When a Southern Woman Rambles... by L. Avery Brown (reading list .txt) 📖

So, I Stapled My Thumbs Together

It was a sunny Sunday morning back in the summer of ’78 and my family and I were all dressed in our summery Sunday finest and had piled into our giant green Ford land yacht that I like to refer to fondly as the USS Williams all so we could make the five mile trip to our church. I remember I had on my sandals and a pretty little sundress with polka dots on it. My brother and sister climbed into the backseat and I went to sit in my spot in the front only there was a pile of papers and stapler where I usually sat. 

 

***

 

But wait…before I go any farther…let me bend your ear and tell you about how a typical trip to church went for the Williams clan. Now this was long before the notion of using seatbelts was popular. Cars did have them, only back then they weren’t much more than a lap belt that looked an awful lot like a modern day airplane seatbelt. Our ‘safety’ lap belts usually wound up getting squished down between the cushions to keep them out of the way. Needless to say, I didn’t wear a seatbelt as a kid. 

 

Likewise, it was also a couple of decades before any sort of laws requiring children under 60 pounds to be secured in a car or booster seat in the backseat of a vehicle for their safety. So guess where I sat the vast majority of the time? That’s right…my spot was in the front seat between my mama and daddy. (You know, it’s amazing as many people from the years before all those nifty safety gadgets and laws survived to adulthood)

 

As I said, my spot was in the front seat…unless my parents grew tired of listening to my siblings bickering from the backseat. When that happened my parents would make me sit between them. I think they thought I would somehow be able to stop their teenage tendency to poke one another in the leg or the arm like it was an Olympic sport and I was the referee. 

 

Only I was very tiny at 8…I’m talking I was really teeny tiny so putting me in the backseat never really worked out too well because my brother and sister would just start smacking each other on the shoulder or the back of the head. And then my parents would get mad because somehow it always wound up that I would eventually be on the receiving end of a poke/slap that didn’t meet its intended mark. Then I’d start crying and my mother, who could whip her head around at like a whirlwind, would ‘assume the angry mother look’ while my father simultaneously grabbed the rearview mirror and did his famous big-eyed ‘I am watching you’ stare.

 

Typically ‘the double parental stare down’ worked to get my siblings cease and desist their behavior…at least for a couple of minutes. But then one of them would say something stupid like, “I didn’t start it.” To wit my mother would reply, “I don’t care who started it but I promise you I will go back that and finish it so you two had best keep your mouths shut and your hands to yourself.” Lucky for them my mama never had to ‘finish it’ because it was usually around that time when we’d pull into the church parking lot.

 

*I know I said this was a tale of stapled thumbs and it is, I promise. But first, let me describe a typical Sunday at our church.*

 

Once we arrived and parked beneath one of the giant oak trees, we’d make our way out of our land yacht and proceed into the church so we could be filled with the Holy Spirit. Although when you’re 8 years old, it’s pretty hard to be motivated by anything that requires a lengthy amount of time wherein one has to not only remain seated but also must be quiet, too. Yes, that is quite difficult indeed. For me, it was gadzoodles harder than it was for most kids because I was a talker…always have been…always will be (as I’m sure you can probably tell). And considering I was diagnosed as an adult with ADHD it puts my fidgetiness in a whole new light.

 

Now just as there was a seating arrangement in our car, the Williams family also had a particular way we sat in our pews. We always tried to sit in the same set of pews. They were right in the middle where these long support columns came down and divided the pew in half.

 

That way my Mama could sit on the end of the pew closest to the aisle. My sister sat beside her. My Daddy sat beside her. I sat beside my Daddy. And my brother, well he got to sit next to the column. That way there was a good buffer zone between my brother and sister (Daddy and myself) and if anyone wanted to get up during the service he or she had better have had a handwritten note from Jesus himself because there was no way my Mama was about to let either one of my two siblings go wandering around the church unattended. 

 

I must say I loved sitting beside my father. Whenever we’d open up our Bibles to read the congregational selection, he’d whisper what the passage was about to me in terms I could understand because I never quite understood the way our minister would try to explain it. Then we’d sing some hymns. 

 

To me, singing hymns was the best part of our services because my Daddy would let me stand on the pew and share his hymnal with him. The funny thing is, I don’t think my father ever actually looked at the words to any of the hundreds of songs in that book…and yet, he seemed to know the tune and words (all the words to every verse) like he’d written them himself. He had a smooth baritone voice and sometimes, when I was tired, he’d hold me instead of the hymnal and I’d lay my head on his chest and listen to the way his voice resonated in my ears. 

