A column by John Estridge
My preschool life was pretty terrific.
Where I lived with my parents in Liberty, the house had a pretty big yard, and I had and still do have a very big imagination.
On TV at the time was the drama series Combat, about an Army squad in Europe fighting the Germans. My dad and a paternal uncle were in WW II as well as a maternal uncle who joined and then was sent home due to the Army finding a heart murmur.
My paternal uncle, Theo, was a Marine, (can one say Marine in past tense?) who was grievously wounded on Okinawa. During one of his last visits to this area, Theo told me about his wounding and the painful aftermath in great detail. When I was young, dad forbade me from asking Theo about it and that always stuck with me as a taboo subject; thus, Theo sharing his story with me really meant something to me.
After a mortar round came in and mangled his arm and back, killing his best bud, some of his other buddies carried him to a Jeep. There were other wounded on the jeep. Two to three times on the journey to the field hospital, the Marines in the Jeep stopped and went to lift Theo out because they thought he was dead. They needed to make room for more wounded.
But he was not dead and was able to rouse himself each time. Thus, he made it to the field hospital and then a hospital ship and was able to tell me the story.
Sorry, for the detour, but I really loved that Theo blessed me with that information.
Anyway, my backyard was both Europe and Okinawa during WW II when I played there in the early 60s. There were abundant pignuts on the ground from a huge pignut tree, and those were my hand grenades.
Also, I had a large collection of plastic toy soldiers, tanks, Jeeps, trucks and the like. When I wasn’t running around with a helmet and toy gun, I was on the back sidewalk deploying my army against the black ants of the backyard.
And it was war.
I slew hundreds and probably thousands, but they remained there in large numbers through the whole time I lived there, 18 years. And even to this moment their allies are all around my house and sometimes in my house in 2022, plotting against me.
Oh, and my favorite movie when I was a kid was the iconic Them! It is about immense radioactive ants in search of sugar, and it starred James Whitmore and James Arness.
The preceding was told in order to bring Monday morning into perspective.
Let me digress again.
Back a couple of lifetimes ago, I helped my mom and stepfather drive to Florida. They had a winter apartment near Tampa at Key Largo. Mom had something wrong with her where she could get blood clots very easily. The doctor had told mom she could not sit for long periods but should get up often and walk as much as possible.
Leo, my stepfather, was one of those people who when heading for a destination, wants to get to that destination as quickly as possible. We have all been there both as passengers and drivers.
However, my two biological sisters had a solution. I was to drive mom and Leo to Tampa and then fly back. I had some time coming at the paper, and I always do what my big sisters tell me to do so I drove them to Florida.
It was agreed – or more truthfully, I was told by my sisters – to not let Leo know I was stopping often for mom as the two tended to argue early and often about anything. I think they deeply loved one another, but they were just one of those couples.
A couple of examples just from that trip are: (1) going through the 50-lane hell of Atlanta – this was before GPS or anything else, we were all on our own – mom was saying I needed to stay to the right and Leo was saying I needed to be on the left. They eventually were yelling very loudly in the too small car. I hummed Beatle songs, went down the middle and somehow got through Atlanta. (2) When we crossed the state line between Georgia and Florida, Leo and mom got into a very heated debate on how many miles and how many hours were between that state line and Tampa. I hummed Beatle songs.
I never knew if either one of them was correct.
That meant that when I stopped at every rest stop on Interstate 75, I had to tell Leo the stop was for me. And at every rest area, I took about a 10-minute walk with mom after I left the restroom. After the trip was over, Leo called my sisters to find out if I needed money to go to a specialist about my bladder.
At their place in Key Largo, Leo informed me there would not be a plane ride. Instead, he was renting a U-Haul, and I was driving some furniture of theirs back to Indiana. I really never enjoyed flying so I looked at it like an adventure, or at least that was the way to psyche up my lazy side, which is really about 99 percent of my being. A non-related sidebar to the detour in this saga is there was a hurricane that came ashore just as I was leaving Key Largo. We crossed paths around Atlanta. I had not driven a U-Haul for quite some time prior to that and almost got blown off several bridges along the way back to Indiana. I was already a bad driver, but the wind and not being accustomed to driving a truck made me a slow lumbering cannon ball. I want to apologize to all the people I ran off the Interstate during that time and all the other times I have attempted to drive anywhere.
Anyway, one of the furniture pieces was a large China cabinet. For some reason I still don’t understand, Leo wanted it moved away from the wall before they emptied it. A couple of times I suggested emptying it and then moving it away from the wall, but Leo was stubborn. Thus, he and I moved the fully-loaded, very-heavy China cabinet away from the wall. As we did, I heard an audible pop in my lower back. Prior to that I had pain from working at Dana Corp. where I had to lift heavy objects. But that China cabinet really aggravated an already bad situation. I had almost constant chronic pain in my lower back from that day with the China cabinet until the early morning hours of January 23, 2008, when I suffered three strokes.
The upside from the three strokes is the back pain vanished as if by magic.
A physical therapist I went to after the strokes, surmised I had a small blood clot pressing against my spine from the China cabinet incident and, for whatever reason in those early morning hours, the clot let go and went to my brain, separated into three smaller clots and took me for an almost fatal ride.
But between that pop in my back until those strokes, I had a very bad pain in my lower back. As I said it was chronic.
And that brings us to Monday morning.
Monday, I spent my work period at the library indexing commissioners’ claims from 1864-1904, which for most people would be as much fun as a root canal without novocaine. But for me, it was exciting. In Nerd terms, I am about 150 percent nerd.
Anyway, as I was leaving through our backdoor to go to work, I stooped down to get a couple bottles of water from cases we have by the backdoor. In the corner of my eye, I saw movement on the counter.
It was the first black ant of the season. I am still at war as the ants and I have never signed a formal treaty. I twisted to the right and brought down my fist on the ant. And I heard a pop in my back, which was louder than my fist hitting the counter. I know that is not saying much considering how hard I can bring my fist down on a counter.
I had trouble walking to the car. It was the China cabinet all over again or as Yogi Berra coined: It was déjà vu all over again.
To do the indexing, I sit in a chair and type on the laptop. At 10:30 a.m., I tried to walk across the room to get a drink of my coffee, which is in a Thermos container – one of the best gifts I have ever bought myself, coffee stays hot for hours – and it was very hard to stand upright. After about five minutes rising to the point of crouching (much like the proverbial troll under the bridge) I painfully slowly limped the few yards from the table I was working at to the counter with my Thermos. Needless to say, it was very painful.
I texted my Long Suffering Wife Ruth and told her of the situation – at least she didn’t text back an LOL or probably more appropriately, LMAO – and asked her to bring me a couple of Aleve on her way back to work after lunch.
They helped some. But I still have trouble getting down and then I have almost an Everest-climbing experience just to get back to an upright position. Also, I have pain with each and every step. (Remember I am male so this is the worst experience anyone has ever experienced on the face of the earth. It is almost as bad as when I get a cold).
And the ant? I missed. He has probably been high sixing his ant buds over some sugar water ever since.