Here’s the next chapter in my “Grannie’s Memories” series. She wrote them down circa 1967* and these stories are what is inspiring my Work In Progress. She was born in 1923 and grew up in her father’s restaurant in Marietta, Ohio.
My friends and I had a great time visiting all the stores. There was a music store run by Mr. Crippen – I think that was his name. It was such a long time ago. There was another building where Dr. McCurdy, the dentist, had his office upstairs. We use to love visiting Dr. McCurdy and his office nurse Miss Eisenbarth. That is… we liked to go just to visit, but when it came time to have our teeth checked, that was just a little bit different story. The doctor and his nurse were always nice to us and never once did they tell us to leave or that we were in their way.
One particular day, my uncle brought Dad some fresh, ripe cherries. Before I went to play with my friends across the street, Mom put some in a brown paper sack and I was to share them, which I did.
We visited the dentist office first that day. In the waiting room was a big glass fish tank with little fish swimming around in it. What fascinated us most about the tank was a big ceramic clown’s head. The fish would swim in and out the open eyes and mouth.
After a while, we got tired of watching them. The doctor and nurse were in another room with a patient. We decided to make up a new game to see how many cherries we could drop into the clown’s mouth in the fish tank. We had a ball doing this and enjoyed this new game very much. However, the game got old and we decided to leave.
Two or three days later, we were back in the alley digging for treasure (that’s another story too). Dr. McCurdy looked out the back window and called us to please come up to his office. The nurse took us right into one of the rooms with the big chair in it and he held a match box with some cotton in it. We couldn’t imagine what that was for until she said, “Girls, somehow our fish died the past few days and we were wondering what you were feeding them.”
I guess it hit us all at once – THOSE CHERRIES! I can’t remember if we cried or were just plain scared as she said to the doctor, “What can we do about this?” We didn’t know at the time that they had difficulty keeping straight faces.
After a few minutes, which seemed like hours, they decided what we were to do to pay for what we did. We were to take the fish and put them in the match box and cover it with the cotton. Then we had to take them down in the alley, where we had been digging for treasure, and have a funeral for those fish!
I guess they watched out the window while we did. I was so scared and I’m sure my friends were too. We didn’t visit there much after that.
*I’ve done some minor editing for the purposes of this blog, mostly sentence and paragraph structure and some word choice.
I’d Love to Hear from You!
Have you ever fed an animal something they shouldn’t have eaten? What happened? Did you ever have a fish funeral?
Shea McIntosh Ford - Author, Harpist 