Pre Pressing Pew Pewing

It was family lore and I heard this story from my parents one day.  The situation occurred when I was just a new born, which would have made my sister about two and a half to three years old.  According to my parents my sister began to say the phrase "Pre pressing pew pewing," and would say it several times very animatedly.  They said it was as if she wanted something but they could not figure out what it was.  "Pre pressing pew pewing!" she would emphatically persist, but they were clueless as to what she meant.  This went on for a couple of weeks until they were driving somewhere and all of us were in the car.  As they drove past a billboard my sister began to scream out "Pre Pressing Pew Pewing!" and point to the sign.  It was a Coca Cola ad and the slogan was "Refreshing New Feeling."

Now some people have a family crest to be proud of and others can trace their family history back through many generations.  My family didn't have anything so lofty or noble.  As it turns out I was born into a family of Coca Cola drinkers and what we had was loyalty to that drink.  If there was some sort of family crest for us it would have been red and white and written in the Coca Cola script.  It could also be said our appreciation of Coke had been handed down from my parent's parents.  They were Coke drinkers as well.  Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't forbidden for us to have other flavors of soft drinks when we wanted them, but if it was going to be a cola then it had to be a Coke - nothing else would do.  When we went to my maternal grandmother's house we could chose from either Coke or Sprite.  When we went to my paternal grandparent's house it was just Coke, but it was even more special because they bought the little glass bottles.

Oh how I loved to visit my grandmother and have one of those glass bottles of Coke.  They kept them next to the water heater and they came in a container that held twelve bottles.  Very rarely, but sometimes there would be a cold Coke waiting in the refrigerator, but usually we had to get some ice.  This was always a challenge because my grandparents had one of those devilish ice cube trays with a metal divider insert.  In order to free the ice you had to crank up this metal hinge in the middle.  It was a finger pincer for sure.  If we were going to be there for a while I would put another bottle in the refrigerator to chill for later.  The unbreakable family rule was that we always had to wait until after the noon hour before we could have a Coke.  Many was the time I would be counting the minutes until the hands of the clock pointed straight up.  As an adult I am not sure why that noon rule was enacted.  No caffeine was allowed to us children in the morning.  Did they think it would somehow make us more awake than we should be? We also could not have a caffeinated drink after 6 pm, which made more sense as a rule.  As children though we felt this left us a narrow window of Coke drinking time so we drank as many as we were allowed in that span.

Coke actually influenced us in several ways.  I can remember how my family would chose one fast food restaurant over another based specifically on whether they had Coke on tap.  We were actually very anti Pepsi and would never accept it as a substitute for the 'real thing'.

I continued my Coke drinking ways into my adulthood.  By that time I had also amassed a collection of Coke memorabilia.  I have in my collection a wooden Coke tray that used to hold glass bottles, a Coke piggy band, whistle and several Coke glasses.  When the 'cola wars' commercials started in the 80s my family and I swore that we would be able to tell the difference.

We stayed true to Coke, but they didn't stay true to us.  I felt personally betrayed when they changed the formula in 1985 and refused to even try the 'New Coke'.  Thank God they cracked under the backlash and brought the old formula back again.  However, it was never the same.  The 'Classic Coke' as they now termed it had been changed. The alteration was the type of sweetener used.  High fructose corn syrup has a much different taste than cane sugar.  It no longer gave me that 'Refreshing New Feeling'.

Oh, yes, I still drank it, but much less often.  I didn't try any other types of colas either.  Strangely enough I think I went into some sort of mourning.  Gone was my childhood treat and it wasn't coming back again. I eventually gave up all kinds of carbonated beverages and drank only water.  I know that soft drinks of all types have fallen out of favor.  A crusade of sorts has been after the soft drink industry and the leaders of this crusade will tell you all sorts of things about how each 12 oz soft drink has 10 teaspoons of sugar and how Coke in particular has so much acid it will dissolve a nail.  Yeah, yeah, yeah - that may be so, but I didn't give it up for those reasons and I never gave up that longing for what I had tasted in my childhood.

Then something remarkable happened.  When I first heard about it I couldn't believe it.  It was my husband who mentioned it in passing.  He heard that in Mexico they still used the original formula of Coke with sugar.  I didn't believe it at first, but I decided to track it down.  Sure enough I found this was true.  It was not however in my local grocery store.  Then one day while I was in a convenience store I saw it.  I wish I could say there was some sort of angelic white light illuminating the scene, but it was just the overhead florescent lights.  There it was right in front of me and in a glass bottle as well.  A Mexican Coke. 

I took it from the refrigerated cooler and the bottle felt perfectly chilled.  I purchased it and the store cashier opened it for me - it even had the proper type of cap - no wimpy twist off.  I paused just a second before I took my first swallow.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!  It was like opening a door back into my childhood.  There was the taste.  There was the perfect carbonation.  There was the experience in soda drinking that had been missing in my life.

Ah, what joy.  It was a Refreshing Old Feeling.

Fire Ants

Ah, who doesn't remember their first meeting with a life long nemesis.  I first met mine when I was a child and it was as memorable as it was unpleasant.  I was outside with my mother and I stepped into a small hill of dirt. In a few seconds it felt like my legs were on fire.

I looked down to see my bare legs covered with these dark spots.  What seemed like a hundred ants were swarming up my legs and stinging me.  My quick thinking mother rushed me over to the garden hose and washed off the ants.  It was horrible for us both, me because I had been stung many times and her because she had to witness it.  That was my first encounter but not my last.  Not my last at all.

This marked a new era in the habitation of our fields.  Previous to this there had been ants, but they were in no way a bother to us.  I am not sure what kind they were, but I don't recall ever getting stung.  The fire ant, originally a Brazilian native had been steadily making its way from its entry point in Alabama since the 1930s.  It reached our fields by the 1960s and forever changed our world.

