The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson

I figured that if a little handful of matches was that much fun, a big handful would be a lot more fun. My second handful was really full.

This time I went out in the sand outside the yard and stood up a row of matches in the sand with their tops up and close enough together that the breeze would blow the flame from match to match. Then I lighted the match on the up-wind end of the row. It worked perfectly and it was fun watching the flame leap from match to match all the way to the far end.

I reasoned that too many missing matches would cause grown-ups to become curious and begin asking questions. And since they knew that I had gone to Grandma's that day, I would be the first one they would question. So I limited my match pleasure to three handfuls and then went home.

I still don't know why I was sent to Grandma's that day, but I remember I was glad I went. I came back with a deep, dark secret of my own and a pleasurable memory to add to my storehouse.

In our youth, if any of us kids complained of feeling a little under the weather, we were given a "scientific" medical examination at bed time. We had to stick out our tongue for our parents to look at. If there was the least bit of white coating on the tongue, it meant we must take a calomel tablet and go to bed.

I'm not sure I am spelling "calomel" correctly because I failed to find the word in my small dictionary. And I sort of doubt that our family doctor knew how to spell it. But it's just as well. I have yet to find a doctor who can write so anyone can read what he wrote anyway.

But anyhow, that was the science of medicine in our family—if the tongue is coated, take a pretty little pink tablet and wash it down with a glass of water.

I hated even the thought of taking one. The slightest taste of one gagged me. To prevent vomiting in the kitchen, I would ask Mama if I could go out on the porch and take mine.

Now, I knew I wasn't apt to vomit on the kitchen floor, but Mama didn't know it. Another thing she didn't know was that there was a knothole in the porch floor, under which, as years went by, a small mound of pink tablets grew into a large mound.

They never caught me putting the tablets through the hole because it was always dark. No one ever took calomel in the daytime, unless he had nothing else to do but sit around and wait for a call to the bathroom, which was way out back in the cold—always cold. Not one of us ever had a coated tongue in the summertime.