WENDEL'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE CONTINUED: THE HERNIA CHRONICLES

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 PART TWO

 
(If you haven't read Part One of my adventures in surgery, please scroll down.  Part One is published below, following Part Two)


The echocardiogram was done later in the week at Saint Francis Medical Center, our local hospital.  I always feel more confident when a hospital bears the name of a holy person. 

Being a Catholic and a great believer in saints, I was a little miffed that Francis himself couldn’t take the time to stop by and wish me well.  I guess he was too busy out in the meditation garden shaking those damn birds off his finger.

The echocardiogram required me to lie on my side, with wires taped to my chest.  The technician then rested an ultrasonic wand on various parts of my upper torso while she dialed up digital images on a machine.  My heart in all its beating glory appeared on a screen.

There were reds, blues, and greens shooting across the image.  “It looks like the Weather Channel’s Dopplar radar,” I said.

My wife, who was watching from a chair across the room, said, “And I think you’re suffering from an upper level disturbance.”

As it turned out, the echocardiogram revealed nothing serious.  The worst part were the jitters leading up to it.

I had imagined the worst, which as I understood, would be a leaky heart valve.  That would require surgery far more serious than a hernia repair.

But that was not the case and I got the okay to proceed with the surgery I had signed up for.  Suddenly, I was ecstatic that I was having my hernia repaired.  In no way did I want to title this column The Hernia (and Heart) Chronicles!

So I was told to report back a week later to Saint Francis (the hospital, not the guy) for the real deal.  I was given my instructions and sent on my un-merry way.

Surprisingly, these days the pre-op restrictions aren’t that bad.  I didn’t have to begin my fast until midnight.  I always fast after midnight.  It’s fasting during Lent that kills me.

The evening before, we enjoyed our routine Sunday chicken dinner.  I have to admit, my appetite wasn’t particularly whetted. 

I did not relish the idea that, within 14 hours, I’d be anesthetized.  That would be a new experience for me. 

Painless?  Oh, sure.  Waking up afterwards?  Sorry, no guarantees.

I began to wonder if this could be my final meal! You’d think, with that in mind, I’d take seconds or maybe even thirds. 

Just in case this truly would be the last supper.

But when the meal was over, instead of breaking bread and giving it to my disciples, I told my wife,  “I want pie.”

And there was pie.  And it was good. 

I ate the last piece at 11:59.

We arrived at the hospital bright and early the next morning.  I was immediately shown to what would be my recovery room. 

Oh good!  Apparently, they expected me to recover!

The nurses stopped by to check my blood pressure and my pulse, to draw blood and to bore a hole in my wrist.  This is where they would put the IV (or 4, as I like to call it) that would relax me just before they killed me.

Before long, I was led to a comfortable bed with warm sheets.  The IV was started and within seconds, I was truly relaxed. 

I can’t tell you much about what happened next.  I remember a mask being placed over my face.

If they asked me to count to ten backwards or some such nonsense as that, I didn’t hear them.  I had my own recitation prepared:

“Now I lay me down to sleep……..”

An hour later I was back in the recovery room and was offered coffee and toast.  The coffee was a welcome beverage after the fast.

The toast was a different story.  I think St. Francis himself baked it, back when he was still alive in the 13th century.

My wife said I dozed off a lot during the course of the afternoon.  One nurse was concerned that I wasn’t responding as brightly as she would liked to have seen.


Well, excuse me!  I'm sorry I couldn't have been more chipper...maybe performed a song and dance for the entire surgery ward!

Then there was the matter of plumbing.  She told my wife that they wouldn’t dismiss me until I had peed.

I’m here to tell you.  When you’ve had very little to drink over a 12-15 hour period, and you did your stand up latrine duty a few times, the last just before being taken to the surgery room…..well, the bladder is empty and it’s sending no signal to the brain or anywhere else.

