This Little Life Of Mine - Chapter 54 - Hard Work and Horseplay Thomas M Parsons

54. Hard Work and Horseplay

I got a call from Dr. Smith. That was not his real name. Fact is, I don’t remember the man’s real name. He was the head of the Community College’s English Department. And he wanted me to come down for an interview because he had a need for a part-time instructor in Speech classes, and perhaps in English classes as well. Me. A college professor!

I went in and talked to him, and was hired. I began teaching classes. I must confess, I loved it. There was something about the classroom that appealed to me. The fact that I got paid was a bonus!

However, I am getting ahead of my story. Long before I had those classes to teach, Linda and I had three little girls to raise. Mandy was the oldest, and still is, for that matter. Kathy the youngest. And Jenny the middle child. It has always amazed me how children from the same parents can be so different in just about every way. Different looks. Different personalities. Different perspectives. Different interests. Can they all really come from the same gene pool?

They can. They do. Ours did.

Mandy was of a generous, outgoing, sanguine nature. Jenny was more melancholic and shy. Kathy was an outgoing choleric who knew how to get what she wanted. Much of the time our three little girls got along reasonably well. Sometimes they did not. In fact, three was not a good number because quite often, three would become two against one. It was not always the same two and it was not always the same one, but, well, you get the idea.

The title for this chapter comes from a piece of music composed by Richard Rodgers for the 1950's television documentary series Victory at Sea. As I stated in an earlier chapter, I have long been a fan of Rodgers’ music, and this is one of his best. It suggests that being in World War II was often hard work, but sometimes it was just horseplay. Raising kids is something like that. Pastoring a church is hard work, and I did it for twenty-five years because that is what God called me to do, and because a man has to earn a living somehow to provide for his family. That was the hard work I contributed to raising our family.

I do not mean to suggest that conducting my ministry was the only hard work I had in raising our children. It was not. I was home most evenings, and often came home for lunch, since we lived next door to the church in Oglesby. There were sometimes disciplinary measures that had to be dealt with, and sometimes there were minor repairs to appliances, fixtures, toys, etc. that had to be made. I was never good at major repairs, and some minor repairs threw me for a loop as well, but there were some things I could do.

Before Kathy was born, I built a bunk bed for Mandy and Jenny from a design I found in a book. Later, when Mandy was getting older, we got a bed for her and gave her her own room, and Jenny and Kathy shared the bunk bed. They carved their names into the wood of the bed, something which I was not happy about then, but later thought it was cute. Time does often change our perspective on things.

Most of the work of child rearing, of course, fell on Linda’s shoulders. Cooking, cleaning, taking care of baths, medicines, brushing hair, discipline, and all often fell to her because she was home all the time. We had both agreed when we first talked of marriage that we wanted Linda to be a stay at home mom. She was, at least until the girls were old enough to allow her to work some. But that comes later.

The horseplay was something Linda and I both enjoyed. I remember tossing the girls around when they were little, throwing them onto a couch and listening to them giggle with delight. Tickling them was fun.

Once Mandy and I were playing kick-the-box with an empty cardboard box in which diapers had come from the store. I would kick it to Mandy, and she would kick it to me. In a weird, freak kick that I could never duplicate again no matter how hard I tried, the box bounced on the floor and up into Mandy’s mouth, forcing a new permanent tooth that had recently emerged back into the gum just a little bit. I was nervous about that. We took her to the dentist, and he said the tooth was not injured and would no doubt return to its proper position. God made the human body with amazing abilities to recover itself. The tooth turned out fine. The box, however, was thrown in the trash.

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Mandy and Jenny were jumping off the couch one time, when neither Linda or I was watching. We were both in the house, but not in the living room where the jumping match was in progress. Jenny jumped (or maybe was pushed) off the couch and landed on the edge of the coffee table, where her temple made contact with the hard wood at the point of a corner, causing a bleeding gash over her eyebrow. Off to the emergency room we went, all four of us (Kathy was not born yet). The nurse on duty looked at the wound, took a small wad of cotton and damped it with a solution and washed the blood away. “It doesn’t look bad,” she said, “just a gash. I don’t think she will need stitches.”

“Well, good,” I said, “thank you, Let’s go, ladies.”

“No,” said the nurse, “you can’t go yet.”

“We can’t?” I said. “Why not?”

“The doctor has to say it’s OK for you to go,” she said.

“OK,” I said, “bring the doctor in.”

“She’s not here,” the nurse said. “She is on call, but she’s at home.”

“So, what does that mean? How does she OK it if she’s not here?”

“I have to call her,” the nurse said.

“OK,” I said, a little put out that there was no doctor on duty.

The nurse left to make the call. In a few minutes she returned.

“Well, can we go now?” I said, with the confidence of a man who was now about an hour late for supper.

“No,” the nurse said. “The doctor has ordered x-rays.”

“X-rays?” I asked. “Why? You said the wound was minor.”

“But I’m not a doctor,” she said. “I’m not authorized to release a patient. Only a doctor can do that. And she won’t release the patient until she’s certain everything is OK. So, we have to take a couple of x-rays, and the radiologist will look at them and then the doctor will either release your daughter, or prescribe further treatment.”

“All right,” I said, with an obvious lack of enthusiasm for the procedure.

“It won’t take long,” the nurse said.

So, Jenny was taken to X-ray, and Linda accompanied her, while Mandy and I stayed out in the waiting area. Mandy was losing patience as was I. What should have taken only a few minutes stretched to half an hour and then close to one hour. Finally Linda and Jenny emerged.

“So, what’s the verdict?” I asked.

“She’s fine,” Linda said. “We can go now.”

“What took so long?”

“Oh, they took the first set of x-rays, but something went wrong and they couldn’t use them. They had to make some adjustments, and then take the series all over again.”

It occurred to me that no x-rays would have been taken at all if a doctor had been on duty and looked at the wound in person.

Our insurance had a $100 deductible. The cost of the x-rays, both sets, the one that didn’t come out and the one that did, cost $100. Guess who had to pay it. In this case, horseplay led to hard work and to the spending of $100 we could not afford to spend. But Jenny was fine, and that was good.

The photo shows Jenny's ten-cent bandaid that cost me $100. Fortunately, the wound healed quickly and left no permanent damage, not even a scar.