It has been a little over a months since our fall and she had her second physical therapy session Wednesday. You are absolutely right, the pain is pretty bad after therapy but she is working hard with the home exercises. She is a darn tough old girl and will definitely take advantage of all the therapy sessions Medicare/Tricare offers. In the meantime she has decided she is unable to do any housework. I told her she still has a good right arm and she is right handed so the vacuum cleaner will fit perfectly plus it will be good exercise. It didn't work! I am now the official vacuum cleaner, ironer, bed maker, dish washer, and whatever else she decides she can't do. If I hadn't had her so long I'd send her back but I think the warranty expired a long time ago. Well I've also put a lot of time and money into her scheduled and unscheduled maintenance over the past 50 years too and would probably lose that.

Let's see if this works. Here is a picture of some jacks.

Yes dljen the wrap is velcroed to the sling and then wraps around her body pretty much locking the broken shoulder to her body. It has been very effective as it has kept the pain to a minimum.

It isn’t that my wife cannot afford to have her hair done at the beauty shop, it is just that she has always done her hair herself and has done a very good job of it for the past 70 plus years. There is a however though and the however is, I have recently been pressed into service as a hairdresser and am no good at fixing her hair. I guess if I were to use a technical term for my ability to fix her hair I would have to admit that I suck at it.

For the past forty years or so Karin has worn a pony tail and it is a good look for her with her long, blond hair though I admit, her hair is not as thick as it once was but then at 73 my hair isn’t as thick as it once was either.
Fixing my wife’s hair became my job after it was our misfortune to fall down an escalator in the Louisville, Kentucky airport. I’m still not sure what caused the fall but it was a whopper with lots of arms and legs and luggage that resulted in Karin coming up with a broken shoulder and my back a wreck.

Once we finally made it back to Florida and a trip to her orthopedic surgeon she wound up in an immobilization sling and band plus several weeks worth of happy pills.
She couldn’t raise her left arm at all but the fingers still worked.

On the third day after our tumble down the escalator, she decided she had taken enough of the happy pills and that it was time to get out of bed. One look in the mirror and she said she needed me to fix her hair. Fix her hair! It is all I can do to get mine to do what I want much less fix hers. Well after nearly 50 years of marriage I figured I should be able to do this and if not how bad can I make it? Turns out shampooing, combing, blow drying, and rolling hair is a lot harder than it looks. The first thing I did was get shampoo in her eyes and then I forgot to put conditioner in which makes combing even thin long hair difficult. I didn’t know Karin even knew some of the words she used. Well I guess she probably learned them from me but I’d never heard her use them and the combinations were a little out of the usual order too but I’ll chalk that up to a lack of practice. Once all the rats as she called them are combed out I went for the blower. First I didn’t have it set warm enough and then I had it set too hot and didn’t move it fast enough to keep from roasting her scalp. Again the words and this time they were followed by threats of what she was going to do to me in my sleep. I think those were idle threats as I am a light sleeper and would probably wake up with the first cut down there.

Finally the blow drying was completed and it was time to put her hair in the pony tail and rollers. I don’t know why it has to be rolled once the pony tail gets fixed but according to the expert it does. There is a real trick to grabbing a handful of hair while pulling a brush through it and I still have not mastered it. By the time I was about halfway through trying to get the ponytail fixed we are back to the bad words but now I’m in the spirit and we are calling one another ugly names. I’m sweating like Paris Hilton in church, my arms are tired and Karin has figured out how to use her middle finger while her arm is in the sling and immobilization band. Once again I didn’t know she even knew that universal sign.

