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| "AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HUMOR"TM
SHOWCASE
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December 2005 / January 2006 Contest Results |
The Oldest
Child
By Carol MacAllister
Ocean Grove, NJ
The oldest child
is an experimental spawn.
That’s what I was with lots of aunts and an
inexperienced mother.
I remember lying in bed with a slight fever listening to Mother and Aunt
Margie discuss buttermilk.
“Merilyn,” Aunt Margie said, “Buttermilk is great for sick kids. It
brings down fevers.”
“But Margie, I don’t have any buttermilk. And, the stores are closed.”
I drifted off to sleep as pans rattled. The two sisters, like
Shakespearean witches, busily concocted an elixir: a pot of milk with a
stick of melted butter brewed. They awoke me. Mother helped me sit up
and Aunt Margie handed me the cup.
“Drink this. It’ll make you feel better.”
I obliged, thinking, chicken soup.
After a sudden shudder, the warm greasy liquid rumbled back up and burst
out of my mouth.
They glared at me!
It was their magic that didn’t work!
From that time on, like Pavlov’s dog, I was conditioned for doom.
Two weeks later, while riding in Uncle Bill’s car snaking down a bumpy
mountainous road, I read a road sign: Stop here! Oatmeal and warm
buttermilk.
Whoops!
Mother and Aunt Margie didn’t care for the looks of my straight brown
hair. Shirley Temple copycat curls were all the rage. Announcement:
“We’re going to give you a permanent.”
A what?
They washed my hair and worked a smelly liquid through it, then rolled
the small strands onto little cardboard curlers with ends that folded
back to hold them in place. Small bottles of potions were opened.
I knelt on the bathroom floor pressed against the bathtub stretching
over the edge as far as my short neck could reach.
They handed me a towel. “Hold this tight against your face so you don’t
burn your eyes.”
It was POW torture. The gut-retching smell and smothering, scratchy towel
didn’t fall under my category of Sacrifices for Glamour.
Who cared about Shirley Temple or was this Aunt Margie’s way of
punishing me for cleaning the toilet with her toothbrush?
I held the towel against my face as they doused each curler with
ammonia. “Hold that towel tight!”
It took forever.
The last step, neutralizer, was finally applied. They unrolled the
curlers and my frizzy hair stank for days.
Mr. Bauer, our old neighbor, pinched my cheek. “Your hair looks like an
explosion in a mattress factory, kid.”
Part of his remark was retaliatory for the time he’d bent over and I bit
him on the behind.
Towels and gross smells became fiendish instruments of experimentation.
The next time I got sick, Mother and Aunt Margie dropped gobs of Vicks
Vapo-Rub into a cauldron of steaming water. My head was positioned
directly over the rising vapors and draped with a towel to catch the
cure-all fumes.
My first pangs of claustrophobia.
My eyes burned even with their lids shut. The fumes were more intense
than that Shirley Temple perm.
Skinned knees filled with cinders provided another opportunity for
experimental hocus-pocus: Straight from the brown bottle -- hydrogen
peroxide dumped into the open wound. “Fizzle, foam, boil and bubble.
When shall we three meet again?” Never would be too soon.
Cinders festered up and out, but the direct blast of peroxide was like a
sudden side trip to the nether world.
Athlete’s Foot?
They dunked my foot into a bowl filled with blistering iodine-laced CN.
The same stuff used to disinfect latrines at Girl Scout camp.
I’ll never forget the day Mother and Aunt Margie sat me down in the
parlor. I was apprehensive: the room was forbidden to children. With Dr.
Spock’s book in hand, (not from Star Trek’s navigation officer, but it might
as well have been), they calmly followed the guidelines for “How to tell
an only child that a sibling is on the way.”
I made a low, long sigh.
The two looked at me sympathetically. Little did they know my sigh was
that of relief. Yes! Someone else’s turn!
Mother stared at me thoughtfully. “Is something wrong, dear? Do you
have a tummy-ache?” She glanced towards the kitchen.
No! Not buttermilk! I backed out of the room and retched.
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