Got up and drove to Howard Prairie Lake near Ashland, stopping at a good store & bakery at Medford. The kids swam.
Marge Binder, July 22, 1969
Mom must have submitted her diary entry before the drama that unfolded later that night. My brother Tim, a gifted raconteur, was holding forth around the campfire after dinner, doing impressions, mimicking the Borscht Belt greats, “owning the room.”
At some point, he slung around and — phwoosh — off flung his glasses into the fire. While we all reacted in horror (and a bit of “what an showman!”), Tim went about trying to retrieve them. But they were already literally toast.
To a Binder boy, lost or broken glasses meant humiliation, like getting a C+ on a test (Tim was the exception to this analogy). Lost glasses was just one more piece of tinder to stoke our raging insecurities. Our childhoods were littered with such spectacles (pun intended), some involving snowball fights, scrapes at school or simple stupidity.
On top of the initial sting of loss, Tim would be blind for a while, until we were someplace long enough for lenses and glasses to be made — pretty much the remainder of the trip.
No matter, it was really funny. Mission accomplished, Timbo! You owned it!
Fun story: When I finally got contact lenses in 1978, I lost one before I even got out of the office. Must have been a sight (puns abound!) for arriving patients to see a half dozen nurses and admins crawling around on the floor.
Note the address: Dead Indian Road. Well certainly they’ve changed the name of that by now. Nope. It’s actually got a pretty significant history. You can learn about it here.
Marge Binder's Epic Adventure 