Sally Breslin: My Life

Monday, August 19, 2024

I BEGGED RHODA TO LIVE!

I swear that Kay, one of my neighbors (and by “neighbor” I mean she lives about a half-mile away) could grow coconut trees in her yard, she has such a green thumb. But if a green thumb means someone is good at growing things, then I must have a brown one, because everything I try to grow eventually turns that color.

Kay has, among other impressive plant life, these huge, flowering bushes in her yard. Every spring, they have so many gorgeous blooms on them, they can be seen from the farthest end of the road. One day, as I was walking my dog by her house and spotted her out in the yard, I asked her what they were. She said rhododendrons.

I knew I’d never be able to remember rhododendrons by the time I walked back home, so I did what I usually do when I want to remember something – I used word association. The first thing that popped into my mind was actress Valerie Harper. Why? Because she played a character named Rhoda on TV for years, and I figured if I could remember Rhoda, I could remember rhododendrons.

Although I have a long history of killing plants, often just by looking at them, I became obsessed with having a rhododendron bush/shrub on my front lawn. As luck would have it, I was in the garden department at Walmart one day and there was a huge sale on bushes and shrubs.

“Do you have any of those Valerie Harper shrubs?” I asked the clerk.

He looked at me as if I were speaking in ancient Egyptian.

“Oh! I’m sorry,” I said. “ I mean a Rhoda...um, rhododendron.”

He led me to the selection. There were white ones and pink ones, which were nice, but then I spotted a bright red one. It was marked down to $12 and was already about three feet tall and in a big plastic tub.

“How big do these things grow?” I asked the clerk.

“Oh, they can get to be as wide as 25 feet across,” he said.

Excited, and picturing my front lawn overrun with beautiful red rhododendron flowers, I bought it.

The minute I got home with my precious shrub, however, I began to feel panicky. I just knew I was going to kill it. No matter how kind I was to it or how much I babied it, experience had taught me its days were numbered. Soon, it would be brown and shriveled, gasping for its last breath, all because it had been unlucky enough to be purchased by me, the Lizzie Borden of plant caretakers. So I put it in the garage for the time being, not daring to touch it.

When I told Kay I’d bought a rhododendron, she said, “Great! When you’re ready to plant it, just let me know and I’ll help you!”

Her offer made me feel much better. I knew she could grow plants and flowers that looked as if they had jumped off the covers of landscaping magazines (while I couldn’t even grow mold on bread), so if my rhododendron received her magic touch, it was guaranteed to receive a stay of execution and survive.

But just as I was trying to pick out the perfect spot on my front lawn for my new shrub, some workers arrived to install my new home-generator system.

“We’re going to have to run a gas line from your underground propane tank to the generator,” one of the guys said, “ so we'll have to dig a trench across your lawn.”

The next thing I knew, construction vehicles descended upon my property and my front lawn ended up resembling a replica of the Erie Canal – if someone had filled it with mud. It was not the best time, I decided, to plant my precious shrub. I would have to wait until I had an actual front lawn again.

So the rhododendron remained in its plastic tub in my garage. I watered it, I sang to it, I fed it...and every day I begged it not to die.

And for a month, it thrived and grew in its tub. I was excited. Every bud, every new green leaf felt like a personal victory to me. And as my yard finally began take shape again with new loam and grass seed put down, I was counting the days until I could call Kay and tell her the shrub was ready to be planted.

But then something unexpected happened. The temperature outside shot up to nearly 100 degrees for the better part of a week. That meant the temperature inside my locked-up garage was hot enough to roast a Thanksgiving turkey. Even worse, during that time, I got really busy on a project inside the house for a few days and forgot to water my poor rhododendron, still sitting in its pot out in that stifling garage.

I know, I know...I should have been arrested for felony plant abuse.

When I finally went out to the garage, there was my once lovely shrub, brown and dried up. There wasn’t one green leaf left on it. Panicking, I called Kay, but there was no answer. So I called another friend who also was good at growing things.

“Dig a hole, fill it with water and plant the shrub right away,” she told me. “It might be okay if the roots are still viable.”

So I rushed out to the front yard and dug a hole, filled it with water and planted the shrub. Then I waited for it to show any signs of life.

I'm still waiting.

That was a couple of years ago. Poor Rhoda is so brown and dried-up looking, even the squirrels point at her and laugh.

Still, I’m seriously thinking about buying another rhododendron when they go on sale again. Then I'll ask Kay if she'll plant it for me.

In her yard.

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Tuesday, August 13, 2024

UNLIKE SCHOOL KIDS NOWADAYS, WE HAD REASON TO FEAR OUR TEACHERS

The kids will be going back to school pretty soon, which makes me think about how much schools have changed over the years. For one thing, some of the disciplinary measures teachers commonly utilized “way back when” probably would land them in prison nowadays.

