Harold Marcum
P.O. Box 286
Kermit, West Virginia, 25674
Patricia King
755 Glen View Drive
Nashville, Tennessee 37206
Saturday, 17 March 2018
World Wide Folklore:
I stumbled upon a way to tell the scanner not to divide a page into a bunch of separate files. I really, really miss programs that came with manuals. Armed with that information, I scanned the letters without much fuss and the robin is backed up at http://wlweather.net/LETTERS/FOLKLORE/JunINDEX.HTM
Health has been pretty much routine here, though our bodies require a lot more maintenance than they used to. I had a cancer taken off my forehead in March, which grounded me until it had healed enough that I could wear a helmet, and Dave has two fresh scars on his scalp — less inconvenient, but they hurt a lot more than mine did. I'm very glad that I didn't grow up in Texas!
I don't recall any folklore from my native culture; perhaps it was by-kill when they stamped out my native dialect. We did have the usual tales childen told each other, such as never use a pin to pick out a splinter because brass will give you blood poisoning. I guess that story had a basis in fact: to get a needle, you'd have to ask your mother, and she would use antiseptic.
Which puts me in mind of a real-world tip: when a splinter just won't come out, wash the dishes with laundry detergent and a slug of bleach, or walk around with your finger in a shot glass of straight bleach for a while. (Stop if it stings!) Sodium hypochlorite disolves dead skin, and that usually exposes the splinter.
I'm sterile. By "our children" I meant the ones I see — and don't see — around town. Traffic is dangerously congested around every school in the morning and when it lets out because every child is delivered and picked up by a parent.
When I was a freshman in high school, I walked. I particularly liked walking through a drive-in church where a flock of quail lived. I never noticed what denomination. (A likely candidate that DuckDuckGo turned up is Presbyterian. The article says that drive-in churches started by using drive-in theaters as an emergency measure during the building shortage after WWII, and continued because Florida has a lot of church- goers who use wheelchairs and walkers.)
I rode my bike to the school when it was closed once, probably just to see whether it was practical, and had to pry my white knuckles off the handlebars when I got there — I don't remember going home, just that awful moment in the school parking lot. That was the last time I rode on a street until I took Effective Cycling lessons about twenty years later.
When I was in junior high in Florida, I rode the bus for an hour, and there were kids on the bus who had gotten on an hour before I did. The nastiest part was that the bus didn't take us to the junior high school, but to the high school, and we had to wait for another bus. We weren't allowed to go inside any building no matter how hard it was raining, and no shelter was provided. A few guys in suits counted us as we got off the bus one day, and were shocked and offended, but othing was ever done about the situation.
Mrs. David E. Beeson