This story is not for the squeamish or for the spleeny. I was in my mid thirties before I discovered that there is no such word in the English language as spleeny. I love the word anyway and I know my readers may recognize it as a synonym for squeamish. Parents used the word as an admonishment. “Don’t be so spleeny. Walk through that bed of hot coals. It won’t kill you. Don’t be so spleeny.”

Anyway I was talking with my older sisters Carol and Ella last Sunday and we were laughing about vaccinations in our school days. Guess the proper terminology is small pox inoculation. Every kid that grew up in the fifties or sixties can bare their upper arm and display a scar with a similar story. Every mom’s admonition was:

“Don’t pick at it or it won’t take.”

Course we scratched at the ensuing crusty scab that formed. It itched like crazy. Than subsequently a larger scab would form and voila, we have scar tissue a bit smaller than the crater left by the comet Kahoutic when it plowed into Arizona.

The process of vaccinating began in the basement of NH Fay with the local health nurse Janet Rines presiding overseeing long lines of students marching bravely up to a table that smelled strongly of rubbing alcohol. Debbie Burdin wrote a much more detailed recollection of the whole shot taking adventures.

When I was really young I thought Mrs. Rines in her white starched nurses dress and stiff brimmed nurse’s cap was to be called Mrs. Rhymes. Somehow that made her less menacing. She was kind enough and realized that getting shots is scary for kids. Vaccinations were coupled with other dreaded childhood shots. It was a happy day when oral polio vaccine came to our little town.

For small pox there was no real syringe involved. It was more a scratching process that resulted in a red puffy inflamed area on the upper arm at first, than the scabbing, than the scratching than the crater that we proudly display to our kids today.

There always were those sheep like students who actually followed through with the advice of not picking at the vaccination. You know the kids. Same ones who took vitamins drank orange juice got plenty of sleep, got good grades et cetera et cetera. Invariably, those saints would rub their shirtsleeve or blouse sleeve across the scab and pow-scar tissue that they still alibi occurred, not from disobedience but from an act of nature outside of their mortal control. I can’t swear to this, but I think I’d rather hang around the pickers. What about you?
-Fred