After several failed attempts I eventually got the pony tail fixed or at least she said to just leave it the way I had it. Now it is time to put the hot rollers in the pony tail. This shouldn’t be a big task since I only have to put in two.
There really is a proper way to roll hair around a hot roller but I suspect it is something girls learn from their mothers or at slumber parties or trial and error. Guys however hardly ever learn the mystery because we just don’t put our hair up in rollers. Well most of us don’t anyway.
The first thing I learned about hot rollers is that you do not grab it by the end that has been sitting in the base warming up. I learned not to do it by actually doing it and turned loose of the damned thing quickly. It hit the bathroom floor tiles and rolled out of sight. I immediately stepped back to try and find it and found it with my bare foot. My second lesson with hot rollers – don’t step on one with bare feet. This is only the second time Karin has ever seen me lying on the floor, holding my foot, crying like a baby. The other time was when our youngest son had a birthday party at the house. There were several six and seven year old girls at the party too. Now in a house with only two boys there are no such things as jacks in the house to worry about so I didn’t. Apparently some of the girls didn’t think there would be enough things for them to do at the party since most of the children were boys so they brought along some jacks. One of the jacks wound up on the carpet in the hallway and I found it with a bare foot while going to the kitchen for breakfast the following morning. I don’t care how brave, macho, or thick skinned you are, when you step on a jack with your bare foot you are going to go down like a felled ox and lay there in the floor crying like a baby.

So now, back to the ponytail and hair rollers. After stepping on the hair roller Karin has this “serves you right” look on her face but I’m the one with the hot roller in his hand and I’m going to get those two rollers in her pony tail if it hair lips the Pope. I get the first bushel of hair wrapped around the roller and put the U shaped clip in place. I stepped back to admire my work only to watch as the roller slowly unwinds and falls to the floor. Obviously I’ve done something wrong and the expert tells me so - as if I needed her input. Three more tries and I finally get the hang of it and the second roller goes in without a hitch. I’m mastering this hair thing in spite of all the verbal help I’m getting from the one armed expert.

I figure by the time Karin gets out of the sling and immobilization band I will have mastered the ponytail and learned new combinations of swear words.

Not sure about the IQ requirement for Air Force pilots, but then the Air Force can't really be considered military (before you guys unload a B52 strike on me it's a joke). For Army helicopter pilots we were required to have an IQ of 115 and above.

I was 18 and home on a week's leave from the Army after completing airborne training. Dad asked me if I would like to go to the pool hall. We lived in a supposedly dry county but everyone knew, if you wanted a drink you could get it at the pool hall. Dad ordered two beers but the owner reminded Dad that I wasn't 21. Dad said, "if he is old enough to parachute out of an airplane he is old enough to drink a beer." The logic worked because I got the beer and that is the best beer I ever drank. My Dad died in 1975 after many years as a coal miner. Sure wish I could have another beer with him now and wish all young men could have a father like mine was to me.

Yes we do learn by our mistakes. When I was four years old I had a job and one job only, I was responsible for holding a carbide lamp while my Dad milked our two cows. I had an old cloth miner's cap that Dad had made small enough to fit my head and I had a carbide lamp that I attached to the cap. All I had to do was stand there with my head pointed at the cow's udder while Dad milked. For some reason that was too complicated for me and I began to question what would happen if I grabbed the cow by her back leg. I asked Dad and he said he didn't know but not to do it. That wasn't sufficient for me and I kept asking until completely out of patience he said, "hell son I don't know --- go ahead and grab her." At four you don't know what sarcasm is so I grabbed the cow's leg and held on tight. Nothing happened until the open flame of the carbide light really began cooking the cow's leg and then she got rid of me with one swift kick that sent me to the back wall of the barn. I may not be the brightest penny in the roll but it only took me one lesson to learn what will happen when you grab a cow's back leg while wearing a carbide lamp.

Every now and then my wife of 50 years will catch me looking at a particularly attractive and shapely young lady at the beach and will tell me. "Old man if you caught that it would kill you ...... And if it doesn't I just might."

The other night my wife and I were setting on the couch, I'm watching television and she's looking at some magazine. She folds the magazine over to a page and shoves it under my nose. The page is actually a three quarter page, full color advertisement for satin sheets. What a flash back those satin sheets evoke!