Fire ants became a constant menace of outdoor play.  All of us children became wary of any mounds of earth that sprang up in our fields, knowing this was the sign of a fire ant nest. They were not confined to a mound though.  These ants would house themselves anywhere they pleased.  At first there were not many of them, but because they were an imported species without any predator in our location, they spread quickly.  They began to invade things we would normally just keep out of the rain, such as the chicken feed.  Anything organic that did not have an airtight seal was subject to their infestation.  They would house themselves under any board or mulch or hay that was on the ground.

They were a horrible menace to all the natural wildlife of the area.  Ground nesting birds were hit hard as were burrowing animals such as rabbits.  They would attack anything and everything.  We had a couple of ducks who were attacked one night and the fire ants chewed through their webbed feet.  I have been told that ducks have no feeling in the webbing of their feet, so they did not suffer pain, but they ended up with feet that looked more like a chicken's foot.

We became very wary, my cousins and I as we traversed the fields around our houses.  Although the ants might be concentrated mostly in their mounds, they also foraged far and wide.  We could encounter them practically anywhere.  We learned to treat their stings by applying mud, the same thing we did with wasp stings.  As we had ample encounters with them we learned a little bit more about them.

When there was rain enough to flood the fields the fire ant colony would form floating masses.  These masses were a raft made up of the bodies of the fire ants clinging together.  Some of these mats would be as big as a dinner plate.  Woe to anyone who ran into one of these in flood water.  As soon as the ants came into contact with something dry they would swarm out of the water up onto it, be it trees, blades of grass or if you were unlucky, your leg.  One time my cousin and I found a small mat of ants and managed to scoop them up without getting stung.  We deposited the little clump of ants near a fire ant mound that was high and dry - don't ask me why we were being so nice to them.  The next day we came back to the mound and found a whole bunch of dead ant bodies around the mound.  Apparently the ants were very territorial and the ones we brought to the mound were from a different 'tribe' or something.  Our good deed did not go unpunished for those ants. 

Back in my childhood, the ants were definitely a rural menace, as my grandmother's house in town was free of the pests.  This is no longer true.  Today my urban garden harbors these malevolent little guys and currently I am sporting about a half dozen stings.  There are no visible mounds in our yard, but if you move a rock that lines one of the beds, look out!   I made the mistake yesterday of trying to weed one of the beds and as I knelt down pulling up several handfuls of encroaching grass I suddenly felt fire.  Actually what I felt was FIRE.  Not only does the sting hurt and burn, but my body is so trained to recognize their particular pain it goes into some sort of hyper-drive mode.

I was up in an instant doing what I like to call the fire ant dance.  The steps for this dance are simple but very fervently enacted.  Step one, you slap the offended area in a downward or outward swipe.  You want to get as many off of you as you can because the longer they are on you the more of them will bite.  Step two, while continuing to swipe, you take off whatever gloves, shirt, shoes, pants, etc. to make sure they are not in contact with you.  While you are doing step one and step two, you better have been moving away from the vicinity of the attack.  They swarm in mass and depending on the size of the nest they can cover a lot of distance quickly.

I do not react well to their bites.  They don't even have to bite me to cause a skin reaction.  If one of them just brushes against my skin it will leave a welt.  If I crush one against me while killing it, even if it doesn't bit me, it will leave a welt.  They are like the Midas of pain - just one touch is all it takes.  The initial pain of being bitten would be bad enough, but a day or so later the bites will itch like mad.  This will die down in a couple of days, only to return in the next week.  It can take more than a month for a fire ant bite to resolve.

If that wasn't bad enough, they bite my dogs as well.  My poor pups will be sitting somewhere then suddenly jump up and bite like mad at their rumps.  I find fire ant welts on them all the time.  Once my poor Lewey came running to me with a fire ant biting the inside of his nose.  There are several bugs I dislike intensely, but I hate fire ants.

We try all sorts of things to control them.  We have used fire ant bait that is advertised as 'killing the queen' because supposedly the workers will bring it to her.  Perhaps our fire ant workers are more lazy than the commercials suggest.  We saw no appreciable reduction in their numbers with that 'cure'.   A friend of my used a treatment that was made from molasses and other stuff and used to drenched the mounds.  She found it effective, but it did not work as well for me. We mostly use boiling water and this is effective at least in that it will kill bunches of the ants right away.  Unfortunately it will also kill any plants growing in the area and some of the nests are around important plants.  It also is uncertain if this method gets the queen.  No matter our efforts, we still have ants.

I had big hopes for another little ant that had been appearing in our garden the last couple of years.  These tiny little ants were red colored and ran crazy zigzag lines everywhere.  Their nests were filled with huge numbers.  Amazingly, even though they have swarmed over my hands in large numbers they have never bitten me and I have never had a skin reaction to them.  My kind of ants.  They were even talked about on the news because apparently they liked to build big nests in electrical boxes, which shorts out things.  Everyone was up in arms about the 'crazy raspberry ants' and worried about how to control them.  In one of the news shows they mentioned how these crazy ants were predators of fire ants.  My ears pick up at that.  I thought with the numbers of these little guys swarming about the fire ants would be gone soon.  No such luck.  Maybe it was the very cold winter we had or maybe it is the continuing drought, but I have not seen but a few of the crazy ants this year.  

I have been reading about a beneficial fly that is a natural predator to the fire ant.  It is called the Phorid fly.  These flies reproduce by laying eggs in the thorax of the ant.  The fly larvae migrates into the ants head and in two weeks releases an enzyme that causes the ants head to fall off.  The head FALLS OFF!  That is my kind of fly.

I don't know yet how I am going to obtain these Phorid flies, but you can bet I am on the hunt.  I cannot think of a more fitting end to my arch nemesis the fire ant.  The only thing that would make it better is if the head coming off the ant makes a little popping sound.  That way I might have the joy of  hearing a fizzing sound like a carbonated drink coming out of their nests.  Off with their heads!

Garden Photos - part 1

I just found a file with a bunch of pictures from April when the garden was looking so fresh and happy so I thought I would share them.  I know I tend to complain about gardening a bit sometimes (also known as whining and moaning) so I thought I would show that sometimes it is all worth it.  This is a part one because I have heaps and gobs of photos that I will eventually subject you to, but for now this is the garden as it was in April.

