looking at skiers’ physiques.

Learning about numbers?  Calculate and compare the speed of each winning downhill skier and divide it by some ratio or other.

Learning geography?  Make a diorama of the flags of the gold medal countries from the previous Olympics and your hopes for this one.

As the parent of a reluctant student, I had to try to convince my son, who had no real interest in things Olympian, to do one more assignment/task/project on The F’ing Olympics.  He hated it.  I hated it.  John hated it.  None of us thought it was interesting; none of the other kids in the class or their parents did either.  It made homework painful.  Boring.  Something to be avoided at all costs.  It made learning misery.

And after beating that dead horse for the entire school year 2001-2002, just realizing that the Olympics are coming makes me break out in a cold sweat.  I hope for a weeks-long power failure.  I stick my fingers in my ears and hum loudly whenever a commercial comes out about TV coverage.  I cry a lot.

There was more.  Much more, but I have, happily suppressed those memories.  The idea of trying to retrieve them makes me believe that there may be something to Primal Scream Therapy.

So if you’re posting on the Olympics over the next couple of weeks, that scream you’ll be hearing is mine.

Nooooooooooooooooooooo! (Google Image)

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June 25, 2012 · 0:00

Sinking Deeper

Some days I am overwhelmed with awe at how brilliant people can be.  I read about new discoveries and new science every day.  And it is amazing.

And then there are days like today, when I am astonished at how willfully and intentionally ignorant some folks can be.  And I realize that the lengths to which some folks will go to remain and reaffirm their ignorance is merely the tip of the iceberg.  The icing on the cake.  The snow on the mountaintop.

Yesterday, while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, I saw this billboard:

It doesn’t mention what happens in the end, though.

And I have to honestly say, I don’t get it a whole lot of things about this billboard.

First, I don’t get why folks are bound and determined that I am going to think just like them.  And that they will keep hitting me over the head with their crap until I agree.

Second, do they really think that someone is going to be driving along the New Jersey Turnpike and need religion?  (Well, sometimes it does seem like hell, but still.)

Do they think that, while sitting in gridlock, paying exorbitant tolls or avoiding stupid drivers, people will suddenly “see the light” and say to their spouse:

“Honey, I understand it now.  God created the universe in seven days.  Period.  Seven twenty-four-hour days.  And science had nothing to do with it.  But you know, Dear, what I can’t seem to figure out is why God let us think up all this science stuff to begin with.”

My mother used to say “you catch more flies with honey.”  And it’s true.  Especially with people’s deeply held beliefs.  Christianity became such a dominant religion by incorporating much of the beliefs and traditions of the pagans.  Not by saying “nannie, nannie, boo-boo, I’m right you’re wrong.”

Even seeing stuff like this billboard and a thousand roadside signs I passed, well, sometimes I can still be surprised by the lengths to which folks will go to try and tell me, to prove to me, that my beliefs are wrong.  But today I read an article that has me still shaking my head, hours after seeing it.

Loch Ness monster cited by US schools as evidence that evolution is myth

Nessie, in the famous “Surgeon’s Photograph” from 1934 that is widely believed to be a hoax. (Thanks, Google.)

THOUSANDS of American school pupils are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real – in an attempt by religious teachers to disprove Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Pupils attending privately-run Christian schools in the southern state of Louisiana will learn from textbooks next year, which claim Scotland’s most famous mythological beast is a living creature.

Thousands of children are to receive publicly-funded vouchers enabling them to attend the schools – which follow a strict fundamentalist curriculum.

The Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme teaches controversial religious beliefs, aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism. (Emphasis added by me.)

Me, I don’t understand why evolution and creation cannot co-exist.

The existence of God and belief in a higher power does not mean that the universe was created in a week and man in a day.  Man and woman, however we were created, have minds and a curious nature.  That’s what makes us unique.  That is also how we discover cool things, like how to photograph pretend monsters.

But public money is going to pay to teach religion.  I will repeat.  Public money.  Whatever happened to the separation of Church and State?  The founding fathers will have something to say about this at the Reckoning, I’d bet.

As a nation, and as living, rational human beings we are walking a tightrope.  Backwards.

Inherit the Wind should be required viewing.

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