The Plunger

Part of growing up in a big family offers huge pay-offs in the larger picture and long term survival techniques. I often believe that my family alone could author the new series of Worst Case Scenario Survival Books-due to our own survival with each other. We truly have information to offer, perhaps not traditional answers-but we survived.

Anyhow, my take on The Plunger Story is a vague, family induced memory and not personal experience.

I can just picture Mary hanging onto the plunger. She was stuck to the ceiling for unknown amount of time. I imagine my siblings had some system of knowing how long a person could last up there, but really it depended on your weight and how well you could maneuver it for your own safety and protection, how much you wanted to be at another's mercy and what chore you were willing to do in return for your rescue. Otherwise, there were no soft landings beneath! It depended solely on you.

I am referred to as Blob by my siblings, for reasons that have to do with my eleven pound birth weight and my inability to distribute it evenly. I am youngest of nine children. Thank God somebody removed the plunger from the toy box by then, because I have never physically understood how to be held by someone without leaning on them completely. The burden was theirs to bare and still is. I would have hit the floor in nanoseconds had I been the victim of this "Plunging" experiment.

Mary is the one I imagine in regards to the story. She is number five in my family. The middle child, if you can have one with nine children. The one I remember hearing most about in tellings of this story. The plunger was stuck to the ceiling and cushions were removed from under her and she was left there. FORGOTTEN!

If you could see her now... Mary is very self-reliant, very fun seeking, very independent. It was perhaps torture for her then, but was it...? Maybe she ought to thank someone. I don't imagine she cried. I imagined she figured a way to make it work, to last. I imagine she never let them know she was scared or even thirsty. I don't know how old she was or how high up but when you are small, everything is larger and higher than it seems.

My mother never seemed surprised or upset by these antics. The fact that a toilet plunger was used as a form of entertainment gave her some idea that all was well and nobody was bleeding. She was probably off doing something, feeding someone smaller of maybe reading a chapter in a book for book group. She was not neglectful really, it never seemed to occur to her that the marks on the ceiling were multiplying or deepening and it never mattered much because she was probably relieved that my siblings found a way to entertain themselves that fortunately did not result in a trip to the emergency room. My mother simply picked her battles.

I did not grow up in the same homes as my older siblings, at least not all of them. However, it does not take the same zip code or street address' to see how far memories travel. They don't have to be your own. They go far and wide and have many varieties. I may not have been there to see Mary hang from the ceiling for an unprecedented amount of time, but I live the plunger story. It is a family lesson, a family jewel.