Entries in Life

Lying there in the dental chair with a hypodermic needle in my mouth, I suddenly felt faint. Not particularly wanting to lose consciousness with a needle stuck in my jaw I waved my hand for attention. The dentist stopped and looked at me.
“I’m going to faint. I’ve fainted before. I know what it feels like.”
She said something about the medicine — that it can make some people’s heart race. I felt my heart thudding along rapidly. I lifted my hand and caught a glimpse of pure white skin and nails instead of my usual pink.
The dentist asked if I had I ever had that medication before. I had no idea. I really have done pretty much everything I can to avoid medical interference in my life. ... but there was that one procedure about five-six years ago that involved some kind of pain numbing chemical.
Whatever the cause for my physical reaction, the dental assistant kindly explained, “Sometimes when people get older they develop sensitivities to some medicines.”
When people get older!? Get older! Are you talking about me?
That’s not the first time I’ve been labeled with the ‘O’ word by someone still too wet-behind the ears to know anything. I’ve heard it before, but I hardly expected to be labeled that way in a dental clinic.
I’ve grown a bit accustomed to it at the fast food places. So I excused the subtle implication from the cashier when she told me the total for my lunch.
“That’s not right. It’s too low,” I said reaching for my wallet.
“I gave you the senior discount,” she quietly said glancing at my graying hair.
I didn’t bother to tell her that my hair began graying sometime before my 30th birthday about the time my last child arrived.
That child, now the mother of two, also notes signs of aging in her father and I. Fortunately, I still have a few children and grandchildren that think otherwise. Last year I slid on reading glasses to finish knitting a scarf before the recipient had to head home. One of the grandchildren looked at me and laughed, “You look just like a granny.”
I peered at that child over my spectacles, “Well, I do have grandchildren. That would make me a ‘granny’.”
The grandchild did a double take. She had never thought about me that way.
Such blithe awareness of me contrasts with the medical explanation for any fluke I notice in my body enough to take the time to inquire about it at the clinic.
I noticed it first when I thought perhaps I should join my children and have an eye exam.
After the exam, the white-coated opthamologist sort of leaned back in his seat, “Most people find that they need glasses as they grow older.” Well! Does that also explain why half of the children in the family began wearing glasses in grade school.
All too often, it seems to me that physicians just look at me and my chart, perform a bit of requisite poking and prodding and have a quick and easy answer, “Well with age the sense of taste tends to decline ....” With age, your joints do tend to ...” “Sometimes the weather effects older people like that.”
In other words, given enough time the body starts to decline. It refuses to function as efficiently as it did in the past and requires more effort to yield the previous results. Which I found out the weekend I had to go to a church retreat with a face only Freddy Krueger's mother could love. After a childhood of roaming the hills of New York oblivious to poison ivy in any shape, form or quantity, I had become highly allergic to the stuff. The doctor never said the ‘O’ word when I showed up with an inexplicable itchy, red rash. No, he just informed me, to my great dismay, that one’s inborn immunity to the vine diminishes with repeated exposures — translated that means with time and age.
If you ask me, it’s not so much that I am getting older, I just have had more experience and exposure to the physically detrimental aspects of life.
That's my explanation and I'm sticking with it.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.

