Where's the dead mouse?
My mother was fond of saying this. It's a whimsical take on the indisputable fact that every problem is more than likely to have another problem hiding in it that you weren't anticipating. A short while after I went off to college there was some issue that involved my next younger brother grabbing some tools and heading into the broken concrete, hard-packed river clay, and other rubble in the crawl space under the house. He came back out after quite a short trip, and told our mother that there was a dead cat under the house. And she calmly looked at him and said, "Well, now you have two problems." Many years later, as an adult, I was at her place tearing out the rotten cabinet floor under the kitchen sink, and as I exposed the subfloor, I found the corpse of a small rodent, desiccated and well-adorned with molds. "Hey, Mom! Come look at this!" Sometimes, the dead mouse actually is a dead mouse.
My sister Ginny, age 10, was in the bathroom off the master bedroom, in her Easter Sunday best, trying to get her hair and everything else prepared to attend our father's funeral. Seven of us trying to fit ourselves into the two bathrooms and get all the pieces in place and all of us into the car for the trip. And her wail was heard to the ends of the house, and our souls. The plumbing under the sink had exploded, and was spraying water with wild abandon. Her best dress, her hair, and the entire bathroom were dripping, and the spray was only getting worse. Several more of us were soaked trying to calm her down, and trying to shut off the valve. Which accomplished nothing, because it was the pipe itself which had burst. That means shutting off the water at the main valve at the street, which is not a trivial affair, since that valve is rarely touched, gets sticky, and usually requires tools and force. And, the vault is barely big enough for your hands and the tools, and, oh by-the-way, that's where the black widow spiders live. As an adult, I once had to fix some plumbing there, and I went and shut off the water, and then thought, after I pulled my hand out, "Wow, you are really out of touch with this terrain," looked in the vault, and there were three black widows evident. I must not have disturbed their webs, as they are somewhat territorial and aggressive. I have been bitten by a brown recluse, and have no interest in discovering how poisonous the black widow is by comparison. And then, after the water is off, and with little benefit from the only two bathrooms, and with several sets of clothes wet, we still have to get dressed up and get to the funeral on time. It turns out that the neighborhood's iron pipes are incompatible with the city's copper lines, and are completely filled with rust and eroded through in many places. Sometimes the dead mouse is having to re-plumb your entire house three weekends after your father dies.
The depth of the problem may vary, but there's always a dead mouse.
One afternoon, sometime in the year after the plumbing adventure, someone in our neighborhood called us, and told my mother that she needed to get to the intersection of Victoria and Chapman (about a quarter mile up the street,) right away, and would not say why, but was very urgent. And of course, that just pushes a mother into worst-case-scenario panic mode. Which was unfortunately appropriate. The three youngest kids, ages 9, 7, and 5, had ridden their bicycles to the store. At the intersection, a car in the first lane had stopped to let them walk their bikes across the street, which they were proceeding to do. Some young hotshot, barrelling along too fast in that same lane, saw the stopped car and swung over into the next lane, at which point he finally saw the kids and bikes and why the car was stopped. Slammed on the brakes to no avail. Knocked all three children and their bikes down like bowling pins. Val, the oldest, and in front, took the brunt of it. The other two were thrown down with minor scrapes. Steven, the youngest, reacted by running with his bike to the far side of the street, which terrified my mother when she learned that, because it meant he was at risk across another two lanes of fast careless traffic when he wasn't watching clearly. He swears it was safe and he checked, but he was five years old. David was mostly unharmed. The driver who had stopped was screaming bloody murder at the young driver, and calling him names. He calmed down later and apologized to the young man. The young driver was cowed, and kept saying he couldn't apologize enough. And I've always felt that was true. He could not apologize enough. I hope he was scarred for life and never drove fast or broke a traffic law again. The police arrived and tried to calm everyone down. The ambulance arrived.
Valerie, however, had both femurs snapped. 9 years old. I still, 55 years later, have a vivid picture in my memory of her legs twisted underneath her in absolutely impossible ways. They scooped her off the street on a plastic device similar to the drain tray underneath your kitchen sink dish drainer, scooting it under her carefully, and then grabbing it by the side handholds and lifting her untouched onto the gurney. A marvelous piece of absolutely simple technology. I was impressed then, and I remain impressed now.
I'm the oldest memory left from this event, and I am at a loss about how we got to the hospital, and got all the children corralled, and got the slightly mangled bicycles home, when the obvious priority would be for Mom to get to the hospital, and I'm still too young to drive the only car. I just don't know. My best guess is that some neighbors got involved. And that would have to be from passing by and choosing to stop. There were no cell phones. But we did have that kind of neighbors.
So, where's the dead mouse? Well, it isn't that kind of story. Isn't it grim enough already?
Val was in a body cast, toes to armpits, for the next six months. Many weird, clever, or clumsy attempts were made during that time to slip something down the cast to scratch the vicious itches without doing damage. There was a strut between her legs, making her a sort of triangle. She was small enough at that age that I could pick her up and balance her, cast and all, and load her into the car, or the bed, or the couch, and we learned what worked and what didn't. We added boards and pillows and straps to a Flexi Flyer, which is a West Coast sled on wheels, so that she could be mobile, albeit prone and quite close to the floor. There is a photograph of her in the kitchen on the Flyer, with her dog Taffy, the mother cat Tiger, and a handful of kittens, feeding them at their own level. It's hard to see why she's lying on the floor, (which she isn't,) but for those of us who were there, that photo is precious. She has a look of concentration that is bordering on a smile.