Not to mention that every time I stood in that cold hospital john, I started getting the shakes so bad, I was questioning whether this was actually St. Francis Hospital or the Betty Ford Center.

By late afternoon, the nurse ordered a bladder scan.  I was hooked up to a machine and the technician proceeded to move a wand around my abdominal area.

“Hmmmm,” she said.

I’ve never liked the word hmmmm when used by someone in the medical profession.  It often telegraphs concern.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m not getting a reading,” she said.  She smiled.  “I guess you have no bladder.”

“It’s probably shriveled up and turned to dust,” I said.

Finally, she hit pay dirt.  Yes, I had a bladder and, while not much, there was something sloshing around in there.

So the nurse called my surgeon with the report.  He explained that I wasn’t holding enough to create any urges and to send me home.

Which she did.  And late that evening, Wendel’s Waterworks returned to a normal state.

Had I known the nurse's home phone number, I would have called her at home and got her out of bed, just to report the happy news.

It’s been nearly three weeks now.  I’m returning to work on Monday.

I’ve gotten kind of used to hanging out at home, resting in a recliner and hitting the correct buttons on the remote without even looking.

I’ve made friends with Regis and Kelly, the ladies from The View, and got to see Oprah’s Farewell.   I’m getting caught up on the news and my reading.  I’ve had some great conversations with my friends on Facebook.

But now its time to return to life as I knew it, which was doctor-free (and there are two words that rarely go together).

I’ve had enough excellent adventures to last me the rest of my life.


Copyright 2011 by Wendel Potter

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WENDEL'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE: THE HERNIA CHRONICLES

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PART ONE

Inguinal hernia--hernia in which a loop of intestine enters the inguinal canal; the most common type of hernia in males
                                                                            ------Webster’s Dictionary

“This f**king hurts!”
                                  -------Noah Webster





It all started a couple of weeks ago when I paid our family physician a visit because I had developed a noticeable bulge inside my pants.  Unfortunately, this bulge wasn’t of the nature that would make most men proud.

My doctor told me to drop my drawers.  He put on a latex glove with that clinical, resounding snap that brings you to attention and then he proceeded to examine the….well, testicular area.

In the old days, doctors always prefaced this examination with this command:  “Turn your head and cough”.  My doctor apparently felt I was well mannered enough not to hack in his face, so he just said, “Cough”.

“You have a hernia,” he told me.  “And next time, turn your head before you cough.  It’s the cold and flu season!”

I asked him why, if a hernia appeared to pop out in the pelvic area, was it necessary to feel my gonads.  He said nothing but wore a glimmer of a smile.  I hoped I wasn’t being scammed.

Of course, I knew what the next step was.  He was going to prescribe magic pills that would cause the hernia to disappear in 3-5 days to never return.

That step was bypassed.  He recommended surgery!

“Well,” I told my wife, “this shoots my track record all to hell!”

58 years old and I’d never spent a minute inside of a hospital except for visiting.  Visit the sick is what the nuns told us to do in Catholic school.  I didn’t mind that rule, because it made it good to be the visitors and not the patients.

Visiting the sick was one of the “corporal works of mercy” that the Catholic church said we should perform.  The Church also said, “But stay out of the goddamn hospital gift shop.  Those prices will eat you alive!”

This is why I like to do my hospital visiting shortly after Memorial Day.  On the way to the hospital, I can drive through the cemetery and pick up some really nice flowers.  Quite affordable that way.

So the next day, it was off to the surgeon for a consultation.  Actually, my wife chose this particular doctor because she knew him and his family personally. 

He seemed pleasant enough, but what bothered me was his name:  Dr. Goering. 

Goering, Goering….hmmm.  My mind was racing through its index and checking its files under “World War II”.

Ah, yes!  I thought, Could he be related somehow to Hermann Goering, the head of the German armed forces during World War II and sadistic henchman to Adolph Hitler?

Possibly from the same family as that same Hermann Goering who was convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials and who cowardly committed suicide by taking cyanide rather than face execution?

