Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

1. born thirsty

I was seven or eight months old — a creeping, crawling carpet crab — when my father came home for lunch one day and found me covered with blood.

At least, my father, bellowing in horror, believed it was blood. It wasn’t. My mother had briefly left me unattended — always a mistake: even as an adult it’s been risky to leave me without supervision — and in her absence I’d attempted to drink a bottle of mercurochrome, spilling in the process a fair amount of it down the front of my sweet little white flannel baby gown.

One doesn’t see mercurochrome much in these days of various antibacterial ointments, but there was a time when it — cherry red, better smelling and less stinging than iodine — was widely used to sterilize and succor minor cuts, scrapes and scratches. Why was I drinking it? Someone once commented that I have a great thirst for knowledge, to which I replied, “What the hell? I’ll drink anything.”

As proof, in the months following the mercurochrome fest, I also drank ink (symbolic, perhaps?) and Little Bo Peep Household Ammonia. Ammonia is poisonous, so I doubtlessly swallowed no more than a sip before being repelled by its powerfully astringent aroma. Ah, but the intent was there.

My innate, raging, and indiscriminate thirst nearly came to an end, and my life along with it, at age two.

I’d toddled into the kitchen, lured by the smell of something sweet, chocolaty, and, yes, liquid. The source of this attractant was a pot of cocoa steaming furiously on the stove. Never one for formalities, I, on tiptoes, reached up, seized the handle, and yanked the boiling pot off the burner, emptying in the action its contents onto my chest.

There was no emergency room: this was Appalachian North Carolina in the middle of the Great Depression. The one and only local doctor washed the burned area — and then, not too cleverly, tightly bandaged it. A few days later, my mother, concerned by my high fever and obvious pain, removed the dressing. All the flesh on my chest came off along with it. Not merely the skin but the meat.

At the hospital in Statesville, some seventy miles away, I took up residence in an oxygen tent, my mother in a boardinghouse across the street. At one point, the attending physician telephoned Mother to tell her that I was dead. She picked up the phone after the first ring, but no one was on the line. In the meantime, you see, a nurse had run up to the doctor to say she thought she’d detected signs of life, so he’d immediately hung up to investigate.

By the time my frightened mother, alerted by the dropped call and propelled by maternal intuition, rushed into the ward, I was officially relisted on the scroll of the living. Still in critical condition, mind you. But sleeping peacefully. Probably dreaming of my next adventure in drinking.