When
you’re a kid, when you’re new in the world, you have a different view of things
compared to when you’re a grown-up.
Take
death for instance.
There
were sports that, as a kid, I thought were quite deadly.
Not
surfing, not rock climbing, not even spear fishing in shark infested waters.
The
deadly sports? Handball and golf.
Oh, and
department store dress racks were deadly things too.
I’ll
explain…
When I was
a kid my dad took a job managing a hotel in Hawai’I and we lived there in the
early 60’s.
Among
the tunes my dad would play on his hi-fi stereo would be those by Alfred Apaka,
the great Hawai’ian singer.
“Who is
this?” I asked my dad. “You play him a
lot.”
“That’s
Alfred Apaka,” said Dad. “The greatest Hawai’ian singer. He died not too long ago.”
“What
happened?” I asked.
“He had
a heart attack after playing handball.”
“What’s
handball?”
“It’s
kind of like tennis but you don’t use a racquet,” he said. “A couple of players go into a room and knock
a ball around with their hands.”
That
didn’t sound like much fun. And why
would you play it if it could give you a heart attack?
I could
relate to dying of a heart attack. My
Dad had one of those a few years earlier and it gave the family quite a scare. I may have been a kid but I knew heart
attacks could kill you.
So if
Alfred Apaka died from a heart attack after playing handball, well, handball
surely must be deadly, right?
And
golf.
Every
now and then when I was a kid my dad would come back home looking kinda sad.
“Fred
dropped dead at the Jefferson Club,” he told my mom one time. “He just finished 18 holes and he was at the
19th hole, had a heart attack and died right there.”
Golf
was a mystery to me. All I knew about it
was it looked kind of boring. I knew
this because my dad watched an awful lot of it on TV. Bunch of people standing around on a golf
course watching Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and a bunch of other guys knock a
bunch of little white balls around then the people would politely clap. Boring.
And
apparently deadly.
Over
time I heard my dad mention other fellows he knew dropping dead on the golf
course from heart attacks.
And
often at that 19th hole.
Which I
would later find out wasn’t a hole on the golf course at all. Oh I reckon it was a hole of sorts, a
watering hole.
It
wouldn’t be til I was grown that I realized these dudes were probably out of
shape or had undiagnosed high cholesterol or whatever and over-exerted
themselves. But that was as an adult…when
you’re a grown up a lot of the mystery of life vaporizes like so much morning
fog in the sunlight of the day.
And
about those department store dress racks…
When I
was a kid I had 3 grandparents: My dad’s
mom and dad and my mom’s father.
“Where’s
your mommy?” I asked my mom one day when I was real little.
“Oh she
died when you were just a baby,” she said.
“Why
did she die?”
“We all
die,” said my mom with a smile. “But she
was in a department store in Toledo and a clerk wasn’t looking while she was
pushing a dress rack through the store and it hit your grandmother and she died
later.”
That’s
all my mom thought I needed to know, I reckon.
I had a
vision of my poor old mom of my mother minding her own business, shopping at a
big-city department store and along comes this dress rack and just rolls over
her like some poor ol’ critter on the highway.
It
would be many years later that I came to realize that the dress rack encounter
probably caused a blood clot that resulted in deep vein thrombosis and it was
that that killed her.
But for
years whenever I was in a big store as a kid I would watch out for those
rolling clothes racks.
One
killed my grandma.
I didn’t
want one rolling over me and squishing me like a bug.
-30-
Omg! This is the funniest thing I have ever read! Realizing that I'm going to miss you even more and your amazing sense of humor.
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