Looking back – Chapter 14

Earlier at my office we were talking about the change of season and what we enjoy about it. Allergies for some, pretty leaf colors for others and so on. Then I got to thinking about it and for me, it is lower electric bills. So we were talking about how it is nice to have the windows open and so on, which of course sparked a memory from my childhood. For any of you who don’t know, I grew up in a very small town in the south and I feel that may be a contributing factor to my skewed views on things.

So for a little back ground on this memory, as a child/young adult (hell to this date if I am in my home town) I had a friend whose family insisted that I visited them (his parents and both sets of grandparents) during both Thanksgiving and Christmas. So to say we were close is a given. And since we lived in a small town we all saw each other a lot. Back in those days it wasn’t any big deal for people to watch the children of friends, and since my buddy’s grandmother was retired she did just that when we were over.

Also important in this memory is that it was a warm summer day and, as most people in my home town were/are, my buddy’s grandparents where a bit frugal. So when the weather permitted his grandmother would open the back door of her house which leads to a screened in patio with a humongous fan, like a huge warehouse fan. And she would use the fan to blow air through the house to cool it as opposed to using the window unit air conditioners. If you were to walk into her backdoor you would be in a small storage room where she kept dry goods and a deep freezer, from there you would walk into her kitchen, this comes into the story in just a bit.

Now my friend’s grandmother was in her late 60’s early 70’s at this time, her hearing was not the best and she moved a bit slower than she once did but she was a super great woman.

So there my friend and I are in his grandmother’s backyard playing. I am sure at some point we were playing war, I would guess that playing cars occurred at some point and many other things that boys do to entertain themselves. At some point we worked our way over to grandma’s vegetable garden. She had a lovely garden with a ton of tomato plants in her garden. My friend and I thought it would be funny to throw some tomatoes into the fan to watch it chop them up so we gathered as many tomatoes as we could in our shirts and made our way over to the fan, probably about 15 feet or so away. Now we were expecting to see this thing blow tomato chunks everywhere, but that’s not what happened. My buddy chucked the first one into the fan and it disappeared. We thought he had his timing just perfect and must have missed one of the blades so I heaved one into the fan and the same thing. So we devised a plan that we would BOTH throw tomatoes into the fan at the same time because there was no way that we could both time it just right. So tomato after tomato we launched them into this fan and … NOTHING.

About this time my buddy’s mom pulls up to the grandmother’s house and lets herself in. What she saw was her mother slumped over the sink with all of this red stuff all over her back and the back of her head and this red liquid dripping off of her. Thinking that her mother had been shot, his mom let out a blood curdling scream and we hauled ass inside to see what was going on.

What really happened was my buddy’s grandmother went into the storage room to get some stuff to make for lunch and apparently as she was walking out and doing stuff in the kitchen we where just covering her with tomato puree, which is why they tomatoes just disappeared into the fan. And the reason that she was slumped over the sink is because she was peeling potatoes.

I am not 100% sure, but I think that I am still on restriction and I know my ass was sore for a long time.

Don’t get dead