Throwback Thursday 14 July 2016 Absorbine Junior

 

This post is part of the meme, Throwback Thursday.  For this meme bloggers are asked to share a photograph, letter, poem, newspaper article, story, or whatever that inspires memories of the past.  Please join with us.

Absorbine Junior

When I was a very young boy of about four or five years old, I was playing in a wading pool at my Grandmother McClendon’s house in Johnston, South Carolina.

While in the pool, somehow I got attacked by several red bugs. Red bugs are larva that bury themselves in the body and live off of skin cells.

My father decided that the cure for red bugs, also known as chiggers, was to apply Absorbine Junior to the red bug.

Now, Absorbine is a horse liniment. It is a substance that creates chemical heat to warm the muscles of horses so they can work better. Absorbine Junior was developed to be a little weaker so that humans could use it.

As I said, my father decided that a good cure for the red bug was to apply Absorbine Junior to the red bug. He decided to start by applying the Absorbine Junior to a red bug that had buried itself in my scrotum.

As soon as he made contact with the applicator, it burned with an intensity I cannot begin to describe.  I cried and screamed.  My father put me back in the water of the pool to cool me off.  It did not help.

After about an hour of intense pain, the Absorbine Junior wore off and I began to return to normal.

My father apologized for this and I forgave him UNTIL he told the following story.

My father attended Newberry College in Newberry, South Carolina on a football scholarship.  He was very good at football.

One day, one of his teammates confessed that he had jock itch very bad and that he needed some relief.  My father told him that Absorbine Junior would cure the jock itch.  After all, one of its uses is to kill athlete’s foot fungus.  This sounded reasonable.

The trusting football player stripped and laid down on the bed, exposing himself.  My father took the cap off the bottle so that the Absorbine Junior could be poured out of the bottle.  He then poured the Absorbine Junior all over the football player’s jock area.

Absorbine Junior goes on feeling cool but soon begins to warm up.  As soon as my father had poured the liquid on the player, he headed for the door.  

Once in the hallway, he could hear that the liquid had now warmed up and the football player was in pain. The player got up and proceeded to chase my father down the hallway.

My father ran out of an open window - they were on the second floor - and onto the roof of the porch.  He climbed down off the porch roof and ran across campus.  Meanwhile, the football player was standing on the porch roof, naked as could be, yelling obscenities at my father.

When I heard that my father had to have known that the Absorbine Junior would burn me, I got very mad at him.  That was years ago and I can still remember the pain.

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The Parable of the Hot Dog Vendor

The Parable of the Hot Dog Vendor

Author Unknown to Me

There was this hot dog vendor who sold hot dogs by the roadside.  He was illiterate, so he never read newspapers.  He was hard of hearing, so he never listened to the radio. His eyes were weak, so he never watched television.

But, enthusiastically, he sold lots of hot dogs. His sales and profit went up. He used only the finest wieners and the freshest buns.  People came from miles around to eat his hot dogs.  All day long, the hot dog vendor would sing beautiful songs and sell his hot dogs.

He ordered more meat and got himself a bigger and better stove.  As his business was growing, the son, who had recently graduated from college, joined his father.

Then something strange happened.  The son asked, "Dad, aren't you aware of the great recession that is coming our way?”  The hot dog vendor replied, "No, but tell me about it.”  The son said, "The international situation is terrible. The domestic condition is even worse.  We should be prepared for the coming bad time."

The hot dog vendor thought that since his son had been to college, read the papers, and listened to radio, he ought to know and that his advice was not to be taken lightly.  So, the next day, the hot dog vendor cut down his order for the meat and buns, took down the sign, and was no longer enthusiastic.

Business got worse and the hot dog vendor stopped singing.

Very often, he ran out of wieners and buns so his customers had nothing to buy when they stopped by his stand and had to take their business elsewhere.

Very soon, fewer and fewer people bothered to stop at his hotdog stand and his sales started coming down rapidly.  He again cut his orders, switched to lower quality wieners, and used cheaper buns.

Business dropped even still and he stopped being friendly with his customers and talked only about how bad business was with the few remaining customers he had, which reminded them of how bad things were and made them begin to think that they, too, should cut back on their spending.

Soon the hot dog vendor was ordering so few wieners and so few buns that he did not have anything to sell to the very few remaining customers he had, so he closed the hot dog stand.

The hot dog vendor said to his son, "Son, you were right.  We are in the middle of a recession.  I am glad you warned me ahead of time."

The Moral of The Story

Never engage in self-defeating patterns of behavior. If you think that you will fail, or always only expect the negative or worst, nothing in this world can save you.

The preceding story was posted on the wall at my family’s Western Auto Store in Iva, South Carolina. 

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