Life in a Sardine Can

When you’re a kid, you accept everything as being natural, simply because you’ve not lived long enough to realize there are other ways to live. At the time I broke my leg, when I was five, having three people (and I think we had a dog) live in a glorified sardine can--a 14-foot long trailer--was perfectly natural. It was just, well, what was. My mom cooked on a small kerosene stove with a cannister of fuel which had a hand pump not unlike a bicycle tire pump. She'd have to pump it vigorously several times before she could light the stove. To this day I can close my eyes and smell the strong odor of kerosene and hear the soft "pffftt" as the stove lit.

When I was released from the hospital I was in a full body cast from just below my shoulders down to my right knee and all the way down my left leg and foot. There was a bar between my legs at the knee to keep my thighs immobile. I quite literally could barely move. And this was in the heat of summer. Mom used keep knives in the icebox, which she would use, when they were cold, to slide down between my cast and my chest and back to try to cool me off.

For the next 62 years, I never slept on my back again.

It of course did not even occur to me at the time what my parents had to have gone through for the several weeks that they were in fact trapped in a that sardine can with an immobile five year old boy. I never thanked them for everything they sacrificed for me. It would never have occurred to me that I should. That's what parents are for.

I remember that I held a grudge against them for several years after they one time found it necessary to “rob” my piggy bank because they simply did not have enough money for something they needed—probably for me—and did not have enough themselves.. Looking back on it now, I am indescribably ashamed of myself for my selfishness. But I was a child, and I take refuge in the fact that I couldn’t have been expected to know any better.

Oh, yes…and the evening of the day I had gone back to the hospital to have my cast removed…it was Halloween Eve, 1938, the night of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast…I had to be rushed back to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy.

I’d never thought of the reason, until now, why, after coming home yet again, my Grandpa Margason drove down in what was then the equivalent of a station wagon to get me and take me back with him to Rockford, where I was deposited at Aunt Thyra’s and Uncle Buck’s for the period of my recovery. I think I know the reason, now: my poor parents simply couldn’t handle any more at the moment.

Surely there has to be a special place in heaven, if there is a heaven, for parents. If there is, my folks are there. And even if there is not the vast expanse of a heaven, they will always live in the sardine can which is my heart.

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