What I do remember from my early teen years is being the Den Mother for my youngest brother’s Cub Scout pack.
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I am a punctual person. I insist on being on time. It is part of my makeup and it bothers me if I am late or others I deal with (including family members) are not as punctual.

I have always had nice time pieces, dating back to my youth, when my grandfather (who owned a jewelry store in Toledo), gave me my first, with my name engraved on the back. After that one, it was usually a Timex, though I bought myself a Cartier Tank Watch as I became a successful tech sales representative.

Once I had my first baby, I stopped wearing the Tank Watch in favor of a plastic Swatch, which was water proof (my hands were always in water with the baby) and he liked to teeth on it. Voila; instant chew toy! But about 24 years ago, with children more or less grown and a house on Martha’s Vineyard, so lots of time at the beach, I wanted a nice, waterproof watch. I looked for something else, but my husband insisted on a specific type of Cartier (the last on the right below), which I wear every day. He had just bought himself a more expensive one.

During these two years of the pandemic, I kept my sense of days of the week by knowing what exercise class I would take on any given day. I had to sign up for each one. Even during the worst of the lockdown, I took classes via Zoom with two great teachers who taught through their gym about an hour’s distance from me (one had taught at my local gym and quickly established herself online). So I kept a sense of schedule.

That is until I injured my ankle on June 26, 2021. Then most forms of exercise ceased for me. Now I do lose track of days. It is frustrating and I feel unmoored.

But that was nothing compared to what happened on July 1, when my husband suffered much more severe injuries than mine. He collapsed twice on his way to the bathroom one morning on the second floor of our Martha’s Vineyard home. In a different story, I have already detailed the severity of his injuries (he has recovered nicely). But that morning, I sat in our kitchen, reading and typing at the computer, oblivious to what transpired a floor above me. I heard a thud, but thought he dropped something. About 20 minutes later, I got a text on my phone saying, “Betty, please come upstairs. I need your help”. I knew the text came from his Apple Watch because Dan knows my name isn’t “Betty”.

I came up and found what looked like a crime scene in the bathroom. I called 911, he was taken to the local hospital, examined, stitched up, then MedFlighted to Mass General. The quick reaction might have saved his life; at the very least, he wasn’t paralyzed. Among his many injuries, he had broken his C-1 vertebra, which supports his head.

This was the second time his Apple Watch saved him. The first time was on August 7, 2019. He had just finished a long bike ride with a friend and was returning to our home. He wanted to avoid traffic, so came through a residential, winding subdivision, full of speed bumps. He isn’t sure, but he thinks he reached down to grab his water bottle at precisely the moment when his front wheel hit one of those bumps and he went flying.

He doesn’t know how long he lay in the road unconscious. The Apple Watch can sense a fall, will send an alert, asking if you’ve fallen and need help. If you don’t answer within a few seconds, it will call 911. The ambulance knows where you are because there is a GPS tracker on the Apple Watch. Dan started to regain consciousness as he was loaded onto the ambulance. He had lots of road rash, bumps, bruises, a broken rib, and a small cerebral hemorrhage. This was his first helicopter trip to Mass General, to check on the brain bleed. If is got worse and he needed surgery, the small Martha’s Vineyard hospital could not handle it. He did not get worse and he was released the next day. The Featured photo shows his smashed Apple Watch from that accident. He is now forbidden to ride his bike outside (it was his third accident in two years).

The watch saved his life – twice!

He thought about this during his three months of healing last summer. He sent an email to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple (who makes his email address public). Dan thought this was news worthy. He got a polite response, but heard from an Apple marketing guy the next day. They chatted at length. Would Dan be willing to do media about his experience? Yes, he would. A short while later, he heard from Hiawatha Bray, the technology writer for the Boston Globe, who interviewed Dan at length, checked the veracity of the story with his doctor, and a lengthy story appeared in the Globe last August. I fear it is behind a paywall, but here is a sample of it.

More than a timepiece, the Apple Watch truly was a life saver! We have several friends who have purchased one based on Dan’s experience.

 

 

 

In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackelton and his crew sailed The Endurance to the Antarctic. It was crushed in the ice pack and sank in the Weddell Sea but all of her crew survived. Frank Hurley, the photographer onboard, captured incredible photographs of the entire experience.

My husband is fascinated by this story and has read at length about it, hoping some day to travel to that region. For his 70th birthday last May, our son David gave him a model of the ship to build.

As a middle-schooler, Dan made a wooden salad bowl that his mother used her entire life, and a set of shelves that even now resides in our basement. When David left for graduate school at Columbia, the two went to IKEA in Red Hook and bought the requisite furniture for his apartment, which Dan helped him assemble, but he had never undertaken a task like building this ship model.

This was not a beginner model. It came from Spain with limited instructions and no tools. At every turn, Dan discovered he had to buy more, or he made a mistake and had to try to undo something that was glued in place. He has invested hundreds of dollars in tools, paint, and other random items along the way so far. He keeps digging into my sewing kit for needles, thread and I’ve taught him the joys of a needle threader. He’s broken three so far.

His July 1st accident meant he was too injured to even begin. The basic sawing/sanding motion hurt his broken neck, but here is what the model looked like in early September, as he worked on the hull.

He packed everything up when he returned to Newton in November, set up work space in the basement (very happy this did not wind up on the dining room table – he dripped black paint on the basement carpet). He was obsessed. He would be there, working for hours each day. He set up his iPad so he could run a video of how the next step should look because the written instructions were so poor.

By Thanksgiving, it looked like this.

You can see the iPad to the right rear, paint can, glue, good lighting above the model. He estimates that he has 300-400 hours into the model. He continued to work right up until the time we left for London in early December. He wanted to have a good quality photo to show David how far he’d gotten and how much he appreciated the thoughtful gift. It also gave him something to do as his injuries healed. He hadn’t built the life boats or rigging, but had completed the rest of the ship by December 6, 2021, the day before we left for London for a month, to celebrate my birthday with our family and await the birth of our granddaughter.

With flags flying, she looks ship-shape. Some small part he ordered, which came from Australia, arrived while we were gone. Since we were not home to sign for the delivery (he had waited weeks for it – supply chain issues), it was returned across the world.

Now, he has hit the doldrums. He needed a few items, but they weren’t available at the local craft store. I drove the half hour to a sewing store to pick them up, but he hasn’t returned to do more work. It is unclear if he will. The ship looks great as is, and Dan says some people never set up the sails (which is complicated and delicate work).

So the model sits amid the tools, needles, thread, glue, paint and other paraphernalia…waiting for resolution.

 

When I was young, my older brother was a Cub Scout (wearing a uniform like the image I found online) during two elementary school years. Our mother was a den mother.

I remembered neighborhood boys trooping into our basement for meetings and activities. Earlier this month, Rick told me the meetings were at school and his fellow scouts were classmates. He ticked off unfamiliar names.

I had conflated memories of birthdays and Halloween celebrations with Cub Scout meetings. I never witnessed any, nor have any memories of them.

And our stressed-out, fragile mother would not let me be a Brownie.

 

//RetroFlash; 100 words