7209. BELOW THE WATER LINE, PT. 20

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 20)

Any number of things come to mind (and well they

should) about my first forays into Avenel life. Drinking

water right out of a hose. I'd never done that before, 

but we had a hose hook-up that was always at the ready.

It wasn't the coldest of water, in fact, in the sun it started

out warm, with some sort of nasty rubbery taste from the

hot hose, until the water ran out enough to at least seemed

chilled. It worked. The hose was a lifesaver. Down towards 

the end of out street, the Route One end, early on, one of

the kid's fathers dropped dead; died in the yard, right there,

after working outside in the heat all day working on fixing

and cleaning up the new yard. As my mother's always

inflammatory reports went, this was typical. As she put it : 

'Don't be outside all day, getting all hot and worked up, and 

then come in here and start gulping ice-water. It will kill you.

That's how Wally's* father died.' The thing was, we were all

told he'd been outside working, all sweated up and hot, came

inside for ice water, and was drinking it right by the refrigerator

when he keeled over. Of course, it was that but more 

than that it wasn't  -  he was, after all, an adult and most 

probably had other medical issues, either being treated or 

being ignored. But she always took things, the most particular, 

and drew it out to the most general and broad cover statement 

she could. I was on to that. It was overkill, always. So, tepid 

water from the hose, which she never knew about anyway, 

and which was probably a bacteria-laced mine field of fetid 

kid-water, that was OK. My mother's medical stuff, anyway, 

was always out in the forefront  -  she herself was a bit of a 

hypochondriac, and quite self-motivated in that regard. Later 

on, about 1962, she underwent  -  having had both rickets (a 

poverty disease, she said), and rheumatic fever as a child  -  

heart surgery to repair a bad valve. It was really early on for 

open-heart surgery. I was away already, in seminary-school, 

but it was quite the nail-biter. Deborah Hospital, Browns Mills, 

NJ; some sort of public-good Jewish heart hospital. I don't know 

the ins and outs, but I think it was cost-free, as long as you agreed 

to be the main attraction that day for the open seating training 

balcony in the operating theater. Training hospital, I'd guess, 

while others, as students and teachers, observed. It worked; she

did have a second such operation, same thing, this time with a 

pacemaker implanted, again at Deborah, about 15 years later 

too. Repeat performance, I guess. 

-

Back then, too, a guy named Dr. Homer, from Green Street,

Woodbridge, he was still making house-calls. Whenever we, or

anyone in the family, were sick (my father seemed never to get ill)

Dr. Homer would eventually be summoned. My sister or myself 

would be kept home from school, put in our parents' bed for the

day, and the room would be darkened. Chicken Pox, Measles,

Mumps, Whooping Cough, Strept Throat (which I always thought

was 'stripped' throat, 'til later), and anything else. He'd pull up in

his black '49 Ford, and then later a '55 Ford, and walk up to the 

house. He had a little round-topped doctor's bag, or whatever it 

would be called. He'd talk pleasant, check the patient over, diagnose

this or that, while flipping open the two tops of his doctor's bag.

It was filled with little bottles, needles, tongue depressors, alcohol, 

thermometers, all that sort of stuff. It always ended with a needle,

arm or ass, one or the other, and then he'd walk out  -  chatting with

my mother. It was, back then, really another, much simpler world.

No real complications, until you died. That was that. Once I got

hit by the train, all my doctor stuff changed  -  I had to go to them,

they were all in Perth Amboy, or Newark. I never saw Dr. Homer

again. I guess I'd 'graduated'. Two or three years later anyway, it

was all over, I was fine, and all my doctor needs ended. It never

really stopped me in my heedless abandon towards freedom and the

liberty as a boy to shuck everything and run wild. Hell, the world

called, 'we don't need no stinking doctors'; so to speak.

*name has been altered.