Chapter Five

Chapter Five of my memoir

Chapter Five

Mom and Dad never seemed to be paying much attention to Mike and me. Maybe it was the pills they gobbled by the handful or the alcohol. Maybe it was their preoccupation with torturing each other. Whatever the reason, Mike and I were often left to our own devices as we explored the world around us.


There was the time when Mike was three, maybe four years old and our mother was in her favorite place—sleeping in her bed. Dad was at work, of course. Remember, he never missed a day. It was a cold, boring winter day with not much happening to occupy two curious little minds. I took Mike into the kitchen and helped him climb up on the counter. I climbed up there with him and we stood there for a couple of minutes just surveying our domain. We were giants in that tiny kitchen. I think I became drunk with the power. I looked around, spotted the canisters and decided to dump them out. We took turns dumping out the flour, sugar, and coffee on the counter. It was great fun mixing it all together; we did that for several minutes and managed to get a good amount of it on the floor as well. I tired of that after a while, so on to the cabinets I went. There wasn’t a lot of interesting stuff in the cabinets and I was about to close the doors when … hold on, what’s this? A jar of Flintstone vitamins—that was probably as close to candy as we were going to get in this treasure hunt, so I took the lid off (this was before the days of child-safe lids—come to think of it, we were probably part of the inspiration for that little invention) and doled out the little Flintstone characters—one for Mike, one for me, one for Mike, one for me … you get the picture. Soon the jar was empty. I tossed it onto the flour/sugar/coffee-covered counter and looked in the cabinet again. This time I came out with a jar of grape jelly. Mike always wore his hair in a flattop and Mom had some kind of glop that she put in it every morning to make it stick up in the front the way a good flattop should. Since Mom wasn’t up yet, Mike’s hair wasn’t sticking up properly. It looked to me like grape jelly would do the trick, so I sat him down in the sink and I knelt on the counter behind him, opened the grape jelly and took out a big goopy handful to smear into his hair. Once I put it on his head, I discovered that I had way more than I needed just to make that little bump in the front of his flattop stand up, so I just went ahead and massaged it all over his head. Mike was trying to talk me into letting him put grape jelly in my hair when Mom appeared at the kitchen door.

I don’t know that I have ever heard a sound quite like the one she made when she saw us. It was sort of a scream, but a strangled one—more like a gasping, choking scream. It was definitely not a joyful sound. We were trapped. The only way out was through the kitchen door where our mother stood making that weird strangled noise and waving her arms around as if she were swatting bees. So we just sat there and waited to die. It was bad enough when she noticed the canisters on the floor with their contents all dumped out on the counters; and it wasn’t good when she saw Mike’s grape-jelly coated hair, but she was mostly just yelling. I thought we might have dodged the bullet—until she saw that empty Flintstones vitamin bottle. There was that strangled, gasping, choking scream-sound again and this time she picked up the phone and called our dad at work. Now we were dead for sure.


Dad pulled up in his car a few minutes later and Mike and I waited for him to come in and kill us. Oddly enough though, he came in and ushered us all out to the car, Mom included. This did not make any sense. The next thing I knew we were pulling up to the hospital and rushing inside the emergency room. My memory is a little foggy about the rest of it, probably because of the guilt I feel. Mike had his stomach pumped while I sat in the waiting room with my dad who kept asking me repeatedly, “You sure you didn’t eat any of those vitamins?” I just kept shaking my head no. I knew I didn’t want any of what Mike was getting.


The next week I overheard my mother talking to a friend, telling her that my brother had to have his stomach pumped because the doctor said if they didn’t get all those vitamins out of his stomach it could cause his bones to become like jelly. WHAT? I spent the next few years convinced that I would wake up one day and be unable to get out of bed because my bones would have turned to jelly overnight. I would have to lie there in my bed like a jellyfish all because of those Flintstones vitamins.


It’s strange the things that kids get in their heads. Like the time in the fourth grade when I stayed home from school on the day of a solar eclipse. For weeks at school, we had been constructing little black boxes with a pinpoint hole in them that would allow us to look at the eclipse without frying our retinas and causing us to go blind. All I could think about was that eclipse, but I was at home and my black box with the pinpoint hole was at school. Don’t do it, don’t do it. I finally couldn’t resist any longer. I opened the door, walked outside with my head down, staring straight down at the sidewalk. I stopped halfway down the sidewalk and just stood there for what seemed like hours, trying to make myself turn around and go back inside. Suddenly, as if my head wasn’t attached to my neck but had a life of its own, my head snapped back and my eyes stared straight at the eclipse—for a whole nano-second, at least. Realizing that I was now doomed to eternal blindness, I snapped my eyes shut, turned around and ran back into the house. I had to open my eyes just a slit to see where I was going, but I was afraid to do even that, although I don’t know why since I knew the damage was already done.


I had looked at the sun during an eclipse without a black box and I would now go blind. It was a given. I just didn’t know if it would be instantaneous or would happen gradually. I wandered around the house the rest of the day testing myself. I would walk up to the dresser or the cabinet or the television, stand there and shut my eyes for five, maybe ten seconds. Then I would slowly open them, just a tiny slit at first, and then a little more, a little more, until my eyes were wide open. Good, I could still see. Alternatively, I would stand there with closed eyes and POP them wide open—so far, so good, I could still see. I did that all day long and each time I closed them, I expected to be blind the next time I opened my eyes. When my mom and dad came home, I did not dare tell them that they would soon have the burden of a blind child to care for. The last thing they both had said to me before they left that morning was, “Remember, don’t go outside today. There’s an eclipse and you can’t look at it or you’ll go blind.” I figured going blind would be punishment enough. I did not think it would be fair to add any extra punishment on top of that.
I never did go blind. Boy, was that a relief. Somehow, I had dodged two bullets—my bones never turned to jelly and I did not go blind.