Well, at least he saved the taxpayers a few bucks, I’ll give him that.

So I tested the "good" doctor.  “How are things in the Luftwaffe?” I asked craftily.

He looked at my wife and asked,  “Is he currently taking any medication or perhaps fallen on his head recently?”

My wife twirled her finger in a big circle alongside her head and rolled her eyes in my direction.
 
Surely there could be no family ties between the evil Goering and this surgeon, I tried convincing myself.

But then…. he got out the latex glove, slipped it over a pair of vise grips and latched on to the fellas down below like there was no tomorrow!  He didn’t even ask me to cough, let alone turn my head!

Good thing, too.  I couldn’t have coughed.  My esophagus was paralyzed.

He squeezed some more.

Now that my cahones felt like a couple of tangerines in a Cuisinart, I decided that there was no way Dr. Goering could share the family tree with the notorious Hermann.  This guy was way too brutal.

[Note to reader:  the following italicized remarks are my thoughts only and not audible, verbal expressions.  This was not because I didn’t want the doctor to hear me.  Rather, as a result of what felt like having my testicles run over by a dump truck,  I was rendered speechless and barely able to take a deep breath for several hours.]

“You have two hernias,” he happily announced.  “What I’ll do is a laparoscopy.”

There you go, talking secret German code!

“First I’ll make an incision under the belly button.”

Ah ha!  A naval attack!

“Then I go in with a camera…”

Oh crap, this is going to be on YouTube!  All it will take is one Tweet from this guy and my hernia surgery will go viral!  Broadcast throughout the Nazi underground!

“Once I can see the hernias, I’ll make two smaller incisions and go in and repair them.”

“How do you repair them?” my wife asked.

“When I’m inside, we’ll inflate his abdomen with gas.”

Couldn’t I just drink a couple of beers?  But no, he’s using a special gas!  The Nazis know all about those things!

“This allows me to see what’s going on inside his body.  I’ll push the protruded parts back inside the cavity, then insert a mesh lining.”

Sounds like he’s trying to catch mosquitoes!

“The mesh serves as a protective patch.”

Oh sure!  A patch that will systematically release an agent to my brain that will make me spill top government secrets!  Well, Goering, you’ll get nothing from me!

Dr. Goering asked me to hop up on the examining table.  He turned away and grabbed a stethoscope.  “You can sit up,” he said.  “You don’t need your feet in those stirrups.”

I told him the Kentucky Derby was coming up that Saturday and I was into interactive participation and I was getting into the feel of things.

“I just want to listen to your heart.”  He told me to take some deep breaths.

You’ve got to be kidding!

“Did you know you had a murmur?” he asked.

“Isn’t that one of those guys who dresses in black face and women‘s clothes?  They have a big parade in Philadelphia every New Year‘s Day.”

“That’s a Mummer,” he said.  “I’m hearing a murmur.”

The only murmur you’re hearing is the one sweeping through the Nazi-hunting crowd that’s gathered outside your door with pitchforks and bloodhounds.  They’ve found you out, Dr. Goering!

“What I’d like to do,” he said, “is make an appointment for you to have an echocardiogram.  It’s like an ultrasound of the heart that can show us how well the blood is pumping.  I don’t want to proceed with surgery until I know your heart is in good condition.”

This brought me to attention like the snapping of no latex glove could ever do.  Suddenly I felt no pain below my waist.  As a matter of fact, I felt nothing below my waist.

“My heart?” I asked.  “No doctor has ever heard a heart murmur inside my chest.  What does it mean?”

“Generally nothing, but for a murmur to develop this late in life, it’s best to check it out before we put you under anesthesia.”

Suddenly, Dr. Goering seemed like a decent, concerned individual.  He made some notes on my chart, then told us that his nurse would contact me with the day and time for my echocardiogram.

“The truth, doc,” I insisted.  “Do you think it’s anything serious?”