Take, for example, back when my mother was in school. Her most embarrassing moment happened when the teacher caught her chewing gum in class. As a punishment, my mother was ordered to stick the big wad of gum on the end of her nose and then stand in front of the class that way until the dismissal bell rang.

My mother said the kids had a good laugh at her expense because the wad of gum was so big, it made her eyes go crossed whenever she looked at it.

Mom said there also was a boy in her class who was given an even more embarrassing punishment. His buddies had double dared him to run into the girls’ bathroom. So he did, because everyone knows the "double" dare is the Queen Mother of all dares, unaware one of the teachers was in there. His punishment? He had to wear a dress to school the next day, complete with a big bow in his hair.

And one of my father’s teachers frequently used the infamous dunce cap. Anyone who flunked a test or misbehaved in class would have to don the big, pointed cap with "DUNCE" printed on it and sit on a stool in the corner.

Several of my relatives who attended parochial school, however, vividly remember having to hold out their hands, fists clenched, so the nuns could slap them across their knuckles, usually with a yardstick, whenever they did something wrong.

“They weren’t gentle, either,” one of my uncles said. “Some of those frail-looking little nuns could really pack a wallop!”

Things weren’t quite as violent by the time I went to school, but the teachers still had a lot of creative ways to punish us.

I still can recall one of my first punishments, back at the end of first grade when I had to write, “I will not talk in class,” 100 times on the chalkboard. Well, I hadn’t even learned how to write in longhand (a.k.a. cursive) yet, so I had to print out my punishment. And seeing I’d just barely learned how to print, it took me most of the day.

The resulting hand stiffness and pain were called “writer’s cramp” back then, but I’m pretty sure the chalkboard-writing punishment actually contributed to the origin of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Getting caught passing notes in class was another humiliating experience. The poor kid who got caught either would have to read the note out loud to the entire class or, even worse, the teacher would read it to everyone.

I’ll never forget the day one of my notes was intercepted. My friend Cindy and I, who were about nine or ten at the time, had nicknamed one of our teachers “Miss Chi-Chi” because she had an ample bosom (and for some reason, Cindy and I always referred to breasts back then as “chi-chis”).

I had written a note to Cindy that said something like, “Miss Chi-Chi’s dress is real low in the front today. If she runs, she'd better be careful because her chi-chis will fall out!”

Well, I’m not sure who was more embarrassed when the teacher grabbed the note from my hot little hand and read it out loud…me, because my private thoughts were being made public, or the teacher, upon discovering she was “Miss Chi-Chi”…and the reason why.

She wore a lot of high-necked, baggy blouses after that.

Of course, the scariest punishment of all, the one that was guaranteed to make kids shiver in their Keds, was being sent to the principal’s office. I was sent there only once during my grammar-school years, but it was enough to traumatize me for life.

The worst part was I didn’t even know why I had been sent there. My mind raced as I sat sweating outside the principal’s office, waiting for her to come out. Had she, I wondered, found out about the bad name I’d called Gary, the playground bully? Or maybe she’d seen me sneaking into school five minutes late the day before and then slipping into class while the teacher’s back was turned?

As it turned out, the reason why I’d been sent to the principal’s office was because a group of about eight students and I had pitched in for a Christmas gift for our teacher. Three of us had gone shopping together for the gift and ended up with 99 cents left over afterwards. So we used it to treat ourselves to some ice cream, seeing we’d worked so hard walking from store to store in search of the perfect gift.

“You stole money!” the principal accused me. “How could you do such a thing?”

I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d never stolen anything in my life.

“That leftover money should have been divided evenly among everyone who pitched in for the gift,” the principal explained when she saw my completely clueless expression. “It was not meant to buy ice cream for only three of you! That is stealing!”

I burst into tears, expecting the police to come slap the cuffs on me at any minute and drag me off to jail for the felony theft of fudge-ripple with sprinkles.

The principal made the three of us ice-cream eaters cough up the 99 cents and give it back to all of the kids who’d pitched in for the teacher’s gift. And to make matters worse, she also ordered us to personally apologize to them! I mean, those kids had no idea anything was wrong, so why couldn't we just have given them back the money and said, "Here, this was extra" and left it at that instead of having to confess something to them that made us look like Al Capone and his cohorts? I mean, we'd already learned our lesson, so why humiliate us even more?

I'd already spent all of my weekly allowance by then, so I had to ask my parents for an emergency advance so I could contribute my portion (33 cents) toward the refund. I honestly believed I'd end up in jail if I didn't.

What bothered me the most was I couldn't figure out how the principal had found out about the ice cream in the first place. Just as I was believing she'd had spies following us around after school, Pat, one of the three of us who'd committed the alleged crime, confessed she had told her mother about how much fun we'd had shopping, and when she came to the part about the ice cream, her mother immediately had become upset...upset enough to contact the principal and squeal on her own daughter to teach her a lesson about right from wrong.