Now, we were a very busy family, six hyperactive children with multiple interests, and a very intelligent mother who encouraged us to pursue them. And one of those family interests was camping. We were introduced to it by the cub scout troops we joined. After a while, during the colder months when the scouts didn't schedule a camping trip, the family would go camping anyway. We bought a huge very-old-fashioned heavy canvas tent in an era when lightweight nylon tents were taking the country by storm. But we had eight people to set it up. I can remember waking up freezing at about three in the morning to find my father cursing and re-filling the Coleman catalytic heater with white gas, pumping it up, and lighting it again to give us heat for the rest of the night. That heater was dangerous. I'm pretty sure you couldn't buy one today. We once went to Half Dome. On the hike side, it's a rounded hill, but the other side is a sheer drop of unimaginable distance and an unmatched vista. There is a steel railing around the path, and high winds. That was when I discovered that my father and I shared a fear of heights and edges. We were both glued to that railing.
And now I must digress. You knew I would. Val's convalescence, and my high school years, were the Viet Nam war, often disguised as the conflict overseas. A church in Brea, a town that bordered our Fullerton, started a program that brought young Marines from the El Toro Marine base, ones that didn't have family nearby or the money to visit their own families, up to our area on the important family holidays of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. These were young men who were in the queue to be shipped off to Viet Nam, most likely to die there. The program invited them to spend a holiday weekend with a family, even if it wasn't their own, and it proved very popular. Families associated with the church, or who learned of the program, would sign up for a pair of Marines for the weekend, and the church would bus in the appropriate number of boys, and I choose that word very carefully, parcel them out, and bus them home again late Sunday. At its peak, four to six busloads of young Marines would be visiting some family for a weekend. And they were very grateful for it. My family got involved with this, which led to the aunts and uncles getting involved, and also a few neighbors and friends. We got so involved that we were allowed to request four guests instead of just two. Holiday family parties at our house might include eighty family and a dozen or more Marines. And one of the delights for these young bits of fodder was that my family figured that if they were old enough to die for their country, they were old enough to drink. There was enough supervision that drinking to excess rarely happened. There were other unusual events along the way, too, such as the young man who told us that he had just taken the bus ride to get closer to Los Angeles, where he had a girlfriend, and was going to hitchhike there to see her. My mother said, "Bullshit! You take my car and drive there, and don't you be late for the bus ride home or I'll hunt you down!" He was astonished, and very grateful, and he did come back on time. She gave another one busfare in a similar situation. I think we hosted several hundred young men during this program. Very few of them ever returned from the war. Only two of them contacted us again. One of them stayed with us a week while he waited for his first thirty rolls of film to get developed. That was all he could afford so far. He had shot over three hundred.
Now, remember that I was a scrubby, fresh-faced, bright, responsible, very young adult of fourteen to fifteen at this time, whose father had just died, in a very volatile political time, during an undeclared war. Every single one of these young Marines that spent a weekend with us took me aside at one point or another and told me that I should absolutely not enlist in the military, especially the Marines. That made an impression on me.
You will remember that we went camping as a family quite often. One year at Thanksgiving we and our aunt and uncle were off to a campout, and so we 'interviewed' the Marines coming off the bus to select ones who would enjoy roughing it in the woods rather than sitting around the family table, and off we went. This happened at the time that Valerie was still in the full body cast. We had learned to rearrange the placement of everything in the van so that she could ride at floor level comfortably on her Flexi Flyer, and the big steel camping box sat on a shelf we built over her feet, and everyone and everything juggled and compromised so that we could all still fit, with all our gear. And even fit in a few Marines. We did have two cars, but there were 6 cousins and a few Marines in the other car too. It went fine. We all had a great time.
At that campout, there was a rope swing hung from a big old oak tree to jump out over the river and jump into the swimming pool. It was hugely popular, a focal point of the campground. And as time went on, these young Marines thought it was a shame that Val, in her cast, on her skateboard, wasn't able to enjoy the excitement of the jump into the river that all the other kids were thrilled with. So they got some rope and lashed her into the rope swing and let her enjoy the swing out over the river jump, flexi flyer and all, a few times until she was happy, and then pulled her back to shore and untied her and set her back down. I don't think our mother ever learned about this. I think she would have gone ballistic. As a teen, I thought it was pretty cool of them. As an adult, and with all my experience with amateur riggers in the theater, I wonder if they had anywhere near the skills to do that safely. They were Marines. They had some training, and should have been taught a few knots, but they were just eighteen year olds, with only the barest training in risk assessment.
As we are fond of saying in the theater, "Well, no one died."
Val spent another six months in a wheelchair, and then another six months on crutches, and a painful year making all the muscles move again after the cast came off. We rigged up rope pulleys in a doorway so she could pull against the tension in her muscles until she screamed. And again. And again. It was a rigorous and excruciating year of muscle torture to get past the crutches until she could walk again, and let me remind you that it was her effort that made that happen, and let me remind you that she was ten years old. The doctors said she would never straighten out her feet and walk normally, and she rejected their attitude and took ten years of painful ballet lessons, practicing to balance and point her toes where the music wanted her to, and exceeded their expectations. They also said that the broken femurs might lead to serious complications with the weight of childbirth, but she has three brilliant children who have produced brilliant children of their own.
I should probably have a moral to the story, but I don't. I do recommend that you always look for the dead mouse.
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