He shrugged and said, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”


Copyright 2011 by Wendel Potter

COMING SOON:  THE HERNIA CHRONICLES,  PART 2

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Wendel's Easter World: Random Thoughts and Resurrected Memories

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In honor of Easter Sunday, I've resurrected this column from my newspaper days.  I hope you enjoy it and a Happy Easter to you all.

There is a weird irony about Easter.

Easter Sunday is one of the most devoutly observed high holy days in the history of organized religion. It is a solemn celebration of the glorious return from the dead of Jesus, who has been proclaimed as the one, true King of the Jews.

And how do Christians honor the greatest Jew of all time? We serve ham.

I like ham. I've always liked Easter, too. When I was very small, Easter meant getting up early and searching for my Easter basket that had been filled with chocolate eggs and jelly beans and then skillfully hidden by my parents, under the pretense that the Easter Bunny had stopped by.

When I became old enough to go to church and began hearing the true Easter story, I just figured that the reason Jesus got up and out of the tomb early in the morning was so he could go hunting for his Easter basket.

Easter was always more than just a religious observance, though. It fired the starting gun for the spring/summer fashion season.

When I was growing up, everyone trotted out their best "Sunday go to meeting" finery on Easter. The church service, admit it or not, was nearly as much a festival of big fancy hats and a parade of new bright dresses as it was a worship session.

That was the women. Where men were concerned, Easter meant it was time to put away the dingy charcoal gray suit and sport a new blazer and lighter colored slacks.

Then, when the early 1970s rolled around, leisure suits made their grand entrance, along with spiffy white dress shoes. "White bucks" they called them in the 1950s when Pat Boone made them his trademark all year round.


Mercifully, their rebirth re-died after a few years. And there has been no resurrection since.

But the crown jewel in the Easter basket is the Resurrection story. While the colored eggs, a mythical bunny, marshmallow chicks and white bucks have all figured heavily into the holiday over the years, the biblical account of a man rising from the dead 2,000 years ago remains the bottom line for celebrating Easter Sunday.

I've been pondering the Resurrection of Jesus. If you read the New Testament's four gospels closely, you'll notice they tell an Easter Sunday story each a bit differently, one from the other.

The conflicts are slight:Who saw Jesus first? How many women went to the tomb? What time of morning was it? How many angels appeared at the tomb? What exactly did the women go to the tomb for? Were the women wearing their new spring hats?

Some historians say that the Gospel of Mark originally had no resurrection story, abruptly ending after the crucifixion, and that the final chapters were added by a different writer.

The apostle Thomas got the worst rap. We've all come to know him, traditionally, as Doubting Thomas, because he insisted he would not believe in the risen Lord until he had seen him and touched his wounds.

But no one else appeared to believe, either, until they themselves had seen Jesus. None of them really seemed to think he was coming back. As a matter of fact, in one gospel, Jesus chides all eleven, not just Thomas, for their lack of belief.

Of course, Thomas was disdained for other reasons. He was the only apostle to wear white bucks and a leisure tunic before Passover.

Now what if there had been no Resurrection story in any of the gospels? I'm not suggesting that there was no Resurrection, just wondering how we would react if Jesus had not bothered to appear in risen splendor to anyone?

Would any of his followers have still concluded that he had risen?

Would we today just naturally assume that Jesus had come out of the tomb and ascended to his father in heaven, even though no one could lay claim to having seen him?

Or would we conclude that he saw his shadow and went back in to the tomb for another six weeks of winter.

He said during his life that he would rise again on the third day. For a true believer, shouldn't that have been enough? He said, "Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe."

The Easter story is one of the greatest stories ever told. But how great would the Christian faith be if it had not been told?  If Christians still believed, it would be great indeed.

Just food for thought. Now pass the ham.


Copyright 2004 by Wendel Potter

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Incredible Journeys: Wendel's World on Two Wheels

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When I was a kid there were two kinds of bicycles: boy’s and girl’s.

