Strep, with camels and steam

My trip to the clinic was informative, beyond my diagnosis of strep. The clinic nurse, named Nancy, so obviously of a certain age and wisdom, said several times that kids "don't know how to be sick any more". She said most of the stuff going around right now should have kids recuperating at home three to five days. Kids don't know how to lounge around in bed, sip ginger ale, look at picture books, and take lots of naps to get their strength back. They only know a high level of activity and stimulation. Because the child is bopping around demanding entertainment, parents think the child is ready to be back at school before he's really well. And, of course, it's more convenient for the parents to believe this.



Being sick was memorable in its length and dullness in the Sixties. No entertainment was provided. We stayed in our pajamas for the trip to the pediatrician and back home again. If we were well enough to sit up, we wore a bathrobe over our PJs. We stayed in our bed, breathing the warm steam from the humidifier all day and all night. We traced the embroidery on the pillowcase with our fingers and created stories about the flowers. We were happy to drink lots of liquids because a walk down the hall to the bathroom was a major change of scene.



The fourth day home from school Mom might make a blanket roll for us on the sofa so we could look out the window while she Mop & Glowed the kitchen floor. She might even let us watch an episode of "I Love Lucy" or a Bing Crosby movie on the tiny black and white tv. By then we might be well enough to eat a perfectly baked potato with salt and butter to go with the poached egg.



There were places where the bedroom's blue wall paint met the white ceiling paint in less than a straight line. I used to pretend those tiny, lumpy overlaps of blue were actually distant camels walking along a very flat desert in a spread-out caravan. They moved ever so slowly.



© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Growling engines and forgetful minstrels

My feverish naps have recalled a strange memory of a childhood illness. I must have been home from school several days already, because I'd improved enough to get out of bed and move to the green sectional sofa to watch the tiny black and white t.v. There wasn't much on in the daytime in the early Sixties, and being allowed to watch was a real oddity.

I'll never forget Bing Crosby forgetting his lit pipe backstage, and burning the theatre down. Not just once. Several times. Until the miraculous age of Google, I couldn't be sure if this old memory was real or a fever, but I worried a great deal about fires for years afterward. Now I know the movie was "Dixie", a 1943 musical biopic of the Old South, and the subject of an article in the Spring 2004 Journal of Popular Film and Television, by Michael Dunne:


Abstract: In Mississippi (1935) and Dixie (1943), the wildly successful Bing Crosby acts, croons, and clowns--in and out of blackface--in Southern roles that exemplify the unquestioned racism as well as the imaginative escapism that characterized other highly successful popular cultural artifacts of the era....

...Dixie is, at once, a musical biography, a narrative romance, and a Hollywood musical. As biography, the film has been justifiably indicted as inaccurate. Daniel Decatur Emmett was actually a native of Mount Vernon, Ohio, and he first successfully performed "Dixie" at the Bowery Amphitheater in New York City on February 6, 1843. (10) For reasons of narrative effect, most of these facts were changed in Dixie. As Michael Rogin points out, for example, "To hide minstrelsy's roots in northern, proslavery idealizations of the South, which it was repeating, Paramount moved Dan Emmett from New York to New Orleans for Dixie" (179). Furthermore, the plot provides Emmett's character with a behavioral forgetfulness about laying down his still-smoking pipes to set up the finale in which his debut performance of the tune "Dixie" in New Orleans must be speeded up to its current lively tempo because his discarded pipe has set the backstage on fire. To develop this narrative thread, Emmett accidentally burns down the family home of his fiancee early in the film, and later Millie Cook barely avoids another disastrous fire when she snatches up Emmett's smoldering pipe in the theatrical boarding house that she runs with her father in New Orleans. Not too long after this, Emmett's discarded pipe destroys the theater in which his new minstrel act is on its way to becoming a phenomenal success. As so often is the case in musical biopics, the available historical facts are subsumed by the narrative exigencies of the genre. (11)

I bring this up partly because of new feverish images, and partly because we adults forget the power of media impressions on young children. I don't know what understanding I had at that age of the Civil Rights movement then sweeping the U.S. I was too concerned about forgetful pipe-smokers to align the Hollywood minstrel romanticism with Life Magazine realities of racism. Afterall, I was only seven. Maybe I obsessed about fire because that was the only worry from the movie that I could even put a name to.

On a much lighter note, I read in the New York Times, Their Motorcycles Are in the Mail, that the Postal Service is releasing a new commemorative stamp set on Monday. The motorcycle stamps are groovy!



I'm a Collage Mama, not a Motorcycle Mama. I've ridden a motorcycle three times in my life. Motorcycles have different associations for me. My son collected some detailed cycle miniatures about ten years ago. At times, I have used the tiny cycles for a drawing project. Kids are as intrigued as I am with the cycles. They've been willing to observe them closely to make excellent drawings, and have respected the rule not to touch. Each time I've explained that the mini motorcycles belong to my son. Then I've showed the kids a photo of my three sons all grown up and dressed in suits. They are always amazed that I have sons, or so I've thought. Maybe they are amazed that I have sons so tiny they can ride the miniature motorcycles! Can you say "Tom Thumb?"

One time I brought the cycles back home after a strenuous drawing class, and left them on the dining table. After a few weeks, the cycles made it to the window sill. Now the cycles on the windows are a sign to friends, letting them know that they've found the right condo in the complex. If you get up to the front door, and don't see the motorcycles, you are at the wrong place!

It's back down to 86 in here

Eighty six degrees is feeling pretty good at the moment after two feverish days. I'm recovering, but the air conditioner didn't. I've never had strep throat in the summer in Texas before, and it's not a fun-filled theme park. I slept twenty-six of the last forty-eight hours. In between strange dreams of poached eggs, Campbell's beef barley soup, and Earth Mother archetypes, I'd wake up, "force fluids", and gradually realize that the a/c wasn't cooling. Then I'd fall asleep again.

The a/c repairman slapped defibrillators on it and got it running again for a couple hours yesterday, but after that it just couldn't say "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can" anymore. Please, Little Blue Engine! Please take us to the top of that cool mountain again, cried all the dolls and toys together! Please make it cool for the good little condo boys and girls! Yes, the dreams were pretty weird again last night.

So today two a/c techs installed a new system that will be much more energy efficient, and a good selling point for the condo. It took them seven warm hours to do it. The worst part was testing the furnace! Now, the new a/c is chugging and puffing along. It has a big job to do. We're at 86, but that's a long way from the top of the mountain!

The new arrivals:



Blue booties for him. Pink booties for her. No chocolate booties until it gets a lot cooler in here!