The foreground in this view is one of our original garden beds, now devoted mostly to ornamental plants and flowers.  This is mostly due to it harboring a very determined number of snails and slugs who have shown a tremendous resilience to all organic solutions.  We have tried snail bait, copper strips, ceder granules and egg shells and it hasn't even slowed them down.  We tried a beer bait lure that is supposed to entice them into drowning themselves and I think they just threw a party.  So now we don't put vegetable plants here because somehow it is less aggravating to us for them to eat the ornamentals - that way at least they are not competing for our food supply.

The middle ground to the right is another one of our original garden beds and it is hosting the cucumber patch this year.  The middle ground to the left is one of our many water stations, this one in the form of a bird bath surrounded by shrimp plant.  In the background you can see the cedar fence and part of the seven garden beds we created this year.

 Here is a closer view of the birdbath and behind that you can see the tomatoes plants when they were still a reasonable size and I was all enthused about staking and trellising them.

Here are the tomato bushes up close.  There are three of them and they used to have actual space between them.  I was valiantly trying to make them be good neighbors but even this early in the season they were proving very resistant to anything that controlled their exuberant growth.  At this point they are about 4 feet tall.  If you look to the lower left of the picture you can see a green tomato, one of the many these plants produced.

Here is a closeup of one of the tomato blossoms. 

This is a photo of one of the first new beds we created this year.  It has been growing since the winter and survived through two low twenties freezes.  In the background is Swiss Chard and in front are some onions.

Here is a ground level wildlife watering stations backed by purple canna and a blooming white crinum on the left.

Here is a wild Border Collie making use of the watering station.  We originally had the bird bath for the birds and this lower watering station for whatever creatures didn't want to use the birdbath.  So this could be considered a lizard bath or something - maybe a toad pool.  Trudy however considers herself the owner of all things that hold water.

So, we gave Trudy her own Border Collie bath.  She can't get enough of it.  One of her favorite things to do is stick her face into it and blow bubbles through her nose.  Sometimes I stock her bath with baby carrots so she has something to dive for.

This anole lizard probably wants to visit the watering station since at this point in the year it had been months since there was any appreciable rain.  He is however a wary lizard which will serve him well.

This lizard on the other hand is not as wary.

He is interested in perpetuating his species and is doing the equivalent of flashing his mighty biceps to any female lizards in the area.

If he is not careful, this female will be the last thing he sees.  I have rescued several lizards from Trudy so far this year.  She does not outright kill them, but carries them around in her mouth and puts them down to play with them.  When the lizard tries to run she puts her paw on top of it.  This 'play' allows me a little time to intercede on the lizards behalf and I put these stressed out little guys into the dog proof area of the garden.  I imagine in time the natural selection process will make two distinctly different subsets of lizards in our yard.  In the dog area will be the fast and wary lizards and in the dog proof area will be the slower but smarter lizards who have chosen to remain in the sanctuary.

Here is Trudy looking slightly guilty about catching lizards.  Or maybe she is off to catch one and is seeing if I am paying attention to her.

Here is Trudy pleading to have her lizard back again.  Or maybe she wants more baby carrots in her pool.

 This is a close up of one of the many cucumber vines.  I always seem to go through some sort of gardening amnesia each year and think that in order for us to have enough cucumbers I need to plant a whole bunch of them.  I believe I put in about a dozen plants this year.

This is the female bloom of the cucumber and if it is fertilized...

...it will look like this in about two days.  It has been a great year for cucumbers and practically all the female flowers got fertilized which resulted in a harvest of more than a dozen cucumbers per day when it was at its peak.  It is not possible for two grown humans and two dogs to eat a dozen cucumbers per day and live meaningful lives.  We therefore became the cucumber cornucopia to our friends and family.

Now lest you think we have only vegetable plants in the garden, here is a close up view of the ornamental snail and slug bed along with the only dog in our yard that does not make daily deposits.  I think you are required by law to have garden art of some sort and our beds are infested with it.  The yellow and orange cosmos in the background have been under assault by the snail/slug coalition as well as from the scented geraniums just visible along the right edge of the picture.  I know next to nothing about scented geraniums except that they are the bullies of this garden bed and are trampling all the other plants.  Every time I go to trim them back the scented geraniums entice me with their heavenly smells and I end up leaving them alone.  I told the cosmos they should work on smelling better if they want more room.

Here are some amaryllis that do not obey the laws of this type of bulb.  These are rogue plants - the masters of their fate.  They were forced into bloom last year and then given to me when the blooms died.  I planted them, knowing, according to amaryllis law, they would not bloom for at least another year.  They had other ideas and  bloomed that same year just months after I planted them.  I thought - okay - now they won't bloom again for at least a year.  But here they are, blooming in the spring.  They put all my other amaryllis to shame.  And don't think I don't mention it to the others - those slackers.  The other bulbs just grumble something about these blooming guys being law breakers.

Not everything in the garden is planted in the ground.  Here are a few of the pots of ornamental plants with an orange calibrachoa in the front and nasturtiums and viola in the back.

Here is a closer view of the nasturtiums.  Technically they are edible, but far too pretty to eat.

Here is a closeup of the viola, one of my favorite varieties.  I forget what they are really called - I call them the Monkey faced violas - they look like they belong in the Wizard of Oz.

Here is another of the ornamentals - a scaevola, which I first tried last year.  It is supposedly a perennial but right now just an annual for me until I figure out how to stop killing it.

Here is the best ornamental in our garden, the rare blooming Westhighland White Terrier.  Rare because he is actually rather white in this photo instead of his preferred dirt caked hue.  It isn't all his fault as Trudy is constantly slobbering all over him, but Lewey also likes to roll in 'things' - things being whatever loathsome substance he can find up to and including dead things, bird poop and the Holy Grail of loathsomeness: possum poop.  This is also a rare photo in that Lewey is looking at the camera.  Whenever you try to take a picture of him he usually turns away in disgust. 

That's enough about the garden for now...

