Pandemics, Panics and Peanut Butter

All this Swine Flu panic has made me miss my Mom so much. She died May 6, 2009 and I miss her every single day. No, she did not die of Swine Flu, but she was the world’s foremost authority on anything that might be even remotely dangerous, scary or possibly some sort of conspiracy. And my phone line would have been burning up with calls from her over this Swine Flu scare. She would have urged me to buy masks, take our temperature and worried over whether we had enough food stored up in the house just in case we needed to quarantine ourselves. She was always big on having made preparations for potential world disasters.

My Dad still bears the scars from the time during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1964 when my mom was pregnant with my brother and she became convinced that there was going to be Nuclear War and she needed to store up food and water. She made Daddy go out and buy a bunch of those huge water bottles - the 100 pound kind that go on water coolers – and he threw his back out and crushed vertebrae in his neck and had to have emergency surgery. He says he may have made sure they were prepared to make through a food and water shortage but Mom’s extensive preparations kept him from being able to help her out with any childcare duties for her 7 year old, 4 year old and newborn for the next six months while he was recovering from his surgery! Not that he would have been much help any way, this was the 1960’s after all. But it still makes a good story.

When the big SARS scare occurred in 2003 I very distinctly remember her calling me up at work one day, telling me I had to come over right away to check out this package they had received from China. She left a message for me that went something like this “Reenie, I need you to come over to the house right away. Your Daddy got that painting he ordered from China today and we are worried that it might have that SARS thing so we left it out on the front porch and we need you to come on over here and check to make sure if it is safe for us to bring in the house…”

"Right. Uhmm well, let me see, I can use my super powers and x-ray vision to check out that package and certify it to be SARS free. Oh, yea and never mind the fact that Mom does not want to touch it in case she contracts SARS, let me go ahead and open it up to make sure it is safe!” Have I mentioned before that my family is just slightly insane?

My Mother earned her degree from The University of Texas around 1945 and I think she majored in Worry with a minor in Paranoia and probably did her dissertation on Identifying Suspicious Persons. I honestly can not remember a time period of my life that she was not obsessing over something. Because worrying was a part of her genetic DNA, she unfortunately passed that along to her children – well three of her four children - I have refused to succumb to the constant temptation of potential danger lurking in every corner. My siblings on the other hand, well, let’s just say each of them has their own struggles with this worrisome gene that seems to have been passed down by Mom’s side of the family.

I remember growing up and hearing all kinds of helpful warnings and advice. Things like, “Watch out for people who drive around in cars with tinted windows. Those kind of people are up to no good.” “Never put a cat around a baby. It will suck their breath right out of their mouth.” My personal favorite was not exactly a particular warning; it was the way my Mom would take little notes on suspicious people she saw around the neighborhood just in case she found out later some sort of crime had been committed so she could turn in her notes to the police!

Now here’s a handy little tip I learned from my childhood - never put your arm out of an open window when driving around in a car. There might be a wreck and the car could tip over and land on the side that had the open window your arm was hanging out of and your arm would be cut off! According to my Mom, she saw that very thing happen so all throughout my childhood whenever one of us would hang our arm out of the window she would tell us that story. Personally, I think she made that one up because she thought it looked tacky to drive around with your arms hanging out of the window.

I can’t even begin to remember the number of times she would call me to tell me about some horrible disease or accident that had happened to the second cousin of a friend of a friend's ex-wife or some such and how I needed to now add whatever calamity that had befallen to them to my long list of things to be on the lookout for. I am pretty sure my Mom is probably personally responsible for at least several dozen of the Urban Legends currently floating around the Internet.

All of this came from the same woman who one time I found scraping mold off of some bread as she was making sandwhiches and when I asked her if she was actually going to eat the bread, she said that a little mold never hurt anyone and didn’t I know penicillin came from mold? There was really no way to understand the convoluted way her brain worked, but it made sense to her.

My mother, who when she died at 83 was still called Puddin by everyone she knew, did not like to turn left when I was growing up. Whenever possible, she preferred to take multiple right hand turns until she was headed in the direction she wanted to go. Why? Well, that was easy. Because it was dangerous! Same thing with driving on the freeway. Dangerous! There is a legendary story among some of my childhood friends about the time my mother accidentally got on I-H35 (imagine that last word being said in a horrified voice!)- I-H35. She had a car load of 14 year old girls all going down town to Town Lake to enjoy the Battle of the Bands Night at the local Aqua Festival. Well, somehow, and to this day we still don’t know how such a mishap could have occurred, somehow Puddin got onto THE FREEWAY by accident. My friends still imitate her saying “Girls. Girls. Be quiet. Did I just get on I-H35? Is this THE FREEWAY?” “Yes, Ma'am.” Next thing you know we were not only on the freeway, but we had somehow been diverted to the UPPER LEVEL of I-H35. Suddenly, she was explaining to my friends that she just could not drive on I-H35. It made her too nervous. So, she just pulls over to the side of the road near a police car that happened to be stationed there to direct the traffic flow and says, “Girls, Girls. Get out of the car now. I have to get off this freeway. You just go on over to that policeman and get in his car and tell him to drop you off at Aqua Festival.” So we did. And he did. And she got off.

