Swallowing the Vitamin Pearl

Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,

just about the age of three, he was putting on a little show for his big sister Donna. They were in the living room of their home in Huntington Beach and it was night, and their parents were talking in the kitchen, just a scant fifteen feet away. Dougie was pretending to be sophisticated and he was showing his sister a pink pearl that had come off a broken necklace.

"And see," said Dougie, "we must take our daily vitamin pill!" He pretended to put the "pill" into his mouth, and Donna said: "You better not really put that in your mouth!"

Of course, he wasn't going to do that, he knew better, he'd been warned, everyone knew you didn't put dirty things in your mouth, it would just be silly for a big boy like himself to actually put a dirty pearl in your mouth, even if you were pretending the dirty pink pearl was a vitamin.

Somehow, while he was faking the drop (his sleight of hand was not as good as it would be in about ten years) he accidentally dropped the pearl into his mouth. It didn't feel bad, sloshing around in there, and just before he was going to spit it out, it washed down his throat.

At least part of the way down his throat. It lodged somewhere in the middle. Dougie put his hands on his throat and bugged his eyes at his sister.

She was having none of it. "You better stop that, I'm going to tell on you!"

When he began turning various shades of red and purple, Donna realized something was up, because she knew her little brother was not that good an actor. She called for Mama and Dada.

"Dougie's choking! He swallowed a marble! He swallowed a marble!"

And then Dada was there and had Dougie upside-down, holding the boy's ankles up near the ceiling in his left hand, while whacking the boy hard on boy on the back with his right hand, once, twice, and on the third whack the marble shot out of Dougie's mouth and ricocheted around the room like a pinball.

It felt good to breathe again. Unlike a lot of children, Dougie never again swallowed a foreign object (except for countless globs of gum, through the years). Many, many years later, even after hearing the tale of the vitamin-pearl near calamity, Papa's little boy Wolfy would perform almost the identical trick of swallowing a metal ball that was also a magnet, except Wolfy didn't get his stuck in this throat. Papa and Mama watched his diaper for several days, but they never again saw Wolfy's Vitamin-Magnet.

Larsen Family Snapshots

The Little Papa Stories

www.DouglasChristianLarsen.com

important - FIGHT THE FLU WITH HERBS - important

The Flu HQ - Fight the Flu Naturally

Unembellished: Although I'm neither adding to, nor taking away from these stories, it must be remembered that every recollection is recreated in the brain (the noodle works that way, it does not draw upon a static storehouse or upon concrete "memories," but like a mad scientist the brain bubbles up potions of chemicals and electric spark, and drawing from here and there amongst the neurons and dendrites, creates a new movie in the mind, every single time), and viewed through the lens of remembering me the way I was via the interpreter of who I am today. I am certainly as fallible today as I was then, whether two years of age, or four years, or forty-six years (and really, just as prone to tears!). But I capture these memories here, for my children, much the way my own Dada told me, and my sisters, stories of when he was a little boy. This way the memories go on, and never die.

- Douglas Christian Larsen