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"Making an impression
Dad always wanted to make an impression on us. He said so often enough and freely demonstrated the technique. It got a lot worse in Albuquerque, where he got even with the insects with double doses of Chlordane on the garden vegetables. He was too manly to take precautions.
Protracted neurotoxicity from chlordane sprayed to kill termites. K H Kilburn and J C Thornton
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1522193/
I could watch him cross a room, and he would yell, "What are you looking at me like that for! I'll give you something to look at!" Of course, I couldn't really see his belt whenever it was swinging in from behind. I was watching because I was afraid of him.
In one particularly memorable and spectacular red-faced, spitting rage, he screamed at the top of his voice, "I know you're intelligent, Don! I know you are! I just don't see how you're ever going to make it in life!" No kid between 12 and 16 ever forgets something like that.
The Favorite Son, the one Dad liked, has his ways of making an impression. His favorite jeer sounds like a particular sterile cross-breed of equine, which comes out in high-low pitch, "Now! Do-o-o-n!" He hated it in high school when his classmates applied the same sequence to him in the manner that Johnny Carson used to gently apply to a certain profane comedian named Lenny. But now it's his turn.
In the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, there's a Licensed Professional Counselor that likes to point out to people in doubt that if they have problems with a lot of other people, "Then who's the common denominator? It's you." She likes to make her impression on people who can't forget.
Now my Mom is old and less healthy, and wants her family to all get together and make nice for her. We should all just forget the past and get along. My inability to forget about it is a major stumbling block that makes her feel so bad. But it's kind of hard to get past things when everyone else is perfect and never has to have an adult conversation about it. For them, jeers have always worked so much better.
This, from the family who left me in the local loony bin, where the LPCs love, or at least feel duty-bound, to punish people for not seeing it their way. That if we are in any way tempted to suicide to escape all those lasting impressions and current failures, then it's just our personal responsibility to get over it. And of course, we should be feeling guilty for not shaping up.
They sure make an impression."
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