Step up and support our firefighters

            When my husband was transferred to Texas over 20 years ago, I was heartsick. My family lived in Louisiana, and I didn't want to move.

            The one saving grace was we'd found a home in a family-friendly, established neighborhood, Pecan Grove.

            Our first winter in Pecan Grove, my children were delighted when they heard the Pecan Grove Volunteer Fire truck coming down the street carrying Santa Claus. When he threw them candy and yelled out "Ho, ho, ho," they were in heaven.

            Our first summer, we saw signs at the station for something called Five Miles My Way. We discovered the event drew hundreds of people from all over Fort Bend County, and we signed up. For years, our boys competed in the bike contest and my husband ran the course.

            The best part of the Fourth of July in Pecan Grove was the fireworks display. That first year, neighbors told us to take a blanket and lawn chairs up to the golf course at dusk. When we saw the display the firefighters staged, we were amazed.

            Those fun events are courtesy of the PGVFD and that's in addition to their main directive, responding to 911 calls.

 

An Earned Prejudice

            I've been accused of being prejudiced when it comes to the PGVFD, and I'll admit that bias right up front. I'm one of their biggest fans, not only for what they've done for the neighborhood but for what they've done for me.

            They came to my house one evening when I detected a burnt electrical smell. My husband was out of town so I called and asked if someone could come by and check out the house.

            A team was at my house in less than 10 minutes and inspected the attic, the garage and every plug in the house.

            I remember seeing the PGVFD volunteers at called-in emergencies and giving "good neighbor" talks at the elementary schools. Some of my favorite memories are when I took my Cub Scouts to the station and firefighters let them hold the big fire hose and pretend to put out a fire.

            Most vividly, I remember the day when they pulled a young girl from a swimming pool and saved her life.

            The PGVFD provides many more services, and it would take double this column space to list them all. Less than 30 percent of the residents in Pecan Grove pay for this service. That's embarrassing.

            The reasons I heard when I lived there was they thought another department covered Pecan Grove which is incorrect. There were those who lived in the apartments and thought they didn't need to pay. You're part of the neighborhood, and you need to pay for the services you receive.

            There's the disgruntled whiners who don't want to pay an additional fee to the PGVFD because they already pay their taxes.

            Justify that statement when your house is on fire and nobody's there to put it out in time because you refused to pay $9 a month to the fire department.

            I spend more than that on a medium take-out pizza.

            If you live in an area where there's a volunteer fire department, pay up and don't let them get into the position the PGVFD finds itself – having to hold raffles and fund raisers to keep their doors open.

            It's time to step up. There are numerous donation sites, including one online at gofundme.com. You could also participate in the Five Miles My Way event on July 4. Applications and T-shirts are available at the PGVFD.

            You could also buy lemonade from some enterprising youngsters in Pecan Grove who, unlike adults, understand the importance of firefighters.

            Keep the PGVFD alive and support those who support you.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.

Busted on watching the soaps

            We turned the television on at 11 a.m. and there, just like they have been since I was in high school, was one of television’s superstar couples, Nikki and Victor from “The Young and The Restless.”

            Victor’s a little grayer, and Nikki looks like she’s had a little touch-up surgery, but there’s no mistaking the popularity of a couple that’s divorced, reconciled, fought and loved each other to the extent these two have over the past 30 years.

            “So what’s the problem this week?” I asked my mom who’s an avid Y&R fan.

            “We’re not sure who the father is of Nikki’s son,” she replied. Then she gave me the background of all of Nikki’s affairs and the possible blood lines of her children.

            “People who post to the message board have all kinds of ideas about what Victor’s up to and what Nikki’s next scheme will be,” my mom added.

            My youngest brother was in the room with us, and he tried to hide a smile behind his laptop.

It’s hard for him to understand the trials and tribulations of the people in Genoa City and why their shenanigans have kept viewers captivated for years.

The story of Nikki and Victor includes numerous divorces, amnesia, alcoholism, betrayal and murders. You know, all the run-of-the-mill tribulations every-day people face.

            “I’d never get involved in those soaps again,” I told my mother, opening my laptop to check my email. “All those ridiculous storylines that nobody could ever believe.”

            The first email was from my son, Stephen. He and I routinely compare notes on HBO’s popular mini-series “Game of Thrones.” I’d sent him an email after the season finale so we could compare our thoughts about what’s going to happen in the next season.

My main question was about who’d be riding the dragons when the series returned.

            He replied that the message boards were hot for Bran riding a dragon, but we’re not sure because Bran, who has the gift of second sight, will probably become a seer and bond with the heart tree.

Then there’s the fate of The Imp, who just finished killing his former lover and his father, and the evil Cersei Lannister who had three children fathered by her twin brother, Jamie. Don’t even get me started on the anguish Jon Snow is feeling after watching the love of his life, Ygritte, die right in front of his eyes.

            My brother asked what I was doing and I told him I was drafting a message to my son about the “Game of Throne’s” finale. My mom asked what I was talking about and I started filling her in on the show’s back story.

Just about the time I got to the part about Daneryn “Khaleesi” Targaryen being the mother of dragons and hatching them out of the fire, my brother looked at me over the top of his laptop screen.

            “So you want to give Mom a hard time about watching a soap opera when you’re discussing the fate of flying dragons?” he said, a smile on his face.

I started to say the show I was watching was much more highbrow than an ordinary soap, but clamped my mouth shut when I realized the big pile of hypocrisy I was stepping into.

            I’m just as guilty of being a soap opera addict as my mother, but secretly, I know I’m a cut above. After all, “Game of Thrones” is science fiction and the first word in that description is science and that’s about real stuff.