 

The one song my father could never sing at church…not because he didn’t know it…he did…was ‘Amazing Grace’. It always got him choked up. I didn’t understand why at the time but later, when I was old enough to put things together, it dawned on me that when I was 8 years old, my father was going through cancer treatment and I think the words moved him in a way a child simply could not understand.

 

Once we’d sung a few hymns, our pastor would start in on one of his ‘reach deep into your soul and shake some sense into ya’ sort of sermons he liked to use at least once a month and that was when my Daddy and I would play games like tic-tac-toe, dots, and hangman on our church bulletins or on the offering envelopes that were in the little holders on the backs of the pews with the always freshly sharpened pencils that reminded me of when we’d go play putt-putt at the beach.

 

But one can only play so many rounds of tic-tac-toe before it gets a bit boring and drawing out all the little dots just to play the game took a good deal of time. Likewise, one can only come up with so many simple phrases for hangman before the church bulletin wound up looking like scratching post for wayward pencils. 

 

*If you’ve made it this far in the story, I’m sure you’re starting to get antsy wondering when the stapled thumbs are going to be mentioned. And it’s coming…I swear.* 

 

But first let me say that there were lots of times when my father and I would also play ‘thumb war’. (See, there are the thumbs! And soon all will be revealed.) Surely you’ve played the game before. You clasp your hands like you’re going to shake and then you say “One, two, three, four…I declare thumb war” after which you hold up your thumbs and try to catch and hold down your opponent’s thumb for 5 seconds.

 

Only since we were in church we had to play it very quietly and I couldn’t stand up or get too wiggly. That’s what made it so much fun for me because it was such a challenge. Oddly enough, my Daddy had these long thumbs but it seemed like I won just enough times to not get frustrated that I wasn’t winning all the time. Smart man, that Daddy of mine.

 

***

 

Finally…the heart of this little yarn

 

Now on this particular Sunday back in ’78 as I mentioned at the beginning of the story, I climbed into the car and found some papers and a stapler where I had to sit. I put the papers on my dotted sundress covered lap and placed the stapler on top of the papers. So far…so good. But then, about half way into our usual Sunday trip to church as my mother was telling my brother and sister to ‘knock it off’ and my father tuned the radio knob to a local station that played old time gospel music on Sunday from 6AM to 3PM, I picked up the stapler and stared at it. 

 

Then I squished it together a couple of times and watched as the bent staples came flying out of the mouth of the device. But then, for some reason, they stopped coming out and I wondered why. (Maybe it was empty. I opened up the top and saw there were plenty of staples inside the thing. Nope not empty!) I closed it back again and tried squishing the stapler together once more to see if that would release the jam. It didn’t.

 

I was not about to be bested by a silly stapler after all, I was 8 years old. So I looked really closely at the mouth of the device and saw that the staples had gotten jammed up inside of the thing. Then I proceeded to tug out about 7 squished staples that gotten stuck. (Hey, I was in the Gifted and Talented program) Once it was cleared, I squeezed the thing together again and it was working again. Victory! 

 

But then I’m not sure what motivated me to do the next thing because as soon as I did it, I instantly realized that perhaps it was not one of my wiser 8 year old decisions. You see, for some reason, I’d stuck both my thumbs beneath the stapler head and started playing with it as if it had ‘eaten’ my thumbs. I remember having a Wonder Woman moment and imagining that the stapler was some sort of dastardly trap I had to work my way out of or else the world was going to explode or something equally horrible. So then I started to fight with the stapler using my Wonder Woman powers. I held it in my hands with my thumbs stuck beneath the ‘mouth’ as I fought it and then…for some really stupid reason…I squeezed the stapler---HARD. (Needless to say, it was not one of my more ‘Gifted OR Talented’ moments)

 

If I think about it, I can still feel the blast of pain as it shot through my thumbs and made its way from my thumbs to my hands then to my mouth because in an instant I let out a blood curdling scream. My father slammed on the brakes…which wasn’t a good thing for me. Why?

 

Because I inadvertently squeezed the stapler back down on my thumbs as my mother did that thing with her arm where she whips it out at lightning speed and threw me back against the seat to keep from going forward into