Neanderpundit

On purpose. last night I had a kids size gyros. Cut up fine, of course. And ate it until I started to feel the pain. So now I know exactly what I can and cannot eat, and I like it fine.

This is being easier and easier to adjust to. I am confident, for the first time., I’m gonna do well.

because I haven’t tortured you enough yet

We often went camping with neighbors whose son, Jeff, went to school with me. jeff’s dad was great at telling ghost stories, and many was the night I nearly wet my pants in fear.

On one of these occasions, at Shakamak State Park, we were sitting around a campfire eating corned beef hash and toasting marshmallows, and Bob was at his storytelling peak.

My sister decided she needed to use the bathroom, and she went off with Mom to the park crappers.

We all sat around thinking about how we were going to escape being eaten by the newest monster. Mom and sis are walking back from the bathroom, and mom spies a 55 gallon drum laying on it’s side. She thinks, I’ll kick that drum, it will make a loud booming noise, and everyone will SHIT THEIR PANTS!! So she takes a couple steps back, takes a running fly at it and kicks it as hard as she can.

It’s filled with concrete. it doesn’t even make a noise- but MOM does. She screams a scream that makes you wonder what made you want to go camping in the first place. And we nearly DID shit our pants, even Jeff’s dad. Dad, of course, recognized the sound immediately, and smiled a little smile, and then was serious again. I think only I saw this.

Mom came hobbling back to the fire, leaning heavily on my sister, and moaning in real pain. She’d broken the first two toes on her right foot, and driven the toenail back up under the skin on the big toe. Her toe was trouble to her for four years after that, and finally only the surgical removal of most of her toenail ever gave her any relief. She had to be careful about what shoes she wore, and if she ever had to wear dress pumps she was in agony.

Dad was, of course, the perfect, attentive husband, got bags of ice for mom, never left her side the rest of the weekend. We kept close to the camper in case we had to leave- but thankfully, mom ended up just sitting around with her foot in a bucket of ice. We went home and eventually mom got back to work, but she limped for long enough that it eventually became common to see her limping.

These days she laughs about it, but if you bumped into her toe under the dinner table she was likely to smack the back of your head.

Every time I see an oil drum I think of mom’s foot and the years she suffered. And giggle, not just a little.

Now the spotlight can shine on her asian half-sister, Hanoi.