Growing Old Gratefully

My generation survived growing up in a time when safety was barely a consideration. There were no watchdog groups and none of these warnings like “Don’t eat dishwashing detergent” or curling irons with a caution reading “Not for internal use.”  If you will, take another memory tour with me. Watch your head, keep your arms inside the ride.  This past has not been inspected for safety. 

There was a time, long ago, when dodgeball was a blood sport, “when walk it off!” was a coach’s standard cure for injuries and when Mrs. Irene fixed middle school playground scrapes with a band-aid and that devil’s antiseptic mercurochrome.  

At sixty we begin thinking about getting old. I may tend toward the morbid but one of my first thoughts then was Who will I list as pall bearers?  By our early seventies it is Who will I list as honorary pallbearers since none of my contemporaries is steady enough to carry me? But I’ve made it so far and if you are reading this, you’re still vertical too. 

I have talked about the terrors of an elementary playground with its blistering metal sliding board and that ultimate thrill ride misnamed a Merry-Go-Round as opposed to child slinger.  Time after time one of us would return to our third-grade class after recess covered in dust and grass stains with scratches on hands and face and holding onto a shoulder or holding back tears after being sent airborne by that whirling dervish.

And Tetherball. Did I mention that head-smacking pain on a chain?  What nefarious toymaker sold the idea of attaching a chain to the top of an eight-foot pole and hanging a weather-hardened volleyball from the other end? It was a triple-threat in the injury department.  For someone really clumsy…just reporting this, not necessarily me, it was possible to get hit in the head by the ball, get wrapped up in the chain and slammed against the iron pole.

Elementary school playground games were not much safer.  Most of them, like Red Rover, or one which began with one team yelling, “Bum, Bum, Bum…Here we come!”  involved running and breaking through a line of hand-holding opponents. We quickly learned that the best defense was to clothesline a runner with a wrist to the neck.

By age nine, every boy had a knife for whittling, often given by a grandfather over the objections of a cautious mother. We never thought of cutting each other but were forever cutting ourselves. Self-inflicted injuries were so common that once I was helping a friend, Lane Powell, build a popsicle stick fort for a middle school history project when my knife slipped and left a pretty good gash on my left thigh. Mrs. Powell packed me up and took me to Dr. Martin for ten stitches before returning me to the Powell house so I could ride my bike home. 

Mrs. Powell called my parents who were grateful to be informed but not surprised. I was worried, rightfully so, that my mother would be angry about another pair of ruined blue-jeans. They too, could be sewn up, but bloodstains were harder to get off jeans than off a thirteen-year-old boy. Like drunks aboard the Orca in “Jaws”, we boys boasted about our scars and stitches like they were battle ribbons.

We were the among the earliest “War Babies” and many of our fathers had returned from the military toughened by training and combat. Dad came back from the Marines and joined the National Guard. He would always bring me boxes of “C” rations and military gear from their two week summer camp. I was a vision in olive drab dressed in army surplus with a canteen, a bandage pouch, and sometimes a holster containing a plastic Colt Model 1915 45 caliber pistol, all hanging from my authentic web belt.

In my pockets were “hand grenades” broken from somebody’s magnolia tree. I have heard that there are so many magnolia trees in this area because my friends and I tossed so many seed pod grenades at imaginary enemy machine-gun nests. It was not unusual to see me as a ten-year-old wandering the neighborhood dressed in OD fatigues, wearing a plastic helmet, carrying a BB rifle and smoking a candy cigarette. Today I would be surrounded by a SWAT team and hauled in for counseling or worse. 

In middle school we put on our own wrestling matches in imitation of the popular wrestling shows broadcast on Channel 3 in Charlotte. Never the wisest owlet in the nest, I was once coaxed into putting on a “Great Bolo” mask handsewn by someone’s sadistic mother.  The Great Bolo was the villain incarnate of the wrestling world and I underestimated the wrestling mania of my friends. I believe we now call such folk “frenemies.” It didn’t take long for me to realize my mistake. I came back to class after recess battered, bruised and embarrassed by friends Flip Ray and Donnie Shaw and several unscheduled onlookers who got caught up in the action. I was eternally grateful that there were no chairs available to bash over my head like on TV and sorry that WBT’s “Big Bill” Ward was not there to call the match and end the schoolyard mayhem.

