pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ANYONE GOT A FEELING WHEEL HANDY? I'M IN NEED OF A FEELING WHEEL Friday was gorgeous, so I opened the windows and listened to the birdies chirp as I worked. Closed them before going to sleep, but forgot to turn the heater back on—which means I woke up in a 58° house wishing that I had slept in pajamas. This put me in mind of a childhood experience that I'll share. So. As my mother became increasingly delusional, my father developed all kinds of interesting dysfunctional habits that got worse with each of her suicide attempts. One habit was buying all kinds of random things that we did not need—and often in bulk. He bought a bunch of forty-man Army tents once, for example, that we never even used. He also ceased fixing items in the house when they broke and our heater was one of those things. I believe it quit working in 1973 and know it was not repaired until after he died in 1997. Now South Carolina is a fairly warm state, but it still got cold in the winter and our house got damn cold. Daddy eventually put a gas heater in the family room and space heaters in our bedrooms, but these did not heat the house (or even the rooms they were in) worth a crap, so, on really cold nights, all seven of us wound up sleeping in the family room . When we complained about being cold, Daddy always said, "Cold? You don't even know what cold is." This was his response to to complaints about our being tired or sick or in pain too—which is how I wound up having a heat stroke at the ripe old age of ten. This happened on a hot August day when we were working in a field at my grandparents' farm. I was pouring sweat, but then turned cold and clammy and the landscape appeared to have been rubbed with Vaseline. I laid down in the field and said I felt sick, but he told me I didn't even know what sick was and to get back to work. A cold family was, likewise, not a good enough reason to fix the heater (which he insisted he was going to fix for the next twenty-five years). So, long story short, I called a service after he died and discovered that the damn thing only ever needed a belt. 12:19 a.m. - 2005-03-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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