Oh, there was also the English Racer, that incredibly sleek bike with the thin tires and the ability to shift multiple gears, but that didn't really count.

The Racer was a rare commodity where I grew up. I can only remember one kid who had one and he was snooty.  He never even wore blue jeans.

There wasn't anything too exotic about your standard bicycle back then. Once in awhile, we'd go a little crazy and hang colored plastic streamers from the handle grips, or fasten a playing card to the wheel with a clothespin so the spokes would flick the card with each revolution and make, well, a flicking sound.

I never owned a brand new bicycle. My first bike was a hand-me-down from my brother and it served me well.

It didn't have training wheels. My friend Mike who lived across the back lot, had training wheels on his bike. I envied that sense of security.

But I learned without training wheels. I took a few spills, yet I had enough pride to ignore the scraped knees and elbows and climb back on the bike and try it again.  Each time, I travelled farther. Eventually, all the way through my boyhood.

For me and my pals, growing up in the 1950s and 60s in the heart of America, a bicycle was not just a vehicle of convenience that took us to school on a spring day or made quick work of a trip to the gas station for a bottle of pop. Having a bicycle enabled us to explore new avenues in our world.

Back in Iowa, that first bike of mine took me to a place on "the other side of the tracks." About two blocks from home, we crossed the tracks of the Milwaukee Railroad, then followed a dirt street that stretched for several blocks, where it intersected with the Rock Island tracks.

Once we had crossed over the Rock Island Line, we were pretty much outside of the city limits where we came upon a strange, square block of old houses, shabby and time-worn. Some were inhabited. Some were vacant and missing windows.

We dubbed this odd country neighborhood "Bums’ Camp," because as we explored one of the vacant houses which we imagined to be haunted with ghosts, we found the very real traces -- empty tin food cans and liquor bottles -- of hobos who had put up for the night in that house. We could easily imagine those grizzled old men eating beans for supper to settle the hunger in their stomachs.

We were too young, too innocent to consider how the hobos might take a long pull from a whisky bottle to whitewash their loneliness and dull the memories of the lives and loves they'd left behind them, distanced now by thousands of miles of steel rail, but quickly called to mind at the sound of a freight train chuffing through the night, its long, low whistle sad and mournful like muffled, lonely sobs.

When I was 12, we moved to Fullerton, a quiet rural town in Nebraska.  There our bikes took us to the river to fish. We'd hang a can of worms from our handlebars, then set off on our bikes, steering with one hand and holding a fishing rod with the other.

We had to trespass in order to reach our fishing hole. It was a matter of lifting our bikes over a barbed-wire fence and riding across a pasture among the farmer's cattle. If the farmer ever saw us, he didn't say anything or make his presence known. The cows didn't seem to care one way or the other.

We even rode in high school. Of course, I had graduated to a bigger bike by that time, but most bikes were still built pretty much in that same standard design. You got on them, pedaled and rode away.

When I was in my junior year, there was a group of us, guys and girls alike, who rode together all over town.  I think we called our outfit The Bike Club.  Damn catchy.

Often, when the weather grew warm and the daylight hours increased, we pedaled northwest of Fullerton to a bluff on the northern edge of town that overlooked the Cedar River Valley.

The place was called Lover's Leap, so named for Indian lovers who, according to legend, met their death when a fierce herd of buffalo forced them to leap from the top of the bluff. At least that's the story I once heard.  Nobody seemed to care what happened to the buffalo.

From Lover's Leap, which was marked with a big wooden cross, you could gaze for miles across the tops of pine trees, over rich pasture land and a shimmering river bed. In the evening you could watch the sun set for a long, beautiful time as it lazily slipped behind the green bluffs that rolled west into the next county, and perhaps on forever.

I couldn't begin to tally up the miles I've biked over the years. No matter. It was the destinations that counted.