Lying there in the dental chair with a hypodermic needle in my mouth, I suddenly felt faint. Not particularly wanting to lose consciousness with a needle stuck in my jaw I waved my hand for attention. The dentist stopped and looked at me.
“I’m going to faint. I’ve fainted before. I know what it feels like.”
She said something about the medicine — that it can make some people’s heart race. I felt my heart thudding along rapidly. I lifted my hand and caught a glimpse of pure white skin and nails instead of my usual pink.
The dentist asked if I had I ever had that medication before. I had no idea. I really have done pretty much everything I can to avoid medical interference in my life. ... but there was that one procedure about five-six years ago that involved some kind of pain numbing chemical.
Whatever the cause for my physical reaction, the dental assistant kindly explained, “Sometimes when people get older they develop sensitivities to some medicines.”
When people get older!? Get older! Are you talking about me?
That’s not the first time I’ve been labeled with the ‘O’ word by someone still too wet-behind the ears to know anything. I’ve heard it before, but I hardly expected to be labeled that way in a dental clinic.
I’ve grown a bit accustomed to it at the fast food places. So I excused the subtle implication from the cashier when she told me the total for my lunch.
“That’s not right. It’s too low,” I said reaching for my wallet.
“I gave you the senior discount,” she quietly said glancing at my graying hair.
I didn’t bother to tell her that my hair began graying sometime before my 30th birthday about the time my last child arrived.
That child, now the mother of two, also notes signs of aging in her father and I. Fortunately, I still have a few children and grandchildren that think otherwise. Last year I slid on reading glasses to finish knitting a scarf before the recipient had to head home. One of the grandchildren looked at me and laughed, “You look just like a granny.”
I peered at that child over my spectacles, “Well, I do have grandchildren. That would make me a ‘granny’.”
The grandchild did a double take. She had never thought about me that way.
Such blithe awareness of me contrasts with the medical explanation for any fluke I notice in my body enough to take the time to inquire about it at the clinic.
I noticed it first when I thought perhaps I should join my children and have an eye exam.
After the exam, the white-coated opthamologist sort of leaned back in his seat, “Most people find that they need glasses as they grow older.” Well! Does that also explain why half of the children in the family began wearing glasses in grade school.
All too often, it seems to me that physicians just look at me and my chart, perform a bit of requisite poking and prodding and have a quick and easy answer, “Well with age the sense of taste tends to decline ....” With age, your joints do tend to ...” “Sometimes the weather effects older people like that.”
In other words, given enough time the body starts to decline. It refuses to function as efficiently as it did in the past and requires more effort to yield the previous results. Which I found out the weekend I had to go to a church retreat with a face only Freddy Krueger's mother could love. After a childhood of roaming the hills of New York oblivious to poison ivy in any shape, form or quantity, I had become highly allergic to the stuff. The doctor never said the ‘O’ word when I showed up with an inexplicable itchy, red rash. No, he just informed me, to my great dismay, that one’s inborn immunity to the vine diminishes with repeated exposures — translated that means with time and age.
If you ask me, it’s not so much that I am getting older, I just have had more experience and exposure to the physically detrimental aspects of life.
That's my explanation and I'm sticking with it.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.

Honey blonde hair matted around Chloe's hesitant smile of unbrushed teeth. Chloe spoke so quietly I doubt but a few heard a word she said during the few months she lived in the school district. I remember her as the kid everyone teased or ignored — one of the invisible students. Yet, she is one of the people from my past that I wonder — whatever happened to them?

When the bus stopped in front of the worn down barn and farm house where Chloe lived, the raucous games of the high schoolers ceased. They turned to stare at the parade of children with matted, uncombed hair, mismatched lumps of woolen coats, mittens and numbed looks. Like peas in a pod, they silently ascended the steps of the bus. They did not expect anyone to save them a seat. They just looked for any spaced begrudged them when a kid shoved over because every rider must be seated. The poverty side of life had beaten the kids down and robbed them of the joy and enthusiasm other bus riders knew.

The rented farm did not feed them. The farm house only warmed them for a season. They stayed just long enough to reveal the way of kids from the painted farms, the kids whose dads – and sometimes moms – had a job in the city.

Chloe's family scraped by in every way possible. Even the teenage brother seemed too stunned with the harsh realities of life to develop a tough guy attitude. No one invited them over for the night. They bore the brunt of subtle jokes and silent ostracization.

I saw it. I felt it. I knew it. Chloe often sat with me on the bus. We had the same teacher in fifth-grade. Every day the teacher walked around to check that his students had washed their hands and brushed their teeth. When I forgot to brush, I mumbled a humiliated “no.” She turned her hands over and said, “yes,” even though her teeth belied that statement every time.

She may have been as mismatched in her clothing, as the fictional Pippy Longstocking, but she lacked Pippy's joie de vivre. I guess Chloe lived with her parents, I don't remember ever seeing them. I just saw her those few months that we rode the bus together.

And I saw time and again the kids whose parents sent them to school in clean, fresh outfits lording it over her as they did other kids in less fortunate circumstances, including Gloria, the oldest daughter in another family. Smirking fifth-graders piled up their trays and signaled to the neat but humbly dressed girl to carry their trays to the dishwashing window. And she did — with a smile. The others enjoyed the service and their secret joke — they never intended to return the favor, the smile or invite her to sit with them.

Gloria's family had a history in the area. I asked my mother once about my classmate's family. Mom simply said that Gloria's mother had been much better off, came from a nicer family, but had met and married the wrong guy — a man who drank. She had made a mistake and she and her stairstep family of children lived with the consequences.

My frequent seat partner on the bus through the years was another girl in my class, Naomi. She wore the fashionable poofy spring coat of the time. She arrived at school clean, combed and brushed. She played in the band. She smiled and others responded and asked her to join them.
Once she missed school for a while.

No one explained her absence. And when she showed up, no one asked any questions. We knew why she had not come. The fading green bruises on her face told a story without words.

The bruises faded. It never happened again during the years I lived there, but the memory remains of her silent abuse along with the miserable neglect of the transient child and the struggle against poverty of the other. Just three girls, I knew a very long time ago.
Sometimes I stop and think of them and wonder whatever happened to them.

(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org)