The Lisp

"Thufferin Thuccotash"

 
Losing my two front teeth was a right of passage for me as it is for any child, but it also had an unfortunate consequence.  I developed a very pronounced lisp.  The lisp worsened during the summer between first and second grade so much that I sounded like a parody of a child talking.  Sure, cute for a toddler, but a seven year old child who lisps sounds retarded. My S sounds were definitely Eth sounds and sounding stupid in the new advanced learning second grade was just not allowed.   It just so happened that this improved school had a speech therapist who began to work with me to correct this problem.

Her name was Miss Simpson, or as I said it Mith  Thimthun.  She was beautiful, young and had a very positive attitude.  I liked her immediately.  She took the time to explain to me in great detail what a lisp was (a soft th sound instead of the hard SSS) and why she thought I had such a strong lisp (the missing two front teeth).

Now before she explained it to me I didn't even know what people were talking about when they said I had a lisp.  I thought they were saying there was something wrong with my lips, that they were backwards or something.   I had spent several anxious minutes looking into the mirror trying to see what was so obvious to everyone else.  My mouth looked normal to me, so I was confused.  It wasn't even apparent to me that people were talking about my abnormal pronunciation of the S sound.  Either I wasn't paying attention or this was one of those times the adults talked about it amongst themselves while not bothering to mention the issue to the child in question.  Sort of like how they decided when you needed your next round of inoculations - better to keep the child in the dark so there was less screaming.

It might sound strange, but at first I could not hear how my pronunciation of the S sound was different from anyone else.  To my ears, SSS was the same as eththth so Miss Simpson first had to teach me how to hear the difference.  She did this with a device I immediately coveted and wanted to bring home with me.  It was a recording device that read a magnetic tape that was at the bottom of a long card.  You would place the card upright with the tape placed between a couple of wheels on the devices top.  You pushed a button and the wheels pulled the card from one side of the device to the other.  While the card was in transit you were supposed to speak, but you had to do it quickly because the card finished its trip in about 5 seconds.  When the card was finished you put it into the machine again, pushed another button and then you got to hear what you said.

Miss Simpson asked me to say the phrase: "My sister is Sally."   I stopped her.  "No, that's our dog's name."  She said since we wanted to work on my S sounds I should use the sentence as is.  I was a little leery of doing this because I feared what might happen if someone heard this obvious lie I was being asked to tell, but since I was eager to see the machine in action I complied.  She ran the machine and when I finished speaking she ran the card back through.  I got to hear my voice on tape for the first time.  It sounded like "My thithter ith Thally."  I was appalled.  That could not have possibly been me.  I didn't sound like that!  I looked at her in horror with my hands over my mouth.  She said, "Don't worry sweety, I know it sounds strange the first time you hear your voice."  She continued, "Now you know what you sound like, so we can begin to help you make your S sounds better."  I was rather unsure at that point about the whole thing, but since she didn't make me do another tape or listen to that wretched machine voice again I grudgingly agreed to play along.

What I learned was that my lisp was my tongues fault.  My tongue did not know where it belonged when I made the sound S.  Instead of behaving properly it jutted forward like a fat snake tongue.  Since I didn't have any front teeth to stop its progress it ended up sloppily getting in the way and flattening out the proper sound.  I was furious with my tongue but since I didn't have any front teeth I couldn't effectively bite it to show it how mad I was.  Betrayed by my own body part and there I was only seven years old.  I laid my head on the desk in a dejected attitude.

Miss Simpson was also a stickler for proper posture so she made me sit up and showed me the first of many times how to make my tongue behave.  First we practiced touching the tip of the tongue to the roof of our mouths.  She would show me with her own tongue and then ask me to do the same.  We did this time after time as I would meet with her twice a week.  We eventually refined the roof of the mouth touching so that I was bringing my tongue tip closer and closer  to the edge of my gums, where my teeth would eventually reappear.  Once I had my tongue in the right position I was supposed to try and blow air across it to make the S sound.  At the end of each session I got to make another recording with the machine.

After a couple of weeks my pronunciation had improved markedly.  Miss Simpson must have been contracted to be with me a certain number of weeks because by the third week my lisp had virtually disappeared yet we still met together.  To use up our time she challenged me to come up with more and more sentences where every word began with S.  The biggest part of the challenge was that I would have to say these sentences in the five seconds the tape would record.  My favorite constructed phrase was "Silly Sam says something silly."  She applauded my achievement. 

Finally we had our last session together and I never met with Miss Simpson again.  Our brief encounter altered my life in a positive way and at the time I didn't even know the importance of what she had done.  By teaching me to overcome my lisp she alleviated an issue that could have left a negative impression on everyone I would ever meet.  We put a lot of stock into how a person speaks and an obvious speech impediment reduces a person in our eyes.  We rate people according to their accents as well assigning negative qualities to colloquial pronunciations.

My work with Miss Simpson taught me to appreciate the spoken language and to pay attention to how I was speaking.  I began to listen to how others were speaking but more importantly I paid attention to the 'proper' way to say things, shunning local accents.  As a result I have virtually no regional accent of any type.  Many people when I first meet them ask me where I am from since there are no telling signs in my speech.  They are certain I could not be from Texas, but I have lived here all my life.  I just make sure when I speak to get my tongue in the right place.

Cartoon

I watched a lot of Saturday morning cartoons.  My sister and I would wake up early and if we were very quiet we could watch as much Saturday morning shows as we could stand until noon.  This was the only time of the week when our TV watching was not limited or censored by our ever vigilant mother.  I guess my mother felt that no matter what loathsomeness was present in other genres of TV,  cartoons were exempt by their very nature.  After all, cartoons were made for children and therefore would never have any adult themes or concept that would destroy our moral character.  She apparently did not consider cartoon violence a morality issue, nor did she seem to understand that Bugs Bunny and Popeye had some definitely adult themes.  Mind you there was nothing blatant in those cartoons, but having viewed them as an adult myself, there were plenty of suggestive situations and double meanings portrayed.