It was where I went, what I saw, what I imagined, what I dreamed, what I learned. Those old sturdy, single-speed bicycles I rode over the years took me on short, but incredible journeys that forged enough memories of boyhood to fill a scrapbook for a lifetime.


Copyright 2011 by Wendel Potter

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A Ghost of a Chance Of A Chance Of A Ghost

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"Starlight, Star Bright, we hope to see a ghost tonight!"

We were kids back in Iowa and we'd shout that phrase like an anthem when the summery dusk had swept through the neighborhood. I'm sure that some neighbors, the older early-to-bed-early-to-rise folks, were often startled out of a peaceful slumber when the late evening crackled with our twilight call to arms.

"Starlight, star bright" was actually nothing more than a game of tag in the dark. But it went a step farther. It gave character and definition to the child who was "it." He (or she -- we were not a misogynous neighborhood) was not just "it," but played the role of a menacing ghost who lurked among shadows in a bushy thicket or behind Mrs. Orsborn's white-washed garage.

When the children came roaming, hoping to see a ghost, "it" would pop out and run down whichever players he could catch and tag them. I'm not sure what the end result of all this nonsense was.

There probably was none because as I recall, the game was always left unfinished after mothers and fathers on doorsteps throughout the neighborhood, with hands cupped around their mouths, hollered out the names of their respective children, serving notice that the hour was late and it was time to come home. 

"Jimmy! YooHoo! It's getting late, son!"....."Nancy dear! Time to come in!"...."Ann!  Your milk and cookies are ready!"...."Wendel!  Hope you get home before the serial killer comes out!"

Darn, and just as the elderly neighbors were once again settling in for the night. Those folks just couldn't buy a decent night's sleep in the summer.

Ghosts, or the notion of ghosts, entered in to a lot of our youthful games and adventures. On Saturday afternoons, we went to the movies to see the latest ghost or monster film and reveled in being terrified out of our wits. And when we camped in the backyard, no sleep-out was complete without exchanging spooky tales and bits of ghostly lore. We loved being scared!

I'm a somewhat spiritual person and I've never discounted the possibility of visits from another dimension. Some of this may be rooted in my Irish Catholic upbringing where stories of visions and sightings of long-dead saints walking the earth were commonly discussed.

However, it was actually my dad's side of the family, the English Protestant side, that made some pretty marvelous claims on the subject of spiritualism. 

The most popular story was that of my Grandma Potter's sister, Aunt Fan. Fan had the uncanny ability to look into the bottom of a teacup and foretell the future by studying the tea leaves.

It is Potter family legend that one morning Aunt Fan sat in the kitchen of my grandparents' farmhouse and told my grandmother that she saw a man, blind and bloody, coming in to her life. Not long after that, Grandpa made his way to the house after a morning of blowing up tree stumps with blasting caps.  I don't know if that was his job or if he just enjoyed blowing things up with blasting caps.

Now, apparently one of the charges appeared to be a dud so Grandpa approached the stump and it promptly exploded in his face. When he stumbled into the kitchen, his face was bathed in blood and his eyes were filled with dirt and tree stump shrapnel.

Coincidence? You decide. All I know is that Aunt Fan was a decent God-fearing woman who obviously had psychic powers of some sort. Or it could have been hallucinations from drinking too much tea.

Fact or fantasy, stories like these made childhood fun. It was a part of growing up.

Even when I was in high school, we delighted in ghostly legends, real and imagined. There was a house over in Fullerton, Nebraska (where we moved to in 1964) that could have been the model for any haunted house movie, as old and ramshackle as it was with weeds growing up around it. It sat away from the road, back in the trees, on the very edge of town.

An old man and his spinster daughter lived there, so they say. Although we never saw the gentleman (or the daughter, for that matter), we dubbed him "Candleman" because it was said that if you stood along the lonely road in the dark and watched long enough, you would see the flame of a candle flickering about the inside of the house, floating from window to window.

