One of the great perks of being the septuagenarian today is that I get to be that guy who harps on and on ad nauseum about the horrors of growing up way back there in the 1940s and 50s…
However, it requires being able to walk a fine line: teetering on the tightrope between being seen as an interesting and entertaining informer (like a Ted Talk guy), and unwittingly coming across as a throwback to the violent caveman days (especially to you of the much younger and more recent generations). In fact, I could be in grave danger of being judged pariah material in these political correctness years. Because let’s face it, a lot of aspects of life in “the good old days” can’t help but be perceived as behaviors shamefully barbaric by today’s standards. I mean, (especially speaking as a male), we really were (shudder) the sexist, wolf-whistling, cancer-stick smoking, firetruck-and-ambulance-chasing, no seatbelt kids of the mid-twentieth century.
And what do I have to offer in the way of a defense? Only this pathetic little bouquet of pathetic, wet-limp-noodle, looking-down-at-our-toes-in-shame alibis. Hey you know, we were just kids—not grown-ups! It wasn’t our fault! We didn’t make the rules. It was the times, you dig? And like… when in Rome, daddy-O, do as the Romans do, right? OK, ya jus’… ya jus’ hadda be there, man!
Perhaps it would be a great idea if, before you read my following, autobiographical poem, you’d try looking objectively back on my decades as one might look upon an ancient anthropology museum diorama. And don’t you worry, I do feel dutifully guilty about having been alive during such a Neanderthal past. Hell, I’m still looking back and apologizing for the hip-hugging bell-bottoms and leisure suits of the disco 70s too. But it’s easy to play armchair quarterback after the game is over. Nevertheless, the times just are what they are, and were what they were.
Anyway, moving right along… and without further ado, allow me share with you this little autobiographical piece of creative writing I penned back around 2001.
rhymes with ‘euphoric’
once upon a time
way back there in the 50’s…
the very minute we started teething
the nursery crib became
baby’s first opium den
mom still marvels
how i’d stop crying & drop right off to sleep
just like that!
after she’d massaged a dollop of her favorite
over-the-counter opiate
into the tender & swollen teething sores of my
poor little five-month-old
gummy-gum-gums
paregoric:
the mom’s best friend
a product that really worked for once—
& my brain
(no dummy, even as early as that)
was as eager to learn as any pavlovian dog
& the old messages started flashing in & among
the axons & dendrites:
brain to gums, brain to gums, come in please
roger, brain, this is gums, go ahead
10-4 gums, that last dose was a beaut.
whatever you do, just keep’em coming. you copy?
roger wilco that, brain. Over & out…
yes, message received:
laugh & the world laughs with you
cry & you cry & get stoned
i try to imagine my cunning little self
in my powder-blue security blanket…
jonesing for my next fix—
bet i did a lot of gratuitous ‘crying’…
wonder if i snored like a banshee
as a swaddled little babe coked to the gills…
hell, i’d have cut excess teeth if i’d known how
True story, I swear. An odd one for sure unless, like me, you were born in 1946 into a generation of “considered-very-respectful-moms-and-dads” who happened to believe in the application of that magic, over-the-counter, no-prescription-required opiate known as Paregoric (yeah, think about what you’ve learned about today’s oxycodone) to the sore gums of toddlers in the throes of teething.
It was the conventional thing to do then, and the humane thing to do, right? I mean, it allowed the child to have a much needed respite from the constant pain, didn’t it. And what parent wouldn’t want that? The baby would stop yowling almost immediately. And the big added plus was: it usually knocked the little twerp right off to sleep in some playpen la-la land. And again, what parents don’t love it when their beautiful baby takes a needed nap, especially one they’ll blissfully be very unlikely to wake up from for perhaps an hour or two?
And yet… it was an opiate. Just think: a pre-rugrat, and I was on the receiving end! Who remembers how often?
Take a look at these two illustrations (with a thumb and finger pinch you can zoom in). Read the labels if you dare. These are the same labels our parents gave the cursory glance at when innocently hauling the little bottle out of the medicine cabinet, from its place among the Vicks Vaporub, mercurochrome, aspirin, and the other wonder drugs of the decade. Check the suggested ages. Check the dosages. How powerful were those doses?
Well, I have a memory of six hyperactive little Connecticut cousins of mine arriving in the dead of night after their long, cramped ride up here to Maine for a week-long visit. I was about nine. They ranged from one to eight and were wound tight as drums after being packed like sardines in their station wagon for so long. A wild and joyous scene immediately ensued, with yelling and laughing and wrestling and telling stories. But 45 minutes later their mom lined them up like little soldiers in a row, had each step forward one by one, and spooned (eye-droppered for the baby) Paregoric into each dutifully opened mouth. Fifteen minutes later there was a dead silence. Every last one of them had fallen sound asleep and was being carried off and away to bed.
And… has it affected me? Well, quite obviously it did at the time I was dosed. I mean I was (to borrow the title of one of my Bob Dylan albums) “Knocked Out Loaded.” Yes, but that was the immediate effect. Did it have a long-term effect on my life? My later life?
Well, first of all, I think we’ll all agree that it’s unreasonable to give an opiate to a 6-month old baby, and it’s hard to imagine there would be no long-term changes. Of course we didn’t have Google (let alone computers). If we had, we might have been interested in this assessment from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: “The risk of addiction to opium smoking appears to be somewhat less than to parenteral use of heroin, but appreciably greater than to alcohol. Even in countries where its use is traditional, opium smoking carries substantial risks of harm to health and social functioning…“ And speaking of alcohol by the way, when I related the story of my 1950s infantile brushes with Paregoric to my high school English classes of the 1970s, they confessed to me that many of their parents had dipped the tip of a rag into a glass of whiskey and allowed them to chew on it for gums relief. But I digress.
Who can say what long-term effects this practice has had on my life? I believe that I can argue very convincingly that there have been some direct long-term effects. But how much of that was brought on by DNA? Nature or nurture?
Let me say this, though: my little poem, “Rhymed with ‘Euphoric,’” is the one I chose to be the introductory piece in the last of five poetry chapbooks:
As a whole, the book pretty much stunk. But there are a few winners within, in my opinion. More about this later perhaps, perhaps not.
NEARING THE END OF THE LINE 