I grew up during the atomic age. Everyone was certain that atomic powered cars, planes and trains would soon enter our lives. Science fiction reached its heyday and in the movies a radiation cloud caused “The Incredible Shrinking Man” to dwindle away to nothing. Insects went the other way with ants the size of school busses and tarantulas big enough to straddle a garage.  Even plants were likely to rise up against us like the cornstalk-looking Triffids.

A good friend and budding scientist, Norman Gholson, had the top-of-the-line chemistry set. Not only did it have several chemicals capable of causing some pretty serious explosions, his chemistry set had uranium and a small Geiger counter to prove it.

The dangers of radiation were so misunderstood that some clothing stores had X-ray devices that looked at how well our feet fit in their shoes. My uncle Ray worked at a clothing store in Union S. C. that had an X-ray machine. I would stand with my feet in it turning it on and off and wriggling my toes until someone would finally tell me to move along. It is a wonder that my feet don’t look like a dead chicken’s. To this day, they still glow enough to guide me on one of my many bathroom forays late at night.

Our teen years carried their own dangers. Fireworks were not the namby-pamby sparklers of today. Some fireworks were just designed for trouble. Cracker Balls were half-inch spheres of what looked for all the world like Captain Crunch Cereal and were filled with flash powder and gravel-sized rocks. Considered harmless, they sold for a nickle a dozen from an old Lance Cracker jar on the counter at Rogers’ Drug Store. We never mistook them for cereal. I understand some children did and got some serious mouth burns.

Cracker Balls were supposed to produce a pop just a little louder than a cap pistol and leave a star-like powder burn when thrown against the pavement but we learned the delight of frightening girls by suddenly throwing one near them. Cracker Balls also worked when stomped on and as pre-teen boys who loved a challenge, we had to see how many we could stomp at once before losing a foot. Most of us stopped at “ouch” but there were those daring boys who stepped lightly for a day or two afterwards.

For a short time, larger cracker balls, about the size of a Tootsie Pop, were available. Only the intrepid or consequence-impaired dared step on those and when we threw them against a hard surface, they became miniature fragmentation grenades, throwing tiny chunks of gravel back to sting any exposed body part they hit.  

For the serious stuff, there were a couple of fireworks stores located just below the North Carolina line on the way to Pineville. Apparently, North Carolina folks were not terribly evolved and couldn’t be trusted with high explosives so they had to cross the line to buy serious fireworks. Those of us below the border were more mature and blowing up things came more naturally to us. Three friends and I once went in a fireworks store to get some materials for mass destruction of tin cans and toy soldiers. We bought several Cherry Bombs (so called because they were red, and cherry shaped with green stem-like fuses) and some TNT’s. TNT’s were literally one inch long sticks of dynamite. 

When we took our goodies up to the counter, the old man running the store looked at us and asked, “Where you boys from?”

We thought we were busted for something, but my friend Gene answered, “We’re from Fort Mill.”

“Give me those damn things.” The man said said. “They ain’t nothing. They’re for the tourists.”  He reached under the counter and took out two boxes. “These are the real thing! Same price.”

Most of left our childhood with all our fingers intact and only superficial scars. We survived and thrived despite the lack of warning labels. There were far worse dangers ahead.

If only the good die young, then so be it. For many of my generation, the military became real and too many good men died far too young.

For others of my peer group, for whatever reason, we were spared by fate and come on, admit it, if only the good die young, that should tell you why we’re still hanging around. We have lived a full life and hope to appear at those final gates decorated with battle scars and rewarded with a little peace and rest. I am just glad to be here and glad you stayed safe enough to be here with me. 

And as for Mercurochrome, I still don’t trust any namby-pamby antiseptic that doesn’t burn like hell itself.