Friday, September 26, 2014

Mother

My mom was slender-ish, 5 ft. 4" and an adventurer.  After all...she married my dad. A happy sort who loved animals a bit more than she should have as our house was a zoo of sorts most of the time.  Little green lizards (a type of gecko) everywhere (Un-named), a parrot (Spook), a baby crocodile (Crack), two cats (Hymn and Her) and jars of miscellaneous bugs but no cages anywhere.  Her day began with feeding this and that to each with great care and concern as was her way.  She mostly loved the little lizards which crawled in through the open window slats to gaze upon all else from vantage points on the wall.  They changed ID over time, became bigger and smaller ones, never less than five or six.  Green ones, some with red heads and gecko-like with fat toes that left tiny tracks wherever they wandered.

She was a fine cook of anything she wanted to serve.  She loved to cook pasta with red sauce as she called it, and it was delicious.   Louise had taught her about the local vegetables and how to prepare them.  Mom was kind to me always, hugging, kissing me goodbye on school days and taking me around to see the wonders of this particular paradise.  She was a consummate photographer, taking 35mm slides of everything with her Argus C3 camera.  That camera was with her wherever she went so she could record her world.

We often went to Balboa which she particularly liked, a funky sort of backwater town attached to the side of Panama City.  There were shops there, and a sort of open air market where locals would sell whatever they had in the way of fruits and vegetables and household junk.  Mostly she came to bar hop in the late afternoon with me in tow.  She was a drinker, attractive and more gregarious than most.  I was told by her that I was "The Preventer" though I knew not what she meant.  Men, of which there were plenty, found her amusing and, if it weren't for me, too available to ignore.  The port of Balboa was right there, sailors and workers from all over the world, some with wily ways that, it seemed, she found interesting, maybe too interesting I thought.  When my father was gone, we went there often. 



The beach was avoided at all costs as the riptide was dangerous and many drownings of military people had happened there.  No doubt they were drunk.  I wasn't allowed out of my mothers sight while in Balboa.  She would lead me to the bathroom when I had to pee and wait for me at the door.  She drank and talked and I'd get an ice cream bar and pilfer a sip of her Old Fashioned when I could.  I liked the taste.  She would shop for clothes and trinkets and we'd drive home to Ft. Clayton in the jeep, her tipsy and laughing and me anxious to join my compadres in an evening adventure or mud slide.

 

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Louise

Her dark skin glissened with sweat when she would run after me to come to lunch or dinner.  I ran away from her and looked back and saw her grab her leg below the knee.  I saw her grimace and I ran to her realizing she was hurt.  She said she felt a sting and saw a scorpion fall from her dress to the ground and crawl away.  She sat down and massaged the sting saying how much it hurt.  I looked for the scorpion in the grass below the red cliff of clay but didn't see it.  My clothes were red with mud, my hands were too and she took some clay from my shoe and pressed it against the now swelling wound.  We walked back to the house slowly, she with a limp, me crying for her hurt.  When we reached the bottom of the stairs my mother came down quickly to help and soon she put Louise in the Jeep and off to the hospital we all went. 



My mother was a fast driver in the little jeep and I worried about her when she drove anywhere, but this was different, we were rushing for Louise.  The smell of the emergency room was of pungent alcohol and medicines.  The doctors and nurses were US Army GI's and while it was unusual to have a Panamanian there they quickly went to work on Louises wound.  My mother and I held hands while we waited anxiously in the waiting room.  I felt guilty for having run from Louise when she can after me and I told my mother that I was sorry and felt I had caused the pain to Louise.  I loved Louise as I did my mother as she had been with our family since we had arrived in Panama right after I was born.  She was my caretaker and friend, parent, big sister and all of those things rolled into one.  When she came out of the emergency room her leg was bandaged from the knee to her ankle.  She told us that they had given her treatment and that she was to return in a week.



 We drove her to her home in Panama City and my mother told her she would take her next week.  Over the next few days things were different at home, my father was very busy at his Army work and Louise was not there to watch over me, cook or clean house as was her usual duties.  The next week Louise went with my mother to the hospital, now her leg had ballooned to twice it's normal size and was black and blue and very painful to the touch she said.  We once again waited patiently in the waiting room while she was being seen.  When she reappeared her dressing had been changed and now there was a tube coming out of it as a drain into a little bottle filled with cotton balls.  It had become infected and become gangrenous too and the doctors had told her that they might have to amputate her lower leg. This upset me greatly and I cried once again for feeling I had caused this catastrophe to befall my Louise.  Over the next month she came once a week, then twice and finally she was "home", her leg better but with a huge scar where the drain had been.  I never ran from her again.

Monday, September 22, 2014

I Dream of DDT

Amidst attending school in the Ft. Clayton elementary school where I was a beaming and bright A student and running the streets and local hillocks for adventures came the DDT truck.   It announced death to mosquitoes, biting flies, ticks and every other creeping, crawling insect it contacted including the fireflies of our wondrous delight.  The oil slicks gleamed their multi-colored sheen as they drifted down the hilly streets.

You could hear the low thrum, thrum, thrum of the diesel engine and the mad cheers of the throngs of kids behind it as it made it's way through our paradise.  From blocks away the cheers and yips and yells as kids were drenched in the aerosol spray from it's spray rig boom. 
 

 The kids gleamed too, high from the vapor and equally poisoned by the chemical, their brains dancing in the street amidst the dying bugs as they floated away in the stream, dead, inert, gone.  Oh we were all "forbidden" to chase the evil truck, many swats to our rear ends took the place of the fine run...temporarily at least. 

David and I, helped by Margaret tried to protect the insects we liked, the fireflies and lady bugs and big beetles by capturing them as best we could and putting them in jars until the day after the evil truck passed...then they would be released to go on their way.  Little did we realize they were being released into a dead zone of built up DDT that would kill them, albeit slowly, anyway.  We felt like heroes and rescuers of our little friends as they were released back to their shortened lives.