Apparently, the guy was not a supernatural being, he just had no electricity. And on many dark, moonless nights we wandered down that road and kept vigil. We never did see the candle or the man (or the daughter, for that matter), but it made for a great story.

I'm not sure what it was in our psyches that found spooks and spirits to be so attractive, but the supernatural world certainly seemed to be an inherent part of our culture growing up. Nowadays kids seem to opt for the cheap thrills of graphic horror movies or video games, the slash and gore stuff, that requires only Hollywood's special effects rather than the viewer's imagination.

Or maybe it's just that kids today take no pleasure in classical old-fashioned scares because they're daily being been exposed to the reality checks of our modern age -- of nuclear and chemical threat, outbreaks of strange diseases, and terrorism in our own backyard. 

Perhaps back in my day it was just plain fun to let ourselves be scared of things that go bump in the night because we knew that those bumpy night things, along with ghouls and ghosts and goblins were made up and weren't really to be feared.

Sadly, the world these days has become a terrifying place and contrary to what Franklin Roosevelt once told Americans, there is plenty to fear besides fear itself.

I often wonder what Aunt Fan would have to tell us about our future if she were alive today and read our tea leaves. Maybe late on some summery night, when the moon is hidden in the shadows of the universe and a warm whispery breeze murmurs like a lost soul, I'll ask her.

I'll let you know what she says.

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Don't Forget To Move Your Sundial Ahead

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That's right. It's the second Sunday in March. And some early risers may be reading this in the dark.

Well, not in total darkness. Of course, you have a light on. But that's my point. 

Yesterday morning, at this hour (by the clock), we didn't need to turn on the lights. Today we do.

Obviously, I'm talking about the dawning of daylight-saving time. It began today and so far I've saved no daylight. As a matter of fact, I've lost an hour's sleep!

I've always questioned the term "daylight-saving time." Sure, by the new clock setting -- spring ahead! -- we gain an hour of brightness in the evening. Yet what have we saved? We lost an hour of brightness in the morning! Do the math!

Back in the 1960s, when daylight-saving time was first instituted in Nebraska, it was agreed in the state legislature that by moving our clocks ahead one hour in the spring, our farmers would be able to work longer in the evening.

But don't farmers traditionally get up really early in the morning to start work? Now suddenly it's pitch dark when they get up. And to benefit from the displaced daylight, they have to work an hour later at night. 

If it were not for daylight-saving time, they could knock off at 9 p.m., have their dinner, sip a couple of brews, and see what's happening on "Criminal Minds".

My Grandpa Potter would not have approved of daylight-saving time. I never knew him, but it was said that he was a cantankerous sort. And being a morning person, he expected his brood to be up and working by 4 a.m.

Now when evening came, Grandpa went to bed with the chickens. That's because Grandma made him sleep in the henhouse. I'm serious. Winter and summer, he turned in at 7 p.m.

Six months of daylight-saving time would have severely maladjusted his body clock. He would have grown more cantankerous than ever. 

Thankfully, cantankerousness was not a trait that was passed on to his grandchildren. (And according to spell check, cantankerousness is not really a word.)

Now, I'll give the farmer his due. And I understand that moving that hour of daylight from morning to night benefits the evening golfer or fisherman or even the guy who has no other time to mow his lawn.

As for me, I was always a morning fisherman, my golf game could not be any worse if I played in the dark, and if I don't have time to mow, well a guy can always spray a little Round Up across the yard.

You also have to take God into consideration when you introduce something like daylight-saving time. The whole time concept was his thing to begin with. So who are we to mess around with it?

You don't read anywhere in the Bible where God tells Noah or Abraham or Moses, "Now on the second Sunday of every March, you guys have to get up at 2 in the morning and go out and move your sundials ahead one hour. You'll notice then on Sunday night that the sun will appear to set an hour later than usual. This will give you some extra daylight so you can slaughter a few more sheep and burn them on the altar for the Sunday Night Summer Sacrificial service. I think you're going to like it."