December 28, 1971 and I'm leaving Vietnam for the third time and what I hope will be my last combat tour. In order to make this a memorable homecoming I've diligently shopped the Army & Air Force Exchange System (AAFES) catalog to come up with just the right stuff. In this case, the right stuff is a set of satin sheets and pillowcases for our king size bed, which I had mail ordered home two months before. Not only have I sent the sheets and pillowcases ahead, I've also ordered a white silk nightgown for my wife and a pair of red silk pajamas for myself.

Now to really dazzle my young farm girl when I get home, I've raided every PX in I Corps within flying radius of Phu Bai for pearls. I bought so many pearls Mikimoto had to put their oysters on a third shift and overtime to keep up with my demand.

Getting out of country was simply a pain in the ass of paperwork and standing around in line for everything that had to be done. I don't remember much about the flight home except it was long and I got the distinct impression the pilot needed practice with his landing skills. It seemed like every time he put that bucket of bolts on a runway (we refueled in Japan and Alaska plus the final landing in Seattle) he tried to bury the wheels in the asphalt. Maybe I was just being a little too sensitive about maybe dying before I could get home. The plane trips to St. Louis and then on to Louisville, Kentucky seemed like they would never end.

Karin was waiting for me at the airport along with our two boys. Rick, my youngest, was 19 months old and a bundle of energy. I'd forgotten what it was like to hold a little one like that. He had my left side stripped of Captain's bars, unit crest; flight wings and jump wings before I could react. So much for those quick combat reflexes I'd developed. With hand speed like his someday he'd make a great scout pilot or pick pocket. Well, I guess that's the same thing, but he was fast. Karin said she had standing orders to call our parents as soon as we got home and they would take care of notifying the rest of the clan. That was fine with me because I really had other things on my mind and I sure hoped she did too.

Slipping behind the wheel of the station wagon felt as easy and natural as if I had been driving a car every day for the past year instead of a helicopter. It was easy and natural until I hit the Watterson Expressway traffic. God, what I would have given for a little gun cover out there. Vietnam was a snap this driving in rush hour traffic was dangerous.

We managed to make it home without incident but I got a couple of disapproving looks from Karin about my language. When Mike, my six year old, piped up and repeated a couple of the words I'd used, I knew I had probably stepped over the line. Well, with a B-4 bag loaded with pearls and seven months since I'd been home on R&R, I figured since there was no blood on the floor I wasn’t hit too badly and I should be able to recover. Boy the house looked great, Bedford stone, a shingle roof instead of a tent, hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, and not a bunker, barbed wire, or machine gun emplacement in sight. Yes sir, life just doesn’t get much better or at least not until we get the kids to bed.

Getting the children to bed turned out to take a little longer than I'd planned. They were really excited with the toys I'd brought them and it seemed to take forever before they began to nod off. After we got the boys tucked in, Karin said she was off to take a shower and for me to turn down the bed.

When I turned the bedspread back, there were the satin sheets. They looked good; cool, soft, and shinny. There wasn't a wrinkle anywhere, not even on the pillowcases. I found out later Karin had actually ironed them before putting them on the bed. The bottom fitted sheet was jet black. The top sheet was solid cherry red with a pencil thin, black accent stripe about four inches from the top. The two king size pillow cases were also cherry red except for a pencil thin black accent stripe about three inches from the opening. Looking back on it I guess the bed pretty much resembled something you'd find in a "whore house." I'm only supposing here mind you since I've never been in one of those places, but I have heard the big boys talk about them. Man oh man did I turn back the covers! I pulled everything back and laid it over the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. I folded and tucked and smoothed so there was nothing but flat surface on that big old king size bed. I figured it was a good idea to get the extra material out of the way. If we did this right we were going to use all the available flat surface and maybe some of the rounded parts too with the floor as an option.