Can you imagine a policeman today seeing a group of five or six teenage girls walking up to his car parked on 35 and having them explain that they just needed a ride on over to the festival area because "Mrs. Harwood gets too nervous to drive on the freeway" and agreeing to take them like it was nothing out of the ordinary? Somehow I just can't see that going over too well today, but I guess in 1974 it must not have caused much of a stir because he did drop us right off at the front gate!

You should have been with us the first few years MoPac (the freeway that was built in Austin in the early 1970’s) was built. I had to suffer the humiliation of her driving across town using only the feeder roads. THE Mopac, as she called it, just went too fast. But hey, she loved us and was determined to keep us safe, right?

She also gave me helpful advice like whenever you are traveling out of town and someone you meet in that new city asks you where you are from, you always say “Dallas.” Never say Austin. “Why?” you might ask. Well that’s simple. If you tell a stranger you are from Austin they might figure out your, name, address and phone number and send someone to rob you while you are out of town. Or even worse, travel back to your hometown later and murder you in your sleep! I will never forget the time when I was right out of college and we were in New Orleans and this darling guy I had met at our hotel asked me where we were from. Just as I was about to open my mouth and say “Austin, Texas” in my cutest little Texas Drawl, my mother shot me The Look, stood lightly on my toe and said “Dallas” in her haughtiest voice. You all know The Look. It’s the one that all mothers can shoot to their children across a room that immediately and telepathically imports into their minds words like DON’T. STOP. JUST WAIT UNTIL WE GET TO THE CAR… So there I was probably missing the opportunity to meet my future husband, all because this boy might, just could perhaps, possibly, maybe, track me down to Austin, Texas ("Please God", I prayed!)and do who knows what.

Then there was the time during my high school years when I seemed to have been involved in quite a few accidents in a short period of time and my mother and her sisters got together to discuss my many calamities. Shortly thereafter, it was determined that I had begun wearing some opal jewelry recently and that "everyone" knew that wearing opals was bad luck unless they were your birthstone. So off came my two opal rings and my opal necklace. And sure enough, all that bad luck that had been the cause of my misfortune just stopped. I ran across that jewelry the other day in my parent’s safety deposit box and thought they would make a wonderful gift for my 14-year old daughter, CeCe, but I just couldn’t quite bring myself to give them to her. She was born in June.

So what does all this have to do with Swine Flu? Well all this panic over the potenial pandemic, got me to remembering last year when the Salmonella outbreak happened with peanut butter. It was all over the TV News just like this Swine Flu thing and of course my mother called to tell me about it because she knew my kids ate a lot of peanut butter. She had very carefully written down the lot numbers of the bad jars and gave them to me over the phone. Because by this time she was in the nursing home and really very,very sick and I knew that writing down those numbers must have been excruciatingly hard for her, I decided to humor her. I actually wrote them down too instead of just saying "uh, uh" and pretending that I was going to follow up like I ususally did.

Since the peanut butter in question was Peter Pan brand and Peter Pan Peanut Butter is the kind my kids eat, and since I had actually written down the serial numbers she gave me, I figured I might finally be able to put to use that ability to be on the constant lookout for possible danger that my mother so graciously passed along to me and my siblings. I decided I really would take that slip of paper downstairs and check out the Peanut Butter.

Amazingly, I remembered to take the slip of paper with me when I went downstairs to go to work, and then I actually remembered to look in our pantry, pull out the peanut butter and peruse the top to see if my jar was one of the polluted ones. I could not believe my eyes. Right there right in front of me was Potential Peril! Looming Danger! Advancing Doom! My Peter Pan Peanut Butter actually had the recalled serial numbers on it.

Finally! After 47 years of vigilance I had actually averted danger. I was so excited I even took a picture of the jar so that I could show everyone how heroic I had been. I could not wait to tell my mother how all her paranoia had finally paid off.

I then left the jar on the counter and raced out to work feeling like such a great mother for having saved my children from sure death or worse.

Later that day as I rushed back in the door to start dinner I saw Tye, our 7-year old, sitting happily at the kitchen table eating his afternoon snack complete with a huge spoon, some crackers and the jar of Peter Pan Peanut Butter.

My Obsession with the Naked Man From The Ski Lift

OK, so I am obsessed. I admit it. I have issues that I just can’t seem to stop thinking about. “Naked man hanging off of ski lift while traumatized child watches” has consumed a lot of my time this week. In fact, often right in the middle of meeting with my boss, or listening to my child talk about his report card or while flossing my teeth, my mind will suddenly jump to yet another thought I have surrounding this drama.