So we reveled in this TV feast all the more since it was the only time each week we could sit in front of the TV for more than an hour at a time.  It didn't hurt that many of the cartoons were the best thing ever created.  Our favorites consisted of the following:

The Bugs Bunny Show

This was the holy grail of Saturday morning cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd, such as in Acrobatty Bunny / What's Up, Doc?, as well as many others and in later years, The Road Runner and Sylvester and Tweety.  This was well animated, brilliantly scripted and hilariously voiced animated cartooning at its best.  Even as kids we knew there was nothing better than what we were watching.  We anticipated the start of this show and when this hour was up, the rest of what Saturday morning had to offer was pale in comparison. 

The Flintstones

Ah yes, the tale of a stone age family.  Fred, the father dealing with his boss and Wilma his wife using all sorts of prehistoric appliances.  Their neighbors Barney and Betty were always in on most of the exploits.  I always felt that Barney and Betty were in many ways a cartoon version of Fred and Ethel from the I Love Lucy show.  I especially loved this show because I had saved up some box tops and sent off for a cardboard version of the actual Flintstone house.  When it finally arrived it turned out to be more fun as a concept because I didn't have any Flintstone characters to put in it.  The Flintstones

The Jetsons

This was like the Flintstones, but set in the future with George, the father character having all sorts of issues with his boss.  Jane, the wife was always using some sort of  futuristic appliance and the kids did futuristic kid things.  I think or favorite part of this show was watching George Jetson become trapped on the dogs treadmill.  All in all it painted the future as somewhat vapid and dismal.  My favorite character was the robot maid, I think for her general downtrodden attitude. Rosie the Robot

Jonny Quest

Oh, my God, but we loved this show, especially the opening credits where there was this eye like thing chasing them.  Jonny was a young boy and he had all sorts of adventures with his same aged friend Hadji and the bulldog Bandit as they accompanied his father Dr. Quest.  There was this other guy Race Bannon and it was unclear exactly what his job was and how he related to the rest of the family.  It may have been an early version of 'don't ask, don't tell'.  The Mystery of the Lizard Man

Underdog

I always loved the cartoons that had a catchy them song.  This one was a great one with: "There's no need to fear!  Underdog is here!"  It was also nice to have a character who struggled with his inabilities but still made good. The fact that he always talked in rhymes was a negative, but it wasn't like we watched these things for the dialog.  The Ultimate Underdog Collection Volume 1

George of the Jungle

Another great theme song which my favorite part was: "George, George, George of the jungle.  Watch out for that tree!" and then he would smash into a tree.  Well, that was mostly what we watched this for so it was pretty far down on the list, but still worth it. GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE (1967)

Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids

 Any program narrated by my favorite of favorites Bill Cosby was a good cartoon.  It combined this with some nice animation and interesting stories.  There was less of a ha, ha about this program and more about teaching us some sort of morality message, but we did our best to avoid learning on Saturday mornings, so we just let the educational messages slide off and enjoyed it as a cartoon. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids

Mighty Mouse

We liked this superman in mouse form because he did all sorts of heroic and totally superpower things, but there was the issue with him spontaneously bursting into opera. All in all this was only a good choice if nothing else noteworthy was available. Mighty Mouse

Sunday

Considering the absolute feast of cartoons on Saturday morning we were definitely experiencing withdrawls symptoms on Sunday morning.  Luckily, Sunday had a small cartoon fare itself.   It was pretty slim pickings as far as quantity but luckily there was a really great cartoon available.

The Rocky and Bullwinkle show

Now this was a compilation shown done right with opening and closing sequences and cliffhanger endings.  Not only did this have Rocky the flying squirrel and Bullwinkle the moose in their fights against the villains Boris and Natasha, but it also was a collection of other cartoons we liked such as Fractured Fairy tales - a very dry witted  version of classic fairy tales with modern twists;  Peabody's Improbable History - with the Professor Peabody, the genius dog and his boy Sherman- we really liked their interactions since the Professor's attitude was quite antagonistic.  I especially loved it when Professor Peabody ordered Sherman with, "Quiet Boy!";  and Dudley Do-Right which had the main character Dudley of the huge square chin always rescuing Penelope from the schemes of Snidely Whiplash.  This usually involved a train track. Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends: Complete Season 1

Davy and Goliath

That we actually watched this show proved how desperate we were for cartoons on Sunday.  If this program had been offered on Saturday we would have shunned it.  This was a show with an overwhelming moralistic attitude, definitely Christian and definitely intending that we learn something wholesome from it.  We resented it almost as much as we needed to watch it.  Davey & Goliath
After all, once this show was over then it was just the wasteland of Sunday afternoon movies and then the Wonderful World of Disney in the evenings, which could be absolutely excellent, but also meant the weekend was over.

Gym was just another word for Hell

I was gifted at being non-athletic.  This is just as much of a thing as being athletic and is just as rooted in DNA, nutrition and interest.  Being a non-athletic person meant that I was the polar opposite to the athlete.  My abilities could easily cancel out the abilities of the most gifted player on a team.  It was a non-ability that was very feared in my gym encounters at school.

Of course at first there was no such thing as gym.  In first through fifth grades we had free range playground time.  There were however opportunities even in this for group sports.  The first one I can remember was a game called Red Rover.  What you did was take the group of kids and divide them in two.  There was a captain for each team who picked the other kids for the team.  The teams would stand a short distance apart and everyone on the team would line up holding their teammates hands.  This formed two long lines of kids facing each other.  The captain of the team would shout, "Red Rover, Red Rover, let (and here they would shout the name of a person on the other team) come over."  The person on the other team whose name was called was supposed to run forward as fast as they could and try to break through the other teams line by crashing into the clasped hands of the teammates.  If they were able to break through then they could bring back these kids to their team.  If they could not break through they had to go to the end of the line and join the opposing team.

The first time I ever played this was in second grade.  The playground teacher picked the two team captains and then the captains set about picking teammates.  Apparently they were given tips on how to select the most valuable players.  Those tips must have included not picking the scrawny looking ones because I was picked next to last.  This seemed somewhat strange to me.  After all, wasn't I bigger than my younger cousins at home?  Couldn't I run the fastest?  Wasn't I feisty?  Well, they would find out.  It turns out the captains were also coached as to who to call over.  This tip was definitely 'choose the scrawny looking ones'.  I got called near first.  As I was hurtling my way over toward the opposing line I was certain they had called me because I was so 'game'.  They knew I was up for the challenge.  They knew I had the heart of the champion. 

