The Whirlpool

So before Jaws, we lived in a house that had a round above ground pool in the backyard. We would have neighbors over to swim. When it was just the kids we would jump in and get everyone walking in the same direction along the inside edge of the pool. Slowly we would increase our speed. Pretty soon the flow of water would start to carry us. Faster, faster, until we couldn't even keep our footing anymore and the water would carry us around in our own man-made whirlpool. That was the most fun ever. The thrill, the bit of fear that it would move too fast and pull us under...the sound of my mom's voice telling us to stop. Hehe.

Now I am reminded of the hocker contests my brother would have. Who could spit a large nasty hocker and get it to land just at the bottom of the fence surrounding the yard. Land in a way that it was just hang down off the fence but not fall to the ground. Totally gross, yet I remember one time there being three just hanging there. Why was there a need to look at it? Maybe it was the physics of it. Maybe it was just a little kid fascinated by snot.

Now I am reminded of Andy Tweardy. I know I am not spelling his last name properly. It just doesn't look right. Andy lived across the street from us. He smoked a lot. His wife, Marge, smoked a lot. They had a smoking hot son named Kevin. He was too old for me and I wasn't pretty enough for him even if I was the right age. Andy used to come over to our house and swim. Whenever he wanted. No he wasn't invited. He just did it. We would be inside the house and hear SPLASH! He would be in the pool. I liked Andy. He was always nice to me, always. He had a really raspy voice. It was cool sounding. He and Mr. Falbo argued all the time. Apparently Andy took some tools from Mr. Falbo and didn't return them. At least that was Mr. Falbo's story and he stuck to it for 40+ years. They lived right across the street from each other on the other corner of Kildeer and Roeske. I think they fought until Andy died and beyond. I remember Mr. Falbo talking about it when I was an adult and Andy had been gone for years. The Tweardy's always had cherries in a dish on their round brown kitchen table. The dish was either a blue or green glass dish. I always got to have cherries at their house. I loved the taste of those cherries, bing cherries. I would go over to their house and talk to them while they would smoke.

As I write this blog I am starting to realize I hung out with a lot of old people when I was a kid. I didn't have a lot of friends my age. I was always with my grandmas, aunts, the Falbos or the Tweardys. Holy moly...I knew this writing thing would be therapeutic. This explains why I didn't think like the other kids. Hell, I was surrounded by conversations of the 50 and over crowd when I was 8. Huh, Mr. Obvious, I didn't make the connection....

Barry Manilow

Oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking, and I sent you away, oh Mandy, you licked me and stopped me from shaking...

Wait a minute, I don't think the word is licked, but licking is what Mandy did. Mandy was our 150 lb. Great Dane. We didn't have her long, but it was the best time. She was fawn in color and humongous! She was so tall she could eat food right out of the pans on the stove. You couldn't push the food back far enough on the counter for her not to be able to reach it. She used to do this thing where if you were sitting on the couch she would give you little bites across your whole arm up to your shoulder. It felt so weird and wonderful all at the same time. We did have a bit of trouble with her putting her toenails through the couch in the living room...yes the living room we weren't allowed in unless people were over.

One time she got into my mom's closet and chewed up her shoes. Darren tried to hide them in the back of the closet but eventually my mom found them. She chewed up many things, but I think my mom loved the little bites and the fact that no one, I repeat no one, had the balls to come up our driveway after seeing Mandy in the front window, so she let it go.

There were a lot of crazy times, like the time she jumped through the screen in my brother's window on the second floor and got out onto the roof. We came home and there she was. Holy cow that was tense. We were afraid she would jump off, but Eric got her back in the house. She used to open the doors with her paws. We would come home and the doors would be open and she would be lounging in the back yard. My parents had to take the door handles off. She was a great dog.

One summer there was some kind of fungus on the grass, she ate some and she died. She died right outside my room. My mom said she thinks the people who sold her to us knew she was sick already, that it wasn't the grass issue. I think she couldn't manage the thought that she didn't take her to the vet. She felt really bad. I can sympathize with that. I don't remember Mandy showing any signs of illness. My parents put her in the far back yard to bury her. No one was supposed to go out there, but my little brother came home and no one realized he had gone to the back. He was just sitting there next to her, petting her. It was really sad. There is nothing quite like losing your dog. She is buried in the back yard. After that my mom said we couldn't have any more dogs.

Mandy brought many wonderful times to our home and many memories remain. Oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking... Barry Manilow, little do you know the impact of your song on my life.

I loved TV

Ah, TV. I loved watching tv shows. I had a little black and white tv from when I was about 10 through college. His name was Peanut. He had a turn dial and got all the local stations plus channels 32 and 44 out of Chicago. I used a metal coat hangar for reception and foil. Reception was always better with foil. I loved Channel 32. It had all the Saturday afternoon spook movies with The Son of Svengooli. I loved Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Lon Cheney. Edgar Allen Poe was my favorite author. They used to creep me out then I couldn't sleep. I just gave the ghosts plenty of ammo always watching scary movies.