Sure, there was the obvious horror and humiliation this man suffered from having millions world wide, look at his hoo haw. And of course, there was the secret voyeuristic pride I took in looking at the photos and being glad it was not me. And yes, there was the chuckle I shared at this poor man’s expense and then the forwarded email link I sent to my friends to make sure they too, got to yuck it up at someone else’s expense. Most normal people would have stopped there; but then when have I ever been considered “normal?”


Mainly I have been obsessed with several burning questions. The first thought which has kept me up at nights is HOW this man’s pants could have fallen down. I can easily see the explanation for how he slipped through the seat, catching his ski, which in turn did not release the emergency boot strap thingy that then left him dangling from the chair lift. That is patently obvious and makes perfect sense to me.

I mean that lift is coming at you at what feels like about 100 mph and you are nervously looking behind you, knees slightly bent, butt stuck out, ready to sit in that chair as soon as it smashes into you. (Note to self, yet another reason why skiing is not my best sport. My butt never looks good slightly sticking out.) OK, so the chair seat is defective and instead of being down into the seated position as it hits your knees, it somehow stays vertical and when it hits you, your body kind of folds in half and you start to slip through. Then, just as you think you are going to fall to your death through that crack, your ski, which, thankfully, happens to be plenty long, turns somehow and wedges itself between the seat and lift, trapping you dangling upside down on the lift.

I get that. Makes perfect sense in a messed up kind of way. The guy fell through the lift and his ski got caught leaving him dangling. But how, in God’s name, did his pants get pulled down...or is that up? That just does not seem logical. Why would his pants come down when he was flipped over? The thing that got caught was his ski, not his pants. The laws of gravity should apply in this case which would mean that since his feet and legs were in the air his pants would stay up. There should have been nothing that caused them to fall down.

I have been so obsessed by this that I even made my youngest son simulate dangling upside down to make sure that my thinking was not faulty and, sure enough, my experiment proved that gravity would not cause those pants to fall down. When a person is hanging upside down their pants should stay right side up. That’s all there is to it. It is just a scientific fact. I know because I did an experiment about it.

And another thing I keep thinking about his pants, is what’s up with his appalling lack of undergarments and layers? While I don’t have a lot of ski experience, the few times I have been up on the mountain, I have been well protected by multiple layers of sturdy and difficult to handle clothing. (Yet another reason I don’t ski – any activity that requires clothing that adds pounds to your look is not for me.) This means that it takes me about 20 minutes of fumbling and snapping and peeling back through layers and layers just to be able to go to the bathroom.

So, again I must ask. If by some strange fluke of nature that defied the laws of gravity and his pants got pulled down, where were all the other layers of clothing that should have protected his dignity. From what I can see, he only had on one measly pair of long underwear underneath his ski pants. What self respecting ski bum leaves home so woefully under attired?


Another thing I have been wondering about. Why did just the man fall through? Wouldn't logic dictate that the child should have been the one to slip through the faulty seat? Children are smaller than adults and therefore more likely to slip through cracks and stuff. Looking at the seat it appears that it is a bench seat because there is one long back. If it were two seats the back would have some sort of separation. So if this is the case, why did the Dad who is heavier, bulkier and supposedly smarter and more coordinated fall though and not the child? This just defies logic.


However, the most horrific thought that I just can not seem to quit obsessing over is the child. That horror-struck child. Not only is this unfortunate child left all alone on the lift, petrified that their father will fall to his death, but also worried that it might happen to them any moment. Vacillating between being genuinely afraid for their life and the life of their father and the utter humiliation of seeing Dad in such an unbecoming situation makes for a lot of years of future therapy.

First of all, when you are between the ages of nine and nineteen pretty much anything your Dad does is embarrassing. No child at that age wants to stand out for anything that might become a source of ridicule. I know people to this day who are still in therapy discussing embarrassing incidents involving one of their parents that happened more than 40 years ago and nothing in their stories involved anything close to having your naked Dad dangling from ski lift aired on every major news station and Internet site in the world!

I still have a horrific memory from 1972 seared into my brain. It started out innocently enough. My Dad for some reason had agreed to drive our carpool. That was embarrassing enough on it’s own. Dads did NOT drive carpool back then. Only Moms. Added to that was the fact that we were late - we were always late but I will save that for another time – and then there was the matter of the horn. Yes, the car horn. We drove up to Suzanne Gray’s house and my Dad honked the horn. He always thought he was funny and would honk like two or three times quickly in a row. Only this time the honk went on and on and on and on… on so long that by the time the Grays came to the door they were not too happy. I am sure they wondered how we had the gall to honk like that when we were the ones who were late. My Dad sheepishly tried to explain that the horn was stuck as neighbors all over the street peered peevishly out of their doors.