Sure, I fully understand her reasoning now, but back when I was a kid, Pat's mother instantly became Mrs. Benedict Arnold in my eyes.

Now that I think about it, I guess I was lucky I didn’t receive an even worse punishment. I could have been ordered to stand in front of the class with an ice-cream cone on my nose.

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Monday, August 5, 2024

THANKS TO LOIS LANE, I WANTED TO DANGLE BY MY TOENAILS FROM A CLIFF DIRECTLY ABOVE A RIVER FILLED WITH HUNGRY ALLIGATORS!

One of the TV news programs was celebrating its anniversary the other day and several of the anchormen and reporters were reminiscing about their very first day of taping – particularly how nervous they’d been and how many mistakes they’d made while reporting live on some of their stories. As I listened, I found myself thinking back to my first year as a correspondent for a weekly newspaper.

It was back in the summer of 1973, when The Goffstown News/Banner-Bulletin Publications (which took me about a week to memorize) hired me, sight unseen, over the telephone. I did have some previous writing experience, but I knew so little about photography, I once nearly blinded myself when I accidentally held the camera backwards and shot off the flash directly into my eyes. Considering flashbulbs were about the size of light bulbs back then, it’s a wonder I still have corneas.

“You’ll need to send us black-and-white Polaroid photos to go with your articles,” the woman who hired me said during that first phone conversation. “Then just mail it all to us once a week.”

The only Polaroid camera I could afford was something called a Swinger. It was small, almost like a toy, and took only wallet-sized photos that had to immediately be coated with a formaldehyde-smelling sealer to prevent the picture from fading away. And after the photos were coated, they had a tendency to curl up as they dried, so I had to flatten them with a book.

My very first assignment was to interview a woman whose handcrafted ceramic stein had won a blue ribbon at a New England ceramics show. Not only did the off-center, shaky photos I took make her stein look as if she’d downed about 12 margaritas before she’d made it, when I sent it to the paper, I accidentally wrote on the caption, “Her first-prize stain” instead of stein...and the editor didn't catch it.

My next assignment was to photograph the construction of a large greenhouse at a flower and garden center in town. The only way my little camera could capture the full length of the greenhouse on film was if I stood about a half-mile away from the place. The end result made it look like an accessory for Barbie’s Dream House.

At the time, the newspaper covered only “nice” news. If some local official was caught betting the town’s funds on Galloping Gertie in the fifth race at Rockingham Park, my editor didn’t want to hear about it. But if little Suzy Perkins won the potato-sack race at the grammar school’s annual field day, well, it was front-page news.

And I had a lot of trouble learning how to spell the name Margaretta Schneiderheinze, who was a prominent figure in the Order of the Eastern Star, so she frequently (much too frequently) was in the news. Back then, everything was written on a typewriter, so I had to physically type out every single letter of her name each time I mentioned it in one of my articles.

I have to admit that ever since the first time I set eyes on Lois Lane on TV when I was a young kid, I dreamed of being a reporter just like her. I pictured myself going on dangerous, exciting assignments where I’d end up dangling by my toenails from a cliff directly above a river full of hungry alligators and being rescued by Superman just in the nick of time.

Instead, there I was, covering events like a get-acquainted tea social, a square-dancing demonstration and a junior-high poster contest. Needless to say, the job wasn’t quite as daring and exciting as I’d imagined it would be. Poor Superman would have been yawning into his cape.

And, as the weeks progressed, my photography became worse instead of better. But to my surprise (and ultimate embarrassment), no matter how terrible my photos were, the paper always printed them anyway. I had so many dark ones published, people began to think I specialized in silhouettes. And there often was an unusual shadow in one corner of my photos. It took me a while to figure out the shadow wasn’t some mysterious apparition…it was just the edge of my fingertip.

Only because I considered my work to be so terrible did I allow three months to pass without getting a paycheck before I finally gathered the courage to mention it to someone at the newspaper. Thus began a long series of, “Your check’s in the mail.”

Believe me, it wasn't.

But even without being paid for a while (make that a long while), I still stuck with the job because I knew it probably would be the closet I’d ever get to fulfilling my dream of becoming another Lois Lane.

As it turned out, my persistence did pay off. Over the years, the newspaper’s owners changed hands several times and the editors became progressively more adventurous and generous. As the paper grew, so did the size of my camera (along with my photography skills) until I finally got my wish and covered some really exciting stories. You might say I even fulfilled my dream of being rescued by “Superman” when I got trapped in a forest fire and was rescued by a firefighter who easily could have modeled shirtless for a pin-up calendar.

During other assignments, I also was threatened by a satanic cult, was assigned to take photos of an actual ghost, was roughly shoved aside by one of Senator John Glenn’s bodyguards, was sprayed by a skunk, had a police cruiser accidentally crash into my car, and was hugged a little too hard by a pet boa constrictor.

And through it all, do you know what I discovered?

That I really was beginning to resent Lois Lane…

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