Tag: Colorado

Ray E. Barber

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In March or April of 1979 or 1980

My younger brother, who was little
And I, who was not,
Found an attaché case
Alone
In the hotel lounge
Of the ski lodge in Winter Park, Colorado.
It was a large square case
Black, with gold letters by the handle:
RAY E. BARBER
I don’t know who read it, or who said it out loud, but
We chanted all around the room
RAY E. BARBER
RAY E. BARBER
RAY E. BARBER
We marched out chanting
RAY E. BARBER
RAY E. BARBER
RAY E. BARBER
We chanted in the elevator
RAY E. BARBER
RAY E. BARBER
RAY E. BARBER
We paraded down the hall back to our room
RAY E. BARBER
RAY E. BARBER
RAY E. BARBER
Today my mother works at
Washington University and she says there is a facilities manager there whose name is
RAY E. BARBER
She says he is from Colorado.
Have you met my
Younger brother?
He teaches second grade.  


This was written about ten years ago. It does not include what may have been the best part of the story, which was that after we stopped, a group of little kids we did not know picked up the chant, and were heard echoing in the halls of the hotel for days afterward: Ray E. Barber, Ray E. Barber, Ray E. Barber

How I learned to Ski

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I was very young when I first learned to ski, probably only 5 or 6. I was largely governed by fear as a child, and have specific memories of being afraid of my parents, sports, strangers, crows, skeletons, other children, and being made fun of by other children. I was certainly afraid of going fast, and did not learn to ride a bicycle until I visited my cousin (who was a year younger and riding without training wheels) and was humiliated into learning to ride one.

My father’s ingenious idea was to take me out on the bunny hill with the movie camera. Back in the 60s, having a Super-8 movie film camera meant you could make soundless three-minute movies of birthday parties, boys throwing footballs and family members waving at the camera. If other families made different movies, I’ve never seen them. Later, after sending off the film for developing, the family could set up the movie projector and screen, bring some straight-backed chairs from the dining room into the living room, and gather all the folks for a movie. Silent home movies have the added advantage of allowing everyone to shout out whatever they want, and best of all, can be shown backwards after being shown forwards. Many a shot in our family’s movies was set up just to be extra funny when shown backwards.

So out on that beginner slope at Breckenridge, my dad shot film all afternoon, while I snow-plowed and linked my turns, hamming it up for posterity. Of course, only the first 10 seconds of my skiing were preserved on film, but I was only a small child and failed to realize how short those movies were. Nevermind. I learned to ski, and I liked it, and I didn’t cry the whole afternoon, probably.

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Chickenpox

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When I was growing up, in suburban St. Louis in the 1970s, my parents took us all skiing in Colorado at least one or two weeks every year.  Typically, we would drive there in our Chevy van, which was royal blue, and had the innovative sliding door on one side, and had two rows of benches and a spacious back area. Whenever possible, I would chose the way-back, because it was here that a small child could sprawl out with her toys and play uninterrupted except for potty breaks for a 900 mile, 15 hour drive. It is a straight shot on I-70, right across the length of Kansas, and many years my father drove the whole way without stopping for more than gas or food.  My father loved to drive.

One winter, we were making our annual trip to Breckenridge, just on the heels of my younger brother recovering from the chickenpox. Chickenpox used to be a pretty common contagious virus, and predictably, one could expect an exposed child to come down with a case 10 to 21 days later. The new patient is pretty contagious for a couple of days before showing any symptoms, which are the itchy red spots all over the body. The older someone gets, the worse their case of chickenpox will be, it is said. It was not unusual in the days before the vaccine for parents to take a child with a brand new case and organize a play-date with children who had not yet caught it, essentially to expose the unexposed and get it over with.
I was allowed to pack all of my new Christmas presents for this trip, which was one of the most memorable things about the trip. Other memorable things I recall are the game of strip poker the parents played (which involved taking a lap around the cabin outside in the snow), how my 16-year-old uncle contracted a whopping case of chickenpox, but missed barely a day of skiing by wearing a knitted face mask on the slopes, and how I never caught them.
When my two older children were small, the chickenpox vaccine was a pretty new thing. Their pediatrician took the time to tell me about it before it was recommended for all children. I mentioned that while I remember being around other children with chickenpox as a child, I don’t remember ever having it. The pediatrician told me to get tested to see if I was immune, because if I wasn’t, I was the perfect person for the vaccine.
As it turned out, I had no immunity to chickenpox, and was given a full course of the vaccine, which is two shots about 4 weeks apart. Months later, one of my boys contracted a case when I was just a few months pregnant. Since I had older children, I did not spend tons of time pouring over the requisite “How-To-Be-Pregnant” books that time around, but I had retained enough from my first pregnancy to remember that chickenpox was one of a long list of things you were not supposed to catch when you were pregnant. Later, I greeted the pediatrician for the hero that she was. She shrugged.
A willingness to sit and have a conversation with me about family history, or sports, or calculus is, to me, a prerequisite for being a good doctor.  Recently, my family practice doctor retired. He wrote prescriptions for things like “TLC,” and took the time to talk about stuff in general, and not just health. He always had a joke for me, and once told me the one about the sad mushroom who walked into a bar.