As I reached the line of the opposing team and did my very best to break the handhold of two of the players I learned that 1. this required far more than just running fast, 2. your opponents don't want to lose, and 3. you should probably have some strategy of going for the less robust kids when you make your run.  I failed to break through and ended up on the opposing team.  Well, this was obviously just a fluke.  There were other games.

One of the other games was kick ball.  The field was set up much like baseball, with bases and fielders, but was played by kicking a ball instead of hitting a ball with a bat.  The pitcher would roll the ball and the person up to kick would kick the ball as hard as they could.  If the ball went sailing up, the fielders were supposed to catch it, which would be an out.  If it just hurtled along the ground the fielders were supposed to grab it and throw it to a baseman, or they could also choose to throw it at the runner.  A runner was supposed to round as many bases as they could and also avoid being hit by the ball.  Simple.

This game once again had captains who picked teams.  I was again chosen near last.  I think I rose slightly in the choosing ranks for this game at first because I was a fast runner and that is a bonus in this game.  However, you don't get to run if you can't kick the ball.  You would think kicking a ball that is rolled to you would be the easiest thing in the world, but that does not account for the strange hardness of that rubber ball.  It hurts to collide with your foot.  Once you know this there is a nearly irresistible urge to avoid kicking this 'ball of pain' - at least there was in me.  When I did make contact with the ball it was once again an issue of mass versus velocity.  I had nearly zero mass, which made it very hard for me to counter the velocity of the ball coming my way.  Usually my kicks barely went anywhere.  I became known as an easy out.  I was no better in the fielding positions either.  These position required that you be able to catch the hurtling ball from those capable of kicking with a lot of power.   Catching a rolling ball was not that hard if it was kicked by someone like me, but some of the kids had true athletic ability and their kicks came past at sonic speeds.  Plus, once you fielded the ball you had to throw it to hit the running player or at least to another teammate who could hit the running player.  Both of these meant you had to have some accuracy, which is also apparently not something a non-athletic scrawny kid like me possessed.

So I gravitated away from such team sports and concentrated on such pursuits as hopscotch (fell down a lot), jungle gym climbing (fell off a lot) and playing on the whirl a wheel (got motion sickness a lot).  This left me with one game I dearly loved which was tether ball.  In tether ball there is a basketball sized ball attached to a rope and you tie the rope up high on a pole.  The object of this game is to hit the ball so that the rope wraps around the pole until the ball touches the pole.  Two people play against one another and when one person hits the ball the other person counters by either catching the ball or hitting it back the other direction.  I played this game again and again and loved it but I seldom ever won.  I had no trouble finding others who wanted to play with me though.  Being non-athletic in a team sport pisses people off.  Being non-athletic in a two person game makes you a valuable commodity.  I only lost out when there were more than one person who wanted to play.  That would mean we would play the winner which was never me, so I didn't get as many turns.

After the elementary school years we entered junior high and school took an interest in our physical development and instituted an official gym class.  This was hell on earth for me.  Now there was no such thing as a non-team activity.  The girls coaches were always disgusted with me whether it was volley ball, basketball or softball.  It is hard to say which one I was worse at, but once in softball I managed to field a ball so poorly it hit the tip of my little finger and ended up causing a 'greenstick' fracture, which the doctor who x-rayed my finger said had 'wrinkled the bone'.  I was ecstatic because this got me out of weeks of playing.  

Then suddenly the President became interested in our physical fitness and we were involved in some sort of contest.  We had to do chin ups, sit ups and running.  There was absolutely no preparation for this contest.  One day they just lined us all up and took us out to the chin up bar.  Girls did not have to do an actual chin up, but we were supposed to be able to hold ourselves up on the bar once placed there for sixty seconds.  Here once again for no good reason whatsoever I felt I would be able to do this.  I watched girl after girl accomplish this task and then saw one girl who was unable to stay up for very long.  I felt sorry for her as I approached the bar.  "That poor girl," I thought, "Being humiliated like that in front of everyone."  The coach picked me up and I grabbed hold of the bar in the required overhand grip.  The coach asked, "Are you ready?" and I said, "Yes."  She let go of me and for about a second there I was, then gravity took hold and I had a few brief nanoseconds of my arms flapping like a hummingbird's wings before I dropped like a rock.  It would have been more accurate to have called it the Presidential Physical Humiliation award.

Coaches must have some sort of grudge against the children they teach because that is the only reason I can think of for the game Dodge Ball.  This game was typically played on rainy days and its rules were as simple as anything.  The kids are divided into two groups and then they take turns throwing a basketball at each other from the opposite side of the gym.  Since I was fast I was able to dodge very well and being super skinny also helped.  However, this eventually meant I was one of a very few left.  The teams were never evenly divided and I always ended up on the dwindling side.  Very soon there would be just me and one or two other kids which meant I had to throw the ball and my wimpy throws could never could make contact with an opposing player. The other team would always have some brutish players left who would hurl the ball with demonic power so getting hit was like getting slapped hard.

However Dodge Ball was nothing compared to a truly awful game that was also played inside on rainy days.  Indoor soccer.  For this you have two players who compete in the center of the gym for control of the ball.  All the other players line up against the wall and prevent the opposing player from kicking the ball against the wall by imposing their body between the ball and the wall.  Yes, you stopped the goal by allowing yourself to be hit by a kicked soccer ball.  Here again I believe the coaches were getting some sort of revenge because the center players would always be the roughest and most aggressive kids.  When they kicked that ball you wanted to be anywhere but in the way of its destiny to the wall.  This had a very unfortunate outcome once when I was playing.  There I was standing against the wall when the two most athletic of the girls fought for the ball a few feet away.  The toughest female jock on the opposing players team got an opening and instead of kicking the ball straight forward put some sort of spin on it that caused the ball to collide at super sonic speeds right into the side of my face.  It nearly knocked me down it was such a hard blow.  I happened to be wearing a retainer on my upper teeth at the time and the blow was so forceful it knocked my retainer loose.  The sound it made must have been tremendous because afterward you could have heard a pin drop.  The coaches response was to yell at me for not paying attention.  She grudgingly let me sit out the rest of the game.  I am not sure what hurt worse, the blow itself or the humiliation of the event.  I spent the rest of the day with that half of my face beet red.  The jock girl came over after the game and very sincerely apologized.  I always got along well with the jock girls - after all I was no competition for them. 

