Waiting Room Amusements

To capture an alligator, straddle it’s back, reach under it’s lower jaw, and pull up — “So’s you bend it’s hed way back”.

“Them gators’has got powerful jaws for snapping shut, but a gator ain’t got that strength for to open it’s mouth up wide,” said the young man, tall, rail thin, tough and flexible as a steel cable.

How to subdue a gator, how to know when one may attack (they grunt), how to avoid the whipping tail and the “gator death roll” are some of the things I learned from a young man in the waiting room while my eldest daughter was undergoing a procedure to reduce the pain from nerve damage in her arm.

If I recall correctly, this was the third or fourth time in the past couple of years I’ve waited outside the surgery while doctors have tried this. She faces still more operations in the future.

Few places on earth provide fewer amusements than a surgical waiting room.

There’s no way to get comfortable in such a spot.

For a while I talked about art, and her days as an art student in New York City, and her cute cat tee shirt business, with my daughter-in-law, Helen, (caution: revealing bath photo on that link) who drove me over there and waited with me. She also helped me with several computer problems.

But reading her Harry Potter book absorbed her.

The young man who fell to talking to me was bored out of his skull, so he began telling me how he had worked on this farm up in Georgia where the owner raised alligators “fer meat, heds ‘n hides”.

To move one that doesn’t want to be moved, once you pull the gator’s head up and back, a partner circles it’s snout with duct tape or a wire loop and places a strip of tape over the creature’s eyes. You secure the legs then, if you need to kill it, use a boom stick (I’m not sure if that’s a shotgun shell on a pole or an icepick-like spear) to sever the gator’s spinal cord.

“You don’t wants to break the skull ‘cause that messes up the hed then you cain’t sell ‘em,” he said.

You cut the gator’s throat and hoist him up on a fleshhook to drain the blood.

“You hose ‘em down the hide to clean ‘em, then lift ‘em up on a cart and take ‘em over to the women. They’uns cut the hed clean off, skin ‘em out and butcher up the meat for the freezer… I learnt all that stuff,” he said.

He told me all about feeding gators, capturing ones that get loose, and about the time his boss (on purpose? inadvertently?) locked him in a pen with 50 or 60 hungry gators.

After that, “I quits that place. My Mama didn’t raise no fool”. He came down to Jacksonville to earn his living doing yard work; he’s enrolled in a trade school to learn welding. “They’s good money in that”.

I learned a lot from our waiting room conversation. I never knowed any of that stuff ‘bout gators afore. I kept looking this kid in the eye and thinking, Here is a man for whom Christ died, just like me. This guy is immensely valuable. Important! Precious!

I wish this young man every success in his welding school; I wish him joy in his new life without gators.

With all our talking, I only got to read a few pages of the book I’d taken into the waiting room to amuse myself.

I carried a reprint of the Sermons of Samuel Ward of Ipswich, first printed in 1636. This is not the same Samuel Ward who wrote the diary I’ve been editing; this is the other guy, the wrong guy, but I’m tracking him down too just for the fun of it.

Hey, what else is there to do in a waiting room but wait, watch the fish circle the aquarium, wait, talk to folks there, wait, amuse yourself as best you can, and wait?

I just realized something — Were I able to pronounce the words as Samuel Ward of Ipswich did 400 years ago, I’d bet the young man from Georgia would understand those sermons better than I do!

The vocabulary, speech cadences, colloquial expressions, idioms, and contractions of deep-woods Crackers and the people of Southern Appalachia have strong roots in Elizabethan English. Ward’s sermons would strike a cord with them.

But, if your tastes run toward neither gator raising nor 400-year-old sermons, but you’re inclined in a more modern bend, I follow the blog of a Church of England reader named Pete. His daughter, Karen, was one of the first people ever to comment on my blog and I got to know him through her. His last post links to a sermon he delivered last Sunday.

I think he has something important to say and he says it well.

Wonder if they have gators in England?

Oh yes, my daughter came through her surgery fine — until next time.

Then you’ll find me in the waiting room again.