Three’s Company
In a hospital near Washington, DC, Dad swore he saw the doctors of slapstick, The Three Stooges, at the foot of his bed doing their schtick.
“Am I dreaming?”
He was probably twelve years old. Both of my older brothers called to verify the vital details of his story. 1941-1943 is the likely time frame.
The Stooges, already famous from numerous film appearances, had been touring a children's ward where Dad had landed, 400 miles from Watsontown, PA.
He had suffered a playground injury when a swing (either its seat or a pole) collided with his shin bone.
This was no Stooge slapstick or YouTube fail but a painful mishap that lead to osteomyelitis (infection of the bone) and the serious possibility of losing his leg.
I can only imagine the pins-and-needles my grandparents were sitting on.
Laughter is good medicine, though, especially for a kid in the 1940s getting a command performance from the Kevin Hart of the day. Times three!
Misty, Water-Colored Memories
The line between historical occurrence and personal memory is a no-man’s land, an ever-mystifying DMZ of facts, impressions, and imagination.
The memories my two brothers, Jim and Dave, share with me are from Dad’s recollections, making “certainty” less elusive. We’re happy to work with “pretty-sure-ity.” Here’s what we’ve got:
He suffered a pretty nasty injury when he was young that defied healing, prompting a hospital visit.
He nearly lost his leg below the knee.
Penicillin was on the eve of its wide-spread use as an infection killer. Hence . . .
Dad said the maggots tickled. I’ve always imagined the nurses gingerly lowering those tiny goop slurpers into his stubborn wound with tweezers. What a party they must’ve had. The maggots, not the nurses.
I remember Dad’s shin bone was always visible beneath a thin, taut layer of skin. He’d invite us to run our fingers across its smooth expanse, which I did more than once. He didn’t mind; the nerves were gone.
Neither he nor any of us were ashamed of his gnarly leg. In fact, we thought it was kinda cool, accompanied as it was by a great story.
One of Dave’s memories is not shared by his younger brethren:
He recalls Dad saying that the healing waters of Newboro Lake in Ontario are what finally healed his leg. Those waters were magnificent, but really?
Compared to the medical maggot explanation, that smells fishy to me.
A Marked Man
I was strangely proud of Dad’s war wound. It announced that he made it through a bad childhood scrape and could laugh to tell the tale.
His accident on the playground, though, was no prat fall. It hurt, and for a long time. It defined his character in ways he probably didn’t reflect on.
In his own way, Dartt Miller Becker was thoughtful, even-keeled, and very much a jolly soul. He became a likable town character in the best sense.
Never one to say "I love you" or indulge his feelings, Dad was nonetheless a contented man with a hearty laugh and, amazingly, an unassailable sense of humor about most things, mostly himself.
When our mother began to struggle noticeably with panic disorder, he tenaciously stuck with her. His bedside manner was less than tender, but he learned to accommodate Mom in a time when mental illness was undiscovered, dismissed, or judged.
Her disability was something he wasn’t equipped to deal with. Or was he?
Perhaps it all began with his appointment with pain as a boy, an initiation that softened him toward the hurting.
And those three buffoons at his bedside?
Larry Fine and the Howard brothers, Mo & Curly, certainly knew a thing or two about the absurdity of evil and what it looked like to apply the salve of laughter to generations of Jewish pain.
The Three Stooges showed us all that a few tweaks of the nose or a board across the back of the cranium or some double-eye pokes won’t hurt you . . . too much.
They might be just what the doctor ordered.
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