Chicken Pox, Cherry Stems, and Playing Quarters with a Five Year Old

It’s the week before Mother’s Day, and I’ve got my Dad on my mind. Calendar-schmalandar.

When I was in kindergarten, I got the Chicken Pox. I caught them from my brother who had maybe 20 spots on his whole body. I had them so badly that there were literally pictures of me in medical journals. The Pox coated my body, covered the bottoms of my feet, were on my eyeballs, ear-drums, and on my voice box. I ended up in the hospital for observation and because no one know how ugly the end result would be. (For the record, I have one scar high on my forehead and that’s it.)

But this isn’t a post about that. It’s not about infectious disease, miracle cures, or even wading into the vaccine debate. Nope. This post is a love story.

When I was five, my Mom was in college working on her degree in Computer Programming (she graduated when I was 11) and my Dad was a student pilot in the US Navy. At that time, Mom was the hands-on parent and Dad was our playmate in the afternoons and when he was home on leave. Then I caught the Chicken Pox at the beginning of Finals, and then it was just him and me.

It makes me laugh now to think of this 20-something-year-old him with little-experience-in-childcare taking on the care of spotty little me. He was definitely jumping right into the deep end of the pool. The Pox on my eyes made them ache in the light. The spots on my ears made me sensitive to loud noises. The sores on my feet made it nearly impossible for me to walk any distance without excruciating pain. And the itching…35 years later and I can still vividly remember the all-over non-stop itching.

He carried me everywhere. While I don’t have a lot of memories of him before that (I was 5, people!) I remember the way that he carried me from the couch to the bathroom. I remember the dozens of baths he gave me, carefully adding oatmeal, baking soda, or whatever-else-one-of-the-locals-moms-had-suggested to the water in an effort to calm the itching of my skin. Once I was ensconced on the couch, he’d whip out the cotton balls and enact elaborate puppet shows that somehow managed to end with both of us covered in calamine lotion. The rash lining my throat made swallowing painful, and so we made twice daily excursions to Whataburger for milkshakes in those days before anyone knew about smoothies. I’d be coated with calamine, wrapped in his t-shirt, and wearing his giant aviator sunglasses to shield my eyes from the harmful rays of the sun, and we would debate the whole way there whether it should be vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry this time. I don’t know why we discussed it at all, as more often than not we brought home all three and I sipped all of them and he drank what was left.

While I love the way he cared for my physical needs, what has me howling with laughter 30+ years later is how he kept me entertained for days on end. It was the late 70s, which meant that there were no children’s shows on television until after 3PM. Unable to move well and sitting in the semi-gloom that was most comfortable for my eyes, he ran out of ideas by the end of the first day when I declared Candy Land and Go Fish to be “boring.” So he dug deep into the well of his Navy pilot experience, and introduced me first to Black Jack and then to Poker. I loved them both. The rules were simple to understand, and the games were fast. We alternated them and played for hours on end.

As the allure of card games began to wane, he brought out his change jar and a drinking glass and introduced his 5-year-old to a game called Quarters. There was no drinking involved (as far as I know, but I certainly wouldn’t hold it against him if he had) just a little skill, a lot of luck, and shrieks of laughter. It was around that time that Dad found a large jar of maraschino cherries way back in the cabinet. Their soft coolness felt good in my throat and I LOVED them. Then, in a moment of inspiration, Dad popped one of the stems into his mouth and within a few moments pulled it out tied into a perfect knot. I spent much of the next few days chewing cherry stems and working on my tying technique. From that point on, no matter what else we did, I was constantly chewing on or messing with a cherry stem.

It was years later, sometime college-ish, when bar bets and drinking games were a part of the “scene” that I understood what he’d actually done all those years before, and was truly grateful for it. The trick with cherry stems amuses my children, and they ask me to “do it again” whenever we get a cherry lime slush at Sonic. I don’t tell them of the money I won in college racing to tie one or betting over my ability to tie two at a time. While I do say that their Grandpa taught me the “Bouncing Quarter” game we play on rainy days; I don’t reveal that it was also one that I never lost at any of the frat parties I attended way back when.

I don’t know what possessed him to teach me poker and bar tricks when I was only 5, but I smile every time it comes to mind (and miss him terribly.) Parenting is like that – you pull stuff out of your hat and hope that it works, and that crazy cakes moment becomes the one that has your kid still smiling long after she has children of her own.