A column by Donna Jobe Cronk
When I was a little girl, it seemed that the old people’s favorite topic was prune juice.
I found prune juice disgusting, and prunes equally so. I even violated a Dunlapsville School rule in first grade about wasting food.
It may have been only a rumored rule, but it went that if you didn’t clean your school-lunch plate, you got paddled. Without any legitimate reason, I was terrified of the sight of Principal Stanley, and even more, of being paddled.
When you’re in first grade, it’s all new, and you tend to believe every rumor that blows through the hallways or on the school bus. I certainly thought that being paddled for failure to consume a particular food was an unjust punishment.
Yet it was worth the risk because I simply would not down those prunes that were plopped before me, landing in a puddle of brown run off. To this day: nope!
So, I did the unthinkable. I wadded the wrinkly fruits into my napkin, and made a fist of the mess. I smuggled it to the trash, my tray fraudulently passing inspection as it cleared the lunch-lady’s approval.
Is that sweat breaking out in that same left-hand palm now, approaching six decades later?
I just know, and we won’t go into why, that prunes were a big topic in those days. But wait! The old people I reference were surely younger than I am now!
The thing about age is not so much that it catches up with us, but we catch up with it. We can hardly believe it.
We want to go back to where it’s safe, say age forty, where we aren’t twisting a knee so badly that childbirth seems nothing by comparison, all from the daring act of getting into the passenger side of a car.
I never wanted to be one of those people always talking about doctors and health scares, aches, pains, and more aches and pains. But here I am. Go ahead, save yourself, and leave now. The rest of this is one boring tale of one ache or pain after another.
Some of the most embarrassing origins of my personal aches and pains happened this year, back-to-back. As I put away our Christmas tree in January, I pulled a little too hard on one section of a pole that was supposed to slide out, but didn’t. I thought the pain it caused in my arm and shoulder would ease within days. No? Ok then, weeks. Instead, I reinjured them before they could heal.
If hurting oneself in such a lame way as shelving an artificial Christmas tree isn’t bad enough, the reinjury part of the story is worse: it happened during water-exercise class.
I may go down in history as the first person to do that.
Low-impact water exercise is supposed to be for those who want to make sure they don’t get hurt. You know: Nothing much hurts in the water; stretching is good. Even in my sixties, I can move gracefully through the water (or so I think) in ways that my body parts would laugh at if I tried on land.
But no, leave it to me to hurt myself!
Pride got me. Usually there’s few people in that pool of water who are much younger than me, but that one evening, some younger women appeared in class and we were to throw pool balls toward one another and catch them, then toss them high into the air, shooting imaginary free throws.
These younger women were doing more than lightly tossing the balls, and naturally, I had to keep up; show I’m not really old. Well, I overdid both throwing activities and, let’s just say that the biblical wisdom that pride comes before a fall holds up.
It’s July and I’m already concerned about getting out that Christmas tree.
A year ago, I carried into the house a stoneware crock from the garage. I set it down in a bedroom to house a plant. When I was not all that much younger, I could have toted the thing all over the house and never have given it the slightest thought.
Well, the night that I carried this piece of stoneware, when I set it down, I felt something that can only be described as a tweak in my back. That night, my back hurt so bad I thought Brian would have to administer an epidural.
Instead, he did an internet search on what to do and it said apply ice. I sat up all night with a block of ice on the trouble spot. It worked! But that crock gets the side-eye whenever I’m in that bedroom. I don’t know how it will ever be moved again.
This is what I’m talking about. Who knew that danger lurked when crossing into one’s sixties and meeting it with the likes of a fake tree, a supervised indoor pool, and an antique crock?
And then, there was the fern injury, and the book-signing one. Surely you’ve heard all you can take. Are your eyes glazing over?
I’m hoping that time slows down. I don’t want to think about what’s in store next. It will probably have something to do with prune juice.
Union County native Donna (Jobe) Cronk writes this column for three Indiana newspapers and for this blog. A 1977 graduate of Union County High School, she attended kindergarten at Brownsville School and first grade at Dunlapsville. Connect with her via email: newsgirl.1958@gmail.com.