Another Infamous Fan Incident
There was another infamous fan incident involving Paul and me. The small fan was not a window fan, but a room fan. Designed to sit on a table and to blow the air either across the room, or up toward the ceiling when it was laid on its back. Paul had gone to the kitchen and returned with a package of saltine crackers. We were having a few when Paul got the inspiration to feed a cracker into the fan blades. The first one shot out of his hand and was dashed to chunks against the table. He reached for another, mumbling “Too hard, have to go real easy”. The second cracker was carefully fed into the whirling blades and was slowly ground into a fine dust. “Hey, that was cool” I said, “Let me try one.” So for the next fifteen minutes or so, we happily fed crackers into our new, insatiable, grinding machine, which chewed them up and spat them out with an efficiency that would have impressed a team of German engineers.
The thing you have to appreciate is that when children do things like this they become so focused on the process that they tend to be oblivious to the product. Paul and I were completely absorbed with the action occurring right at the point of impact. The very neat and somewhat amazing job the fan blades were doing with each cracker was the acme of precision workmanship. We never even bothered to look up, let alone foresee, the absolutely obvious results. Finally after the last cracker in the package had sacrificed itself in the name of… science, entertainment, the general increase of human knowledge… In any event we finally beheld the consequence of our activity. The Mohave Desert never held as much dust as our mother’s living room did right then. I looked over at Paul; he was frozen in place with a permanent expression of "oooh" locked on his face. The dust was everywhere. There was a coating on the windows, the walls, the tables, chairs, sofa… even the edges of the pictures on the walls. The entire room looked like a reenactment from the opening scenes of The Grapes of Wrath. Wrath being the operative word.
Mom had an uncanny timing when it came to Paul and me. There she was walking up the steps to the front door just as Paul was telling me I was nuts if I thought we could clean it up before she got home. Mom had been to the neighbor’s house to enjoy a visit and a cup of coffee or tea. She was returning home to start cooking supper. Mom was never really surprised by anything Paul or I did. I mean, hey she might have teetered on the edge of sanity more times than Edmund Hillary teetered on Everest, but she was smart, and a realist. Whenever she returned to the house after having left us there she knew that it wasn’t a matter or “if” we had done something, but more a matter of “to what extent” we had done something. It’s the biggest reason she’s my hero today. My mom is the domestic equivalent of a GI who fought the entire Pacific campaign armed only with a pan and a bag of clothespins (okay, admittedly she did posses a larger arsenal than I have portrayed here: wooden spoons, yard sticks, coat hangers… but I digress) and only succumbed to shell-shock twice.
Anyway, Mom hit the door, saw the mess, hit us, hit the door again, came back and hit us some more, back to the door, back to us, shouted that we were going to clean up every grain of dust, realized we were abjectly incompetent, and would only make things worse if we tried. She then changed her mind and sent us to our room, following us all the way with threats of death, shame and beatings, not only from her and my dad, but even a few neighbors she promised to invite over for the ceremonies. By this time though, Paul and I had spent enough time in the Japanese P.O.W. camp that we were desensitized to it all.
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