When Karin showed up at the bedroom door she looked gorgeous. The short, white silk nightgown showed just enough leg to get the remainder of my blood pumping furiously. I said “what the heck” I really didn't need a shower. After all, I'd showered some 30 odd hours earlier, so by Vietnam standards I was squeaky clean. I got the wave off and told to hit the shower. I was not about to argue at this point and risk bringing on a headache, so off to the shower. Karin had laid out my silk pajamas on one of the towel racks. It was nice to know that I had practically unlimited hot water after a year of taking cold showers if we got a shower at all, but I've got to admit, I didn't waste a lot of time standing there soaking. I took a little longer shaving as there was no need risking cutting my throat at this point. Finally, I slipped on the pajamas. Wow, that silk felt cool but I didn't plan to have them on that long.

A quick check across the hall and Mike is sound asleep. Tiptoe into the baby's room and Rick is sound asleep too. When I reached the bedroom door it was the scene I'd played out in my mind a thousand times during the past year. Karin was seated with the pillows pulled up behind her and leaning against the headboard. She was sitting with one leg pulled up under her and she'd let her hair down. She'd dropped one shoulder strap and let the nightgown fall a little to reveal just a hint of........

She looked up and crooked her finger in the "come here" gesture. Ah yes, the little girl's in a playful mood and so am I. I backed up about four steps into the hallway and made a running approach to the bed. About a step away from the bed I did my best imitation of a rocket attack, bunker entrance dive. The moment I hit the bed I realized I'd made a terrible tactical blunder but it was too late. When those silk pajamas hit the satin sheets I discover what slick was all about. An ice cube dropped on a brand new Teflon frying pan isn't even close to the slick of silk sliding across satin. There just isn't any friction. Mag Lev trains my ass, if they want something frictionless they need to investigate the silk and satin combination. I caught a momentary glimpse of surprise on Karin's face as I whizzed by. As I went speeding across the bed I also discovered, there was absolutely nothing to grab hold of. That damned fitted bottom sheet was as tight as a banjo string and I'd done such a thorough job of clearing the decks there was nothing but an unobstructed path across the bed. Yep, I'm about to set the world's land speed record. I probably would have if the bed had been a tad bit wider and the opposite wall and night stand not so close. I had no idea the human body would crumple like aluminum foil, but it will when slammed into a solid object with enough force.

I’ve been shot down twice and made better crash landing than that! I staggered upright, did a quick body check for form and function and found most of my parts still attached and operational. My jaw was a little tender from smacking into the nightstand so I wobbled it from side to side to make sure it was still hinged. When I brought my hand away it was bloody. I'd opened a gash that required a trip to Ireland Army Hospital and four stitches to close. When we finally got back to the house it was almost four in the morning. Nick and Ellie, our next door neighbors, who we woke up to watch the kids, were dying of curiosity. After telling them what happened I couldn't get Nick, an old retired soldier of W.W.II and Korean War vintage to stop laughing. Karin took the sheets off the bed that night, put them back in the boxes, and we didn't take them out again for twelve years. When we did take them out again it was to give them to a Captain and his wife along with a few words of caution. Here it is over forty years later and I still have no idea what it is like to sleep on satin sheets and don't really care if I ever learn.

There is an old Army saying about war stories that goes, “if you don’t have pictures---then it didn’t happen.” Well, I don't have any pictures but I still have the scar on my chin and the knowledge that I probably missed the best..................well you know what I missed that night.

Good heavens, if you believed the story then you have probably bumped your head. Ok the part about going to Bermuda and that I have bought a Nikon camera and don't know how to use it are true.

Sorry it has taken so long to reply. The reunion was indeed one heck of a time, but then get 1700 old Vietnam helicopter pilots together and it just naturally has to be a good time. It is amazing how our war stories get better with age and our bravery was almost limitless now that we are forty-seven or so years later. We were ten feet tall, handsome, and bullet proof back then or well we were ten feet tall and handsome anyway.

Only if you fought it the way I did in Vietnam.

Karin and I have been married a few months short of 50 years and we are almost past the "turn on" phase. We'll I am still in trouble with her over our last shopping trip. She wanted to get some new bras. The sales lady asked me what size and I said 38-long. Karin has not talked to for two days.

My only bias is that I bought a Nikon, but would be equally inept with a Canon, Sony, or any other model.