A Memory from Childhood
My memories begin in the summer of my fifth birthday. An early memory has me sitting on my maternal grandfather’s knee in the backyard of his home. The house is on one of the bigger lots in an aging residential neighborhood. It is evening in late summer or early fall. Overhead are the limbs of Malus domestica, the fruit of which, golden delicious apples, is scattered on the ground around us. The tree is a mature monster, 20 feet high with a massive crown. The limbs are laden with ripening apples causing boughs to bend earthward. This is a moment of repose for my grandfather who is 75 years old and takes a bus roundtrip to work five days a week. He is, in the inimitable words of Ambrose Bierce, a prestidigitator, who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket. He is a dentist. Also, very much of an agriculturalist, if that means one who, by choice, loves and works the land. A puffed-up way to say a farmer at heart. To the left and behind where we sit, in the southeast corner of the lot is a chicken house. The chicken house holds a rooster and a dozen or more hens. Abutting the west side of the chicken house is a large vegetable garden surrounded on all four sides by a wooden rust colored picket fence. The garden plot has been plowed to reveal rich, black loam. The kind of soil from which anything can grow. There are pockmarks in straight rows, a sign of the vegetables grown there, carrots, corn, and snapping beans but also uniquely midwestern vegetables like kohlrabi, rutabaga, okra and turnips. Compost molders in a corner of the garden. A smaller parcel of land west of the vegetable garden and outside the fence is planted with flowers that are perennials, mostly bearded iris. My grandfather’s morning routine is to wake when the rooster crows, work two hours in the garden, eat, bathe and leave for his dental office. He is an above knee amputee. At the age of 19 years, his right leg was crushed in a work-related train accident, then amputated on a kitchen table sans anesthesia. That year was 1904.
In my memory, my grandfather sits on a dark green lawn chair. The arms and legs of the chair are fashioned from a single piece of curved steel tubing. The seat consists of steel molded in the shape one’s buttocks would make if one were to sit naked in wet sand. The seatback has the appearance of an unbroken scallop shell like one commonly found on the beach but much larger. If the chair sounds uncomfortable, it was not. The chief disadvantage of the chair was that it was difficult to store when not in use. Since it was made from a small number of steel components riveted together, the chair could not be folded or compressed. In late fall and winter, the chair disappeared into a storage space located beneath the master bedroom of the house.
Sitting where I was, if I turned my head to the right, I could see the yellowish wooden door that accessed the storage area. Entering the enclosure, I would later learn, was like spelunking. The bottom or floor of the enclosure was cool to the touch, hard-packed, bare earth. There was no interior lighting. A child could stand upright on the floor and their head would not touch the ceiling. A fully grown adult would have to walk in a crouch. The length and width of the space was equal to the floor of the master bedroom above it. Slick, damp roots protruded from the walls or rose from the ground. Spider webs abounded. Farm implements, a sickle, a scythe, pieces of a broken wooden plow were strewn about. Crates and boxes took on a menacing appearance in the shadow-light. There was the apprehension that a misstep could awaken a hibernating bear or a brominating reptile, and not a little salamander or skink, but a ravenous alligator or python. Had my grandparent’s house been a stop on the underground railroad, one could imagine fugitive slaves hiding in the storage space by day and exiting at night to hurry north.
Again, in my memory, my grandfather, unperturbed, sits in the chair and relaxes. He wears dark pants upheld by suspenders that pass over a white shirt. Neither pant nor shirt is particularly fancy. These are not his finest clothes. It is possible he has changed into them after work. As a five-year-old child, I am unable to distinguish work attire from casual clothes. What do I care about clothes? I am content to sit on my grandfather’s lap. He holds a pocketknife with an open blade in his right hand. With his left hand he reaches down and scoops an apple off the ground. He is able to do this without rising from the chair because apples lay all around us. The apple he chooses is imperfect as are most of the apples. It has a circular, black, blemish on its skin from a tiny invertebrate that has invaded the pulp. Such an apple is said to be wormy, or worm eaten. This conjures the correct image but fails accuracy. Blemishes on the skin of the apple and the tracts in the pulp are caused by the larval, caterpillar stage of the codling moth. The moth deposits tiny eggs on the surface of the fruit. Once hatched, the larva burrows beneath the skin of the apple and grows as it eats its way toward the core. When the time is right, the caterpillar, having grown to a centimeter in length and a millimeter or two in width, exits the apple to form a cocoon. Later, it will emerge from the cocoon as a moth. My grandfather being familiar with the pest has come prepared. He carves away the soiled portion of the apple and wipes the knife blade on a handkerchief that he takes from his pocket. After satisfying himself that the remnant of the apple is unsullied, he slices off a piece and hands it to me. I pop it in my mouth. The apple is crisp and sour in a pleasing way. An early testimony to what will come to be called organic farming. My grandfather slices a piece of apple for himself and eats it. We alternate eating slices of the apple until the remnant has been consumed. The cycle repeats with other apples until we have eaten our fill.
This would be the last summer my grandfather and I sat together beneath the apple tree. On a winter morning six months later, he died in his sleep. As the household erupted in chaos, I was hustled on to the living room couch. At the time, there was an older woman renting an upstairs apartment. She sat with me on the couch, comforting me, as I watched the body of my grandfather being carried away on a stretcher. He died from a heart attack. We did not call it that. In the precise, dispassionate way of my family, we called it coronary artery thrombosis. I was probably the only five-year-old on the planet to know the meaning of coronary artery thrombosis.
Bruce Harris MD FACS is a retired General Surgeon who practiced in North Carolina. Dr. Harris earned a BS in Physics at Harvey Mudd College in 1977, and is a graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine in 1981. He enjoys running, reading, writing, snowboarding, and rafting.