Most Dads would have probably gotten out and unhooked some wire thingy or done something under the hood to stop the honking, but my Dad was not mechanically inclined and this was way beyond his talents or skills. The best he could do was beat on the steering wheel and mutter a bunch of cuss words under his breath. Embarrassing!

The horn then proceeded to honk the entire way to the next stop where we picked up the Thornhill kids and then it honked incessantly all the rest of the way to Casis Elementary. Imagine the horror six children ranging in ages 7-12 had to suffer as drivers pulled over, made rude gestures, honked back all the way up to the school. By the time we pulled into the circular drive for drop off, each child had sunk as low as possible into the seats hoping to just disappear. But no such luck. My Dad cheerfully drove us right up to the drop off where it seemed every child in the entire school was arriving at the same time and just laughed as he told the Principal, who grumpily had rushed over to see what child was causing the ruckus, that he was going to go straight to the Texaco to get the thing disconnected before he had to drive downtown. I was pretty sure I was going to die that day, and my Dad was not even pant less!

So back to my obsession with this poor child. Most reports have assumed that this was a man and his son. And one can only hope that this case, because the sheer horror of having your Dad dangling from a ski lift for a full fifteen minutes is embarrassing enough. Add to that the fact that not only did your Dad look like a big doofus for falling through the chair lift, I mean a real man probably would not have had that happen, but his entire “area” was totally exposed for all the world to see. Any son would be sufficiently mortified for pretty much the rest of their life. They would probably feel the need to change their name, change schools and probably even move out of State. But consider the trauma inflicted on that same child if it was the daughter sitting in the ski lift instead of a son.

Well after some pretty obsessive viewing of the photos, I need to tell you that I am fairly sure that the child was a girl. First, is the color of the ski jacket. If you blow up the pictures (and yes, I am that obsessed) you will see that the arm of the jacket appears to have pink and turquoise markings on it. Not many self respecting little boys would wear a jacket sporting that much pink. Turquoise maybe, but not pink. Second, and far more important, if you look closely at all photos the child is never actually looking at the father. The most natural position for the child to be in would be to look down straight down at the body that was dangling underneath them. But if you look at those photos that poor kids is stiff as board, which could be from terror, but I am more inclined to think it is from humiliation, and looking purposefully off to the side. I am thinking this just may be because the poor kid is not only scared to death, not only embarrassed by the fact that her father is in this humiliating position, not only revolted that, to add insult to injury, his pants have fallen off, not only dismayed to realize that everyone on the entire mountain is looking at them, but is also a GIRL!

Now here’s the deal. Kids see their parent of the opposite sex naked by accident all the time without irrevocable harm. Yes it is horrifying. Yes it is upsetting – usually to the parent as much as to the child. But mostly it is just embarrassing and probably makes them want to throw up a little in their mouth. But its just a fact of life. Things happen, Yet we all know that children do not want to think of their parents as sexual beings. They would rather never really fully acknowledge that the parent of the same sex comes equipped with the anatomically correct parts, much less the one of the opposite sex.

Most people I know have at least one embarrassing story about walking in on a parent and if they are lucky all they did was catch a glimpse of something they would rather not see. And, most people I know just as quickly turned and ran out, or better yet pretended it never happened. Yet even with those quick, fleeting accidents the images usually remain seared on the brain like a brand on a steer.

I will never quite erase the image of just seeing my dad in his underwear bending over to pull up his pants and that didn’t include anything but a small glimpse of a buttocks crack! It just was so undignified and horrifying – especially because I rarely saw my Dad in anything but his work clothes. He was either fully dressed or asleep or not in our house.

So I just keep thinking of that poor child stuck on the chair lift for what reports say was anywhere from seven to 15 minutes, screaming “My eyes. My eyes!” and wishing she was anywhere but there. Only to then to be forced to watch the rescue team come and take over the situation as they help her father to safety. The photos also show that part to also seem pretty awful. I mean take a look at the one where no less than six people, several of them women with their faces in a fairly intimate area, are having to grab his person to guide him to safety. While I am sure she was relieved to find that he would not fall to his death, I am also fairly certain that she was praying for her own!

I kind of feel guilty for even writing about this. I know I should refrain from laughing at this unlucky man and his unfortunate child. Yet somehow I find it impossible not to giggle a bit inside as I think of the ensuing conversations that must have been forced to occur for this family. “Well, I don’t know exactly what happened, one minute I was sitting down and the next thing I knew I was upside down, dangling hundreds of feet in the air, with my pants around my ankles and freezing my privates off.” “What? Well it was very cold…” “Um. Mom, do you think you could home school me for the rest of this year?”

And while I do feel guilty, I just can’t seem to help it. I mean, seriously, even Jesus would have probably laughed at this. ..And yet another reason I don’t ski. I really do not want Jesus laughing at me.