Channel 44 got the cartoons. Mostly crazy Japanese cartoons, but some good ones like Speed Racer, Underdog, Boris and Natasha, Bullwinkle, and the really smart dog with the little boy, I can't remember their names, but they led me through history. Peabody, that was the dog's name. And lest we not forget SCHOOL HOUSE ROCK!!!! You can view these on You Tube. There are so many!

Favorite all time show: hands down was Starsky and Hutch. The episode when Starsky was almost poisoned to death, I thought I was going to die.
Favorite variety show: The Carol Burnett Show. They laughed during every skit, so did I. Especially the Gone With The Wind skit.
Favorite cartoon: Speed Racer, however, Trixie was a worthless girlfriend
Favorite movie: all the old black and white movies (even though they were all black and white to me). Which reminds me...I never knew the Wizard of Oz had the big color scene when Dorothy opened the door of her house in Oz until I saw the movie in color as a teenager.

Remember all these theme songs?
Conjunction junction what's your function? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses...
VERB, that's the action!...
Lolly lolly lolly get your adverbs here...
I'm just a bill just a lonely old bill sitting here on capital hill...
Three six nine twelves fifteen eighteen twenty-one....

Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer. He's a demon on wheels. He's a demon and he's gonna be chasing after someone....

Here's a story of a lovely lady who was bringing up 3 very lovely girls. All of them had hair of gold like their mother, the youngest one in curls.It's the story of a man named Brady who was living with 3 boys of his own. They were 4 men living all together, yet they were all alone....

Here they come, walk down the street, we get the funniest looks from everyone we meet. Hey hey we're the Monkees. People say we monkey around, but we're too busy singing to put anybody down...

Come on and zoom zoom zoom a zoom. Come on and zoom a zoom a zoom a zoom. We're all coming along. We're all singing a song...

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor, would you be mine, could you be mine? It's a neighborly day in this beauty wood a neighborly day for a beauty would you be mine, could you be mine...

Good times all the way around that's for sure.

A mouse in the house

Not only was I freaked out because dead people came to see me, but others did as well. I would hear something moving around in my room at night. I would be as quiet as I could be to figure out where it was. As soon as I would move it would go silent. I would yell for my mom and she would come in and kneel next to my bed. Undoubtedly the damn things wouldn't make a sound. She would tell me I was imagining things and would get up and leave. Sure enough the minute she left the room the tiny little scratching would begin again.

Well for weeks I never saw anything but I would hear it every night. I knew it was just a matter of time before it would creep onto my bed, look me in the eye, I would awake and die of a heart attack upon seeing it. In a fit of bravery one night I decided - no more. I was going to own this and I was taking back my room from all that was scary.

I didn't get into bed that night. Instead I was standing straight up with pajamas and shoes on. I stood over by my shelves and waited. I bet I stood there for 2 hours patiently waiting. I think he knew it too. I think he knew I had had enough. But he decided it was worth the risk. I began to hear the scratching and pitter-patter of tiny little feet. Then in a fit of what I can only say was Shelley-crazy I starting slamming everything on my shelf against the wall. I was going to get him at all costs. My parents heard the commotion and came flying in. Everything was on the ground including the shelf. My mom was irate. I am certain she thought it was time for me to be committed. Just then that dastardly little mouse skirted from under some rubble and out the door into Darren's room. Victory was mine. I was not crazy. It was not all in my head. I WAS JUSTIFIED!!!!! A few minutes later I saw why the little dude had graced me with his creepy little presence. He was eating the little shellacked bridesmaid cake that I had as a rememberance from my cousin Kathy's wedding. He had eaten most of the skirt on the beautiful little hardened cake shaped as a wonderful princess in a yellow dress, that was the color of my dress at the wedding.

I don't know what happened to that mouse, but I do know he had left my room with a belly full of shellac and cake.

Cadaver Chemistry

Everyone out there who has had a class across the hall from a cadaver lab raise your hand.  I am lifting my hands, both of them, up high!  Nuclear Chemistry was in the basement of Lilly Hall.  It was the coolest chemistry class I ever.  We did all kinds of experiments.  We messed with radio isotopes, performed radioactive tracer experiments, and learned how Marie Curie died a slow horrible death. I probably glow at night which isn't a bad thing since I remain a bit scared of the dark.  Our best times though were the illegal visits we paid to the lab across the hall.  Periodically on the campus the hursts would pull up with those bodies donated to science.  They would take the bodies in bags to the basement and put them in the body room.  The bodies were used for nursing and PT students.