Then one day I came into the gym and they had all this gymnastic equipment set up.  There was a balance beam, uneven parallel bars and a pommel horse.  Now the humiliation wasn't just from competing with your classmates, now you had to contend with inanimate objects.  Once again I am pretty sure this was just another sign of the sadistic nature of the coaches.  Who in their right mind puts non-athletic people up on a balance beam.  At first they had it lowered all the way to the ground while they showed us the routine we had to learn.  We had to walk up and down its length and then dismount.  It was hard to do, but manageable at first.  Then they raised the beam.  Now it was about chest high, in fact just high enough when I fell off of it to give me my second case of having the 'wind' knocked out of me.

On the uneven parallel bars you had to hold yourself up on the top bar and swing and wrap your hips around the lower bar.  Didn't we already prove I was incapable of holding myself up on a bar during the Presidential Physical Fitness test?  Every day I would try and fail without an iota of improvement.  If I could somehow miraculously hang on and swing so my hips hit the lower bar this was just designed to give me a bruise in a new place.  The set up expects there to be some flesh at the contact point.  When you were built as skin and bones as I was your contact point was bone against hard wood.  Not a recipe anyone wants to experience.

The pommel horse was a horrible, horrible thing.  You were supposed to run as fast as you could, jump and land on a spring board and hurtle over the top of the dreaded thing.  The landing was onto a thick foam pad, but to reach that you had to make it over the pommel horse.  Once again my body rescued me from this ordeal by developing a strained back.  I got to sit the rest of gymnastics out. 

I have mixed feelings when I hear about them removing gym class from schools these days.  The logical adult side of me says, "Good Heavens, how ever will those youths become physically active.  What a bunch of sloths we are raising.  Of course we should have mandated gym class."  Then my memories kick in and that skinny, non-athletic ghost of my former self comes forward and says, "It's about time!"

Daisy the Buckskin Mare

It was very fortunate for my sister and me that we lived on some acreage in a rural area.  This allowed us a lot of opportunity for healthy outdoor play.  Granted some of this healthy play involved skinned knees, bruises and insect bites, but you have to take the bad with the good in these instances.  The best thing about where we lived is when the need to have a horse became overwhelming in us, at least the issue of having enough room for a horse was not on the table.  Convincing our parents that horse ownership was essential was however a daunting task.

We were avid horseback riding fans which was frustrating because we were not often offered the opportunity to ride.  This made us act like raging maniacs whenever the slightest chance of being near horses was available.  My sister however was the one who 'got us' a horse of our very own.  She did it by acting very mature and offering a point by point plan of horse ownership to my parents.  Never before had she gone after a goal more relentlessly than this one.  Every objection they voiced she calmly and in a matter of fact way countered with a solution.  I think they gave in due to the shock of seeing her so rational.  My sister was many things, talented, intelligent, and vocal, but she was also prone to hystrionics and overly dramatic displays.  Seeing her rationally and logically approach a problem without all the emotional whirlwind of her usual character broke their minds and they gave in.  "Okay," they said, "you can get a horse."

So we went horse shopping, which amounted to us looking in the classifieds of the local paper.  Our one drawback was that we had only $100 to spend, so we were looking for a very special horse.  A very, very cheap horse.  We found one by the second week of our quest.  It seems this rancher had his old saddle horse available for sale.  He no longer wanted to use her for work as she was 22 years old and sway back  He liked the idea of her going to some kids to live out the rest of her life taking it easy with us.

He arrived with her in the back of an open topped trailer.  As soon as he got out she began to back up into the rope that covered the end of the trailer.  She knew how to work and was ready to get out of that trailer and down to business.  She was a lovely light buckskin, tan body with black legs, mane and tail.  She was very tall at 16 hands, but that was not the only size to her.  She had a huge rounded 'grass' belly and was quite swayback.  Her name was Daisy.  Once out of the trailer Daisy set to grazing right away.  She was totally unconcerned about us and was the most placid creature I had ever met.

We loved her from the moment we first saw her.  The rancher took the time to teach us how to saddle and bridle her and then we set off for our first ride with my sister in front and me behind.  Heaven can only hope to hold such magic as that moment for us.  After our first ride we took off her tack, combed her and fed her and introduced her to her stable which was located in the shed at the back of the barn.

Thus our life with Daisy began.  She was very patient with us and would let us do practically anything.  She was so calm I could handle her easily by myself even though I was only 10 years old and skinny as a rail.  One of my favorite things to do was to 'Indian' mount her.  This meant she was bare backed and I would reach up to her mane and swing myself sideways up onto her back.  The thing was with her being 16 hands high most times I would only make it up about half way.  I would then struggle clinging to her neck as I worked my way up onto her back.  My mother watched me from the window as I did this once and she said Daisy would just plant her feet wide and wait very patiently while I clambered my non-athletic way onto her.  She would only move once I was securely on her back.

However, when we were in the saddle, Daisy was not as careful with us.  Once we were riding in one of the many empty fields that surrounded our land.  The field was overgrown with tall weeds and there were narrow pathways the horses could travel on.  My sister was riding up front and I was on back.  My sister decided to bring Daisy up to a trot, which was one of my most dreaded gaits since it would bounce me up and down like a sack of potatoes.  My seat was actually behind the saddle since the back of the western saddle had a hard ridge.  As Daisy began to trot she veered ever so slightly to the left.  I was clinging to the waist of my sister and began to tilt to the right.  Since I was behind the saddle there was nothing for me to push against to right myself.  My feet were not in the stirrups and with my arms around my sister my tilt began to pull her sideways as well.  In slow motion, but inexorably we slid out of the saddle.  As we began to fall, my foot made contact with Daisy's flank and she leaped forward, hastening our plummet to the earth.  We fell hard with my sister landing slightly on top of me.