            Now let’s see what the message boards have to say about Jon Snow’s hair…

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.

Living on Hospital Time

Time crawls along slowly in a hospital. The hands of the big clock on the wall seem to reluctantly click from one number to the next.

Here, time is measured, not in minutes, but from when the nurse comes into the room and when she’ll return, when the doctor is scheduled to come in and when lunch will arrive.

            And in between those events is an almost unbearable period of waiting.

            I’m with my mom following her left knee replacement surgery, and she came through the procedure with flying colors. She’s spending the next week or so in in a rehabilitation center, and life here is different from life in the outside world.

Before 7 a.m., Mom’s in the gym where physical therapists guide patients through leg lifts and arm stretches. A stopwatch sits next to Mom and she has to lift her leg as many times as she can until the buzzer goes off.

Next to her, an elderly lady – her hair Lady Clairol Jet Black, her thin arms a difficult road map of purple skin and raised veins – sits erectly in a wheelchair and stares into space. 

            “It’s time for me to go back to my room,” she announces to no one in particular.

            A young therapist, her pony tail bouncing, tries to convince this woman the exercises are for her own good, but she shifts in her wheelchair and her mouth tightens.  

            “I’m not doing anything except going home,” the woman says and everyone in the room looks away, concentrating on their own exercises.

They know if they allow their minds to drift away, they might never come back. They know without the exercises, their bodies will go back to the state they were in before they came in for surgery, and they don’t want that, most of all my mom.

            At 81, she’s setting the bar high. She completes all her exercises and follows all the rules. She doesn’t complain, even when the physical therapy is tough for her. But for a woman used to living on her own, living on someone else’s time schedule has been difficult.

            Like many seniors, she’s developed her own routine. Dinner’s about 6 p.m. followed by whatever’s on TV or a community meeting. She goes to bed when she’s ready and gets up when her body tells her.

But not in the hospital. She’s on someone else’s schedule where the base structure is marking time and waiting.

In the evenings, we wait for the nurse to come and dispense night-time medication. We can hear the heavy cart beeping as it rolls down the hall and the creak of one of the heavy doors as the nurse enters a patient’s room.

            We know the nurse will be in that room for at least 20 minutes, so we chit chat until Mom dozes off or talk about the mindless shows on television that, because there’s no other game in town, hypnotize us.

            When the cart stops outside our door, we wait for the nurse to pull up the right chart and come in with the meds, to readjust the dressing on Mom’s knee and perform all the routine blood pressure and temperature checks.

            The nurse leaves and Mom is instantly asleep as she’s waited as long as she could wait for the nurse to come and, now that she’s finished, she can finally go to sleep.

            Mom will sleep until the next time the nurse comes in to check her vital signs. And then wait for the routine to begin again.

            And we’ll wait until it’s time for Mom to go home and she can go back to living on her own time.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald

James - The Superhero

            I looked up at the top of the slide and standing there, his hands on his hips, a bright red cape tied around his neck, was my 2-year-old grandson.

            "Who are you?" I called to him as I walked up.

            “Superman," he said, sliding down the slide and jumping up at the bottom, just like the Man of Steel does when he lands.  

            James flung his cape behind him and took off, on his way to foil a villain. As he ran across the playground, he kept looking behind him, making sure his cape was flapping in the wind. Every once in a while, he’d stop and pretend to karate chop the bad guys.  

            That scene took me back 25 years to when his father ran around with a cape pretending to be Batman or Superman, depending on his mood for the day. I could also picture my youngest brother who did the same when he was a preschooler, terrorizing all the mailboxes up and down our street with his super-human strength.

            Children love to pretend they have magical super powers, and when mom ties a cape around their shoulders, they transform into someone with incredible powers to rule the universe.

            Or at least the family dog or a much younger brother or sister.

 

Started Early

            In our family, the love affair with super heroes started when we were kids. My dad would often stop at the local 7-11 on his way home and pick up comics for all of us. I was an "Archie" comic lover while my brothers preferred "Silver Surfer" or "The Flash."

            At night, we’d pass around the comics and my brothers grudgingly read "Baby Louie" while I came to love their superhero comic books. I didn't care for the war comic books as they were too gruesome, but I loved the Marvel and DC heroes, especially Wonder Woman with her invisible plane.

            When the insecure teenager Peter Parker first appeared as Spiderman, I was hooked. I couldn’t identify with either Batman or Superman as they seemed invincible, even though Batman was still a human and Superman could be foiled by a chunk of green kryptonite.

            But Peter Parker was a superhero with acne, no money and no friends. He couldn't get a girlfriend, everybody hated Spiderman and Parker got pushed around all the time. I couldn’t get enough of those comics and, to this day, I’ll choose Spidey over Superman.

            When my boys were growing up, they too loved Spiderman until the X-Men came along. They had every action figure from the series – Gambit, Wolverine, Sabretooth and Beast – and they had constant wars with Batman and Superman.

            They also loved dressing up like their favorite superheroes, so we had a variety of capes – a red one they could wear to pretend to be Superman, a black one so they could be Batman and some generic capes they could wear just to be wearing a cape.

            They wore those capes everywhere we went. We were like the Justice League in the grocery store when they’d march down the produce aisle, their capes providing them with super-human power against the broccoli and eggplant.

            Watching my grandson run around the playground, his imagination providing him with bad guys to fight and foes to overcome, I felt as if I’d stepped back in time. I was so happy he’d inherited his father’s love of playing superhero and glad I was there to watch him protect the world.

            After all, isn’t that what all superheroes are supposed to do?

 This column originally appeared in The Fort Bend Herald.