Free Sunny Dreams by Alison Preston Page A

Winnipeg’s middle classes were a bit too concerned with cleanliness and didn’t give themselves a chance to build up any resistance to the disease.
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “An early exposure to the virus could build up an immunity to it,” she said, in her nurse-like fashion, “a protection that people like us might not have because we clean away any chance of that exposure.”
    I liked that theory. I liked the idea of letting a little dirt build up here and there and having an argument for it.
    “Is this true, Helen, or is this something you made up?” I asked at the time.
    “It’s true and I made it up,” she said.
    When I had first heard the word polio , the same spring that I got stuck in the mud in my new rubber boots, I thought it had a jolly sound to it. Poli-oli-oli-o! Poli-oli-I-over! Like it belonged in one of our skipping songs. But that didn’t last long.
    The school nurse, Miss Peeler, came into our grade four classroom to tell us how not to get that dreaded disease. It was very contagious, she said. Don’t go swimming, stay squeaky clean, and don’t hang around with people who aren’t. At that point practically everyone in the class turned around to look at Margie Willis because she was the dirtiest person most of us knew. She was the younger sister of the Willis twins, the neighbourhood bad boys. In those days they lived in the same rickety old house on Cromwell Street that they lived in now with their exhausted-looking mother and maybe a grandfather. An old man, anyway. None of us had ever seen a dad, unless the old man was the dad.
    Once, when I was walking home from the Piggly Wiggly store, way back when, I passed their house and the grandfather was sitting on the back stoop cutting his toenails. There was nothing unusual about that, I thought, just bad manners doing it outside where anyone could see. What was unusual was the tool he was using to do the job. It was a pair of pruning shears like the ones Dad used to trim the shrubs. Aunt Helen called them secateurs. It made me feel kind of sick. I don’t ever want to have toenails so big and coarse that a garden tool is needed to cut them.
    Anyway, that day in grade four I forced myself not to turn around and look at Margie Willis. Look at me, how great I am. I’m not staring at the dirty girl.
    Some kids made up a song at recess:
    Polio Joe, from Mexico
    Hands up, stick ’em up, Polio Joe.
    That was the extent of it. It was just a redo of some other stupid song about cowboys. I couldn’t join in singing it. I knew if I did, I would get polio for sure and end up in braces or worse, like the children in the pictures that Nurse Peeler showed us. The worst that could happen, the worst that polio could do to you, was cause you to not be able to breathe or swallow. In that case, you died.

Chapter 8
     
    The hospital kept Jackson for a few nights. There was a reluctance to discharge him until some certainty of his living situation was established. Plaster casts on both arms went up past his elbows. The break in his right arm was near his wrist and less severe than the break in his left. The doctor felt certain that in four weeks the one cast could be replaced by another that would stop below Jackson’s elbow, allowing some use of his right arm.
    But for the next month he would need help. Aunt Helen insisted that he stay with us. Not in a tent in the backyard, but in the spare bedroom upstairs.
    “I am a nurse,” she said. “I am more than qualified to look after Jackson’s needs.”
    The “I am a nurse” statement was starting to grate on my nerves but I was rooting for her. Jackson living in our house for at least four weeks!
    When Helen made her announcement on the Wednesday following the accident we were eating supper at the dining room table. Potato salad, cold chicken, and peas.
    My dad’s usually hearty appetite was suffering. He pushed the food around on his plate like he used to get after me not to do. One pea tumbled