Free Short Circuits by Dorien Grey Page B

slide down between my cast and my chest and back to try to cool me off.
    For the next 62 years, I never slept on my back again.
    It of course did not even occur to me at the time what my parents had to have gone through for the several weeks that they were in fact trapped in that sardine can with an immobile five year old boy. I never thanked them for everything they sacrificed for me. It would never have occurred to me that I should. That’s what parents are for.
    I remember that I held a grudge against them for several years after they one time found it necessary to “rob” my piggy bank because they simply did not have enough money for something they needed—probably for me—and did not have enough themselves. Looking back on it now, I am indescribably ashamed of myself for my selfishness. But I was a child, and I take refuge in the fact that I couldn’t have been expected to know any better.
    Oh, yes…and the evening of the day I had gone back to the hospital to have my cast removed…it was Halloween Eve, 1938, the night of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast…I had to be rushed back to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy.
    I’d never thought of the reason, until now, why, after coming home yet again, my Grandpa Margason drove down in what was then the equivalent of a station wagon to get me and take me back with him to Rockford, where I was deposited at Aunt Thyra’s and Uncle Buck’s for the period of my recovery. I think I know the reason, now: my poor parents simply couldn’t handle any more at the moment.
    Surely there has to be a special place in Heaven, if there is a Heaven, for parents. If there is, my folks are there. And even if there is not the vast expanse of a Heaven, they will always live in the sardine can which is my heart.
    * * *
    GRANDPA FEARN
    It’s really a shame to realize one doesn’t know nearly enough about the history of the people without whom one wouldn’t exist. I’m ashamed to say I know very little about Grandpa Fearn’s, but what I do know I admire.
    Chester (“Pete”) Fearn was born the year after the great Chicago Fire, in Pena, Illinois, a town so small it cannot be found on a Rand McNally road map, and quite probably no longer exists. I know almost nothing of his own family: as far as I know he was an only child. One of his grandmothers was a member of the Blackfoot Nation…to whom I am deeply indebted for my Native American genes, which I credit for the fact that I still have a full head of (though very little facial) hair.
    His father committed suicide when he was quite young, and Grandpa left home to wander around the central Midwest. I doubt he had more than a third-grade education, but he was far from ignorant. He earned his living tap-dancing for money aboard the riverboat
Natchez
, sister ship to the
Robert E. Lee
. At some point he found himself in Rockford, Illinois, where sometime in the late 1890s he met and married Annabelle Erickson, my grandmother, about whom I talked in a previous blog.
    Grandpa worked for more than 35 years various Rockford factories and foundries, which repaid his efforts by giving him the Black Lung disease from which he eventually died at age 85. I’m sure if it hadn’t been for the lung disease, he’d still be around.
    He and my mom shared the same sly sense of humor, which I’d like to think I’ve inherited. Two of his favorite sayings were “...don’t ‘cha know?” and, after a full meal, “My sufficiency has been suffancified.” He loved walking, and he loved his “snuss”—pocket tobacco snorted through the nose. And he never lost his love of dancing. On his 79th birthday, he was honored by Rockford’s Arthur Murray Dance Studio (the same one from which I had been ignominiously expelled), whose dances he regularly attended. His prized possession was his pair of tap shoes, which he kept so