Have you ever seen the movie "An American Werewolf in London?"  Well I have and as the semester went along these bodies looked more and more like Jack.  They went from just naked and dead to torn to shreds, naked and dead.  It was seriously creepy and cold in that room.  You would think with my ghostly experiences that I wouldn't screw around with the dead, but chalk it up to college humor and stupid bravery.  We would make them talk, make them wave, have them hold hands, etc. etc.

Being one of only 8 Chemistry majors, we clearly had the best fun of any major ever.  We did all kinds of inappropriate stuff because many of our classes and labs were at night and we had a post doc as a prof.  He was doing his own research.  There was more making out in those labs than anything, but from a purely scientific point of view that is Chemistry, am I right?  We also were the ones responsible for the night pseudo-chemistry student labs.  These were the kids/adults taking a gen chem class because they had to.  Those people should never have been allowed to touch chemicals.  They set the lab benches on fire, each other on fire, and occasionally tried to blow us all up by leaving the gas on.  I said on more than one occasion "EVERYBODY OUT OF THE BUILDING NOW!"  I am thinking that Lilly Hall is lucky to still be standing.

They didn't deserve to see the cadaver room. Eventually someone found out about our visits with the dead and the locks were changed.  We could have hacked in, being smart asses and all, but we figured it wasn't worth getting thrown out.  Those were some seriously good days.  Next time you see a skeleton and have the mad desire to pose him or make him sing or are playing with a crab claw at the table, think of me.

Braces

Remember back in the day when braces weren't cool? I do. I had braces for a year and it was tragic. For a girl going through puberty, that's all you needed was a mouth full of metal. Okay, it wasn't that bad for me because at that time of my life I really didn't give a rat's ass what anyone else thought. Actually, I wasn't that self aware of how I looked which people today would be shocked to know.

Funniest moment with braces, well not funny but memorable... Darren hit me in the face with a toboggan and all my brackets fell off and I had this cool long time imprint of the brackets impaled upon my lips.

Today I got braces again. My kids were like "wow Mom." My youngest in a sarcastic tweet said "you are a brave woman." I like them so far. They were my choice to fix some teeth that were turning. I am equally thrilled times have changed and I can wear hot pink bands to match my red hot honey badger personality.

Darren

So my little brother is over six feet tall and I am just over five, but he will always be my little brother. Darren was born deaf. I remember when he came home from wherever adopted kids were picked up from that he had the biggest eyes I had ever seen. Those eyes would play a big part in his childhood. They were very expressive and always gave him away. So it was fairly early on when my mom realized he was not hearing properly. She contacted some people to gain further information. I remember hearing that the adoption agency offered to take him back - that is horrific. He was a keeper for sure. He was the cutest little boy with light brown super curly hair. He smiled all the time. I remember when he started learning to say "mom." It was amazing. My mom would hold his hand on her throat when she said it, then he would hold his hand to his own throat and try to get the same feeling. One night I bet he worked on it for hours - bomba, bomba, momba, momba, momma...that was an amazing night for sure. At first he went to a special school in Chesterton. A limo came and picked him up every day. He was pretty special! After a while though, he had to go away to the School for the Deaf in Indianapolis. He was gone every week and would come home on weekends. The bus would come to Merrillville and my mom would pick him up from there. That must have been really hard.

We learned sign language when we were little. It was really useful not only to talk to Darren but to talk across crowded rooms and about people when you didn't want them to know. We did that a lot. There were some really interesting times at our house with Darren, like hide and go seek. Darren would forget we could hear him breathe and laugh so when he would hide we would always find him. Most of the time we would let him see us looking and we would look right past him and he would laugh thinking we didn't see him. The tougher times were when we were in trouble. When my mom would be yelling, he would just close his eyes so he didn't have to listen to her signing (yep let it sink in). She could never sign as fast as she would yell and then when she would see his eyes closed she would be just irate. He got liquid soap too.

My "dad" never learned sign language so he never really communicated with Darren. I really don't remember him having any relationship with Darren until my parents got divorced and then Darren was used as a pon in a terrible game. Don took Darren once when he had visitation and wouldn't bring him back to my mom. I still remember that. If he had any hope of ever having or keeping a relationship with me, it ended that day. Who does that? Who takes a child from their mother in a power play? Well as you have learned by now, my mom doesn't put up with that shit and Don got what was coming to him.

When I went to college in Indianapolis, I would go get Darren from school and we would do things together. I would also go and do science experiments with the kids there kind of like science fair. You have never been in a more quiet environment. I would go to his football games. They would hike the ball by listening for the vibration from this huge drum someone beat on the sideline. They played their skinny little hearts out.

Many more experiences were had, too many to talk about. Darren now has 3 little perfect girls. Perfect in every way. He is so blessed.