Brooklet Peanut Festival – 2010It always seems to be hot for the Brooklet Peanut Festival. This year the air temperature was about 84 degrees at 10:00 am with the humidity through the roof.
I got to Brooklet just as the parade was making the turn at the end of Main street.
Stayed for the parade and shot some video.
The peanut festival is a check in point for me each year.
Back in August of 2004 I was real sure it was just the heat taking all my strength away.
So what if I couldn’t walk from my house to the barn without taking a rest.
Nothing to worry about.
At the peanut festival that year I was able to shoot some of the parade for Coastal Sunrise and then do a walk-though of the festival area.
When it came time to leave I was hot, out of breath and so weak I had to find a shady spot to lay down. All the while I’m still telling myself, “it’s all right, nothing to worry about.”
No chest pains during any of this.
Back in the sixties when my dad was living with angina, there was a lot of pain.
My dad would pop a few nitro pills and attempt to go on with the day. I lost my taste for golf one day under the smokestacks of Union Camp on the Mary Calder course.
A regular group of golfing buddies playing a Saturday round when my dad says he is going to sit down and we will catch up at the clubhouse. He pops a couple of the nitros and after a few minutes we set out for the clubhouse. Through the woods. He didn’t want anybody to know what was happening so we go stumbling through the brush and woods with me practically carrying my dad. He is in crippling pain, I know this because his legs collapse each time another flash goes through .
I am skipping some details here, but after this point my telling of this story turns bitter, it’s enough to say dad survived and went on to be one of Dr Yeh’s early bypass patients at Memorial. During his recovery time at Memorial he and my mom became close to a nurse nicknamed Red. If you follow my Facebook page you may remember a nurse named Red from a post about a practical joke. Same person.
Back to Brooklet and 2004 – I’m laying in the shade, not in pain, just weak and out of breath, maybe a little dehydrated.
Having learned the wrong lesson all those years ago on the Mary Calder golf course, I’m thinking, you wimp, suck down some cold water and get off your ass.
Which is what I eventually do. Skipping some more details, I survived and went on to have a triple bypass at Memorial a few weeks later.
Never did have any chest pains, turns out a lot of people don’t.
I did have some startling symptoms. Lots of startling symptoms.
I am still stunned at how easy it was to deny it all.
That’s why I go back each year, to remind myself of the ease and allure of self deception, while celebrating survival with a bit of peanut brittle and cold soda.
It won’t hurt me.