I have to admit I'm a morning person, especially in the spring and summer months. I like to get up early and have my coffee and listen to nature as it greets daybreak.

Well, that's a little difficult to do right now when day doesn't break until it's time to rush out the door to work. And since I don't go to bed especially early, I resent missing "Letterman" jsut because the sun is casting a glare on my television screen.

But I seem to be in the minority where daylight-saving time is concerned, so I'll have to keep making the best of it. And I guess I'd better start working on my next column since I'm already an hour behind and I haven't even begun slaughtering my sheep for tonight's sacrifice.

Copyright by Wendel Potter

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Give it up! It's Mom's Macaroni and Curdled Cheese Casserole

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When I was a kid, many of my parochial school buddies gave up going to the movies during Lent. Being a compassionate fellow, I didn't want to see the guy who owned the movie theater go out of business (even if he was a non-Catholic), so I continued patronizing his place on Saturday afternoons between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday.

Besides, in a way I, too, was giving something up -- companionship at the movies! While my friends were off playing ball or riding bikes on Saturdays, I was sitting through a double-feature ALONE!

I'm telling you, when John Wayne was having it out with the bad guys or the girl in the haunted house was about to be strangled by Vincent Price, not having a friend in the seat next to me to share the excitement with was almost unbearable to an 8-year old boy.

But I suffered through it in silence. It was my Lenten duty.

Some kids gave up eating candy during Lent. For me, that wouldn't have really been a major sacrifice.
My mom -- or as we called her, Mother Most Frugal -- rarely bought candy or sweets. So eating candy wasn't a habit. To my way of thinking (or what's known as Catholic rationalization), giving up something that you didn't eat on a daily basis wasn't really giving something up.

Besides, that poor guy who owned the movie theater didn't survive on ticket sales alone. Why, he might have gone belly up before April if folks like me hadn't plunked down our nickels for a Slo-Poke sucker or a box of Boston Baked Beans to get us through the movie.

But while giving something up for Lent was encouraged by the Church, it still remained an option. One thing that did not was abstaining from eating meat on Fridays.

Today, the Catholic no-meat-on-Fridays rule applies only during Lent. In my younger days, it applied to every Friday. All year. No exceptions.

That rule never really bothered me. While I love fried chicken or a good slab of roast beef, I would be just as content to eat a catfish dinner or a plate of spaghetti smothered in sauce (meatless sauce, of course).
What did bother me was the macaroni-and-cheese casseroles my mother used to make every third Friday. This is where the Lenten suffering came into play.

Growing up Catholic, our Friday evening menu rotated. One week we would have tuna and noodles (tolerable). On another Friday we had salmon and baked potatoes (not bad). But the third Friday on the rotation was the dreaded macaroni and cheese.

Don't get me wrong. Mom wasn't a bad cook. The problem was my dad. Mom cooked to suit his taste (and when it came to macaroni and cheese, he had pretty poor taste).

I remember the big brown baking bowl. Mom would bring the macaroni to a boil on the stove, drain it, then dump it in that bowl. I'm not sure what kind of cheese she used -- Velveeta, I think, but I remember she used enough of it to bind up a small continent. Then she poured in the milk. Lots of milk!

The brown bowl went into the oven where the casserole baked. And baked. And baked. Until it was done to Dad's liking.

When it came to macaroni and cheese, Dad's liking meant the casserole was covered with a thick, crusty brown skin and all that cheese and all that milk had bubbled and boiled and blended into a curdled soup.

Come and get it! Dinner's ready! Mmmmmmmmm.

Well, you can imagine.

So there you have it. Maybe I didn't give up movies or candy during Lent, but believe me, when "Crusty and Curdled Macaroni and Cheese Friday "rolled around every three weeks for as long as I care to remember -- how I did suffer!

Copyright by Wendel Potter