Old So What

  Wasn’t I lucky? Actually NO.   The polio shot itself and what I may have caught as a germ of polio caused me to contract the disease. That’s what the doctors thought.  I will never really know. Did the shot contain live polio?  Again, I will never know. Other children around this time, who had gotten the Salk Vaccine shots, contracted the disease, too. If it was because of the same reason. Well, guess along with me. Where I lucked out is that my doctor (a specialist) put me in the hospital, and in traction immediately.   I couldn’t even go home first to get anything such as books or clothes, or playthings. Because the Children’s wing was full up in the local hospital, they put me in the lounge, on an adult floor, with a public telephone booth, so I was usually not alone. Mostly it was boring and despite the booth, lonely.   I especially missed being around other children. (I was eleven.) Before I continue, perhaps I should explain that “tr...

  What a juicy name! (I want to get a dog and name it Yakutsk.) Yakutsk, Siberia, Russia. Where it’s cold, the temperature regularly falls below -58F/-50C in January. (But can go to +86F/+30C in summer.) This is the coldest city in the world. So cold that they put the water pipes above ground. And there is a tour of the permafrost museum. (Permafrost is the frozen layer of soil, sand, gravel and ice, which as the name suggests is permanently frozen and is just on or just under the Earth’s surface.) Yakuts are the indigenous people (about 450,000 of them) who are smart enough to survive here through the conquest of most obstacles that would stop the rest of us in our tracks, and with the ample employment of fur: reindeer, muskrat and fox. Dress warm for Yakutsk when visiting October to April.