Daisy took off and ran back to the barn without a care in the world for us.  In her mind if we were so incompetent we fell out of the saddle it wasn't her fault, so she didn't have to stick around.  My sister was up immediately and yelling at me.  "Why did you pull me off? What is wrong with you? If you are going to fall then just let go and don't bring me with you!"  All though her diatribe I just sat there gasping for air.  This was my first experience with the 'wind' being knocked out of me, which is a very descriptive way of saying I could not breathe.  I sat there just trying to inhale for what seemed like several minutes until my body began to work again.  My sister did not wait around for me or pay me any attention.  She ran after Daisy.  After a while I was able to stand and walk and thankfully breathe.  My sister never let me live it down and always brought up how I kicked Daisy in the flanks.  "You could have at least not kicked poor Daisy when you were being such a klutz," she would chastise me about a million times a day.

Daisy didn't hold it against me and continued to be as patient and loving with me as long as she wasn't wearing a saddle.  In her mind saddles meant work and work had special rules.  When I was in the saddle I was her boss and I had to act like the boss.  When I was bareback we were friends and friends get treated differently than bosses.   I learned a lot from Daisy.  I learned how to clean a horses hooves. How to make them breathe out by bumping their side when you saddle them so you can get the strap tight enough.  I learned from her example that when weird things are happening it is best just to plant your feet and be patient.  I learned that when you are working hard and things go wrong and the boss just leaves then the best thing for you to do is just head home.  It will all sort itself out.

P.S. The picture at the top is not Daisy but looks remarkably like her.  I was unable to find my pictures of her yet and will have to update this when I find them.  Just add a huge belly and several more inches to the height of that horse and you will have the spitting image of Daisy.

Dangerous Games

I don't know how we survived our childhood considering the number of dangerous games we were exposed to.  These days if there is even a remote possibility of potential harm, a game will be whisked off the market and lawsuits will fly.  Not so back in my childhood years.

Consider the following:

Clackers

Better known in my house as wrist crackers

Probably a better name for these would have been 'hit yourself with a hard acrylic ball' toy.  They were a couple of very hard 3 inch diameter clear acrylic balls that were tied together via a long string.  You held the middle of the string with the balls hanging downward and by raising your wrist up and down you could cause them to bang together producing a 'clack' noise.  When they banged together the force of the blow would send them further apart and if you had the right rhythm you could eventually cause them to swing up above your wrists and bang together as well.  I have a distinct auditory memory of hearing: "clack...Clack...CLACK..CLACK..CLACK.CLACKCKLACKCLACKCLACK - OWWWWW!"
The last sound being either your own cry of pain or, and this happened with equal frequency, the sound of someone else's body part getting in the way of the very, very hard balls.  And even better, the balls might shatter.  What fun!  These days I am sure they have worked out all the dangerous stuff since you can still find them. Clackers

Skip Ball

Also known as sprain your ankle ball...

It was a ball attached to a rope attached to a ring that went around your ankle.  You were supposed to swing it around your ankle and hop over the rope.  Now perhaps this was not a dangerous toy to most children, but to a non-athletic clutz like me it was a certain to knock me off my feet.  Also, my version of this toy had a ball that was about as hard as the clacker balls.  I remember this because it caused me quite a bruise.  So a potential sprained ankle or a contusion, either way it was going to leave a mark.  They still make it and you can find it here. Skip ball by Toysmith

Operation

A truly shocking toy

Yes, this was just what I needed.  A game that could electrocute me.  The design was this board with a picture of a man and cut outs of various body parts filled with a plastic piece you were supposed to remove using a pair of tweezers.  The whole thing was electrified and if the metal tweezers touched the edge of the metal cut outs a loud buzzer went off and the nose of the man would light up red.  You got a different kind of buzz if you touched the edge of the wishbone area with your bare finger.  Ha Ha!  Nothing like an electrical shock to liven up a children's game.  I am sure the current version is much safer now... Hasbro Operation Game.

Creepy Crawler/Thing Maker

This toy came with metal molds, bottles of plastic goop and a little oven.  You filled the molds with the goop and baked it in the oven.  Sounds harmless, except for the fact the goop gave off a very strong odor which probably had all sorts of toxicity. Just what every child needs, poisonous vapors.  I am sure they have figured out how to make it non-toxic today.  Creepy Crawlers.

Slip and Slide

For me this was the slip and hurt yourself toy...

A long yellow plastic sheet with a sprinkler hose down one side.  You hooked it up to the garden hose and the sprinkler wet the length of the plastic sheet.  Then you were supposed to run and leap onto the sheet, sliding down its length.  Okay, maybe in a perfect world this would work like it was supposed to, but in our world there were 1. uneven surfaces the sheet was resting on which were guaranteed to either trip you or impact you as you slid,. 2. an abrupt end to the ride where the sheet became not-sheet also known as grass and of course eventually mud,  3. Non-athletic children like me who just can't get the knack of sliding but who will slip and come to an abrupt and bruise inducing stop. It was however, tons of fun.  Slip N Slide by Wham-O

Water Wiggle

The idea was simple.  Just attach a water hose to this funny looking weighted head.  Turn on the water and the force of the water would hoist the head up into the air where it will twist and turn, spraying all the laughing children.  At least that is how it worked in the commercial.  I think it was very telling that the manufacturer of this toy is a company called Wham-O - because that is exactly what this toy does - Wham! right into the ground after it lifts up for about a second.  This necessitates having to go back over to it and reset it almost guaranteeing that you will at some point be directly under the thing as it slams to earth, beaning you in the head.

This is the only one of the toys that you cannot find today, owing to a recall of the toy in 1978 after the unfortunate death of two little boys.  

Somehow we survived, but not without mild injuries. And I am sure it could have been worse.  I shudder to think what could have happened if we had been given the truly lethal toys like Lawn Darts.