The Cure

The Cure

“If ever there is a tomorrow when we’re not together…there is something you
must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem,
and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart…
I’ll always be with you.”
A.A. Milne

Mike Krupka is godfather of our girls. You know, the girls I have been posting about for years, who we took to their respective colleges to start their freshmen year this week. Mike will always be my friend, as he is one of my pals who gave me courage when my knees started to shake just a bit twenty-six years ago as I was contemplating asking my wife to marry me. That was an astoundingly good decision.

Quite a while back, I called Mike, and his lovely wife, Toni, answered the phone by saying, “Hi Hank.” Caller ID keeps me on my toes. “Hi Toni,” I said, as she apologized that she had the hiccups. It seems to me that as an adult I don’t get hiccups very often at all. But I noticed that children seem to get them a lot.

I asked Toni if she knew the cure for hiccups, and she admitted that she didn’t. “It’s very simple and always works, though it is a bit difficult to explain,” I offered.

This is how it works:

While standing, hold a glass of water in front of you in the normal fashion, as if you were just about to take a drink. Keep the glass upright as you bend way forward at the waist, as though you were going to pick up a penny without bending your knees.

Now, instead of drinking the water from the edge of the glass that is closest to your chest, drink the water from the opposite side of the glass or as we like to say in our family, “Drink the water upside down.”

As I described this to Toni she did it, and, in seconds, she said, “My hiccups are gone!”

It almost never fails, and I have no idea why. Maybe it’s because we believe it will work. And I don’t recall ever meeting anyone who knew this cure.

Later that day, I told my daughter Annie, she was about 12, about my conversation with Toni. I asked her if she knew that trick, and, of course, she did. I asked her where she had learned it, expecting her to credit me, but she surprised me and said she had learned it from Winnie the Pooh. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I had no recollection of that and argued the point pointlessly for a few moments, without changing her mind whatsoever.

Could it be that this is yet another example, when it comes right down to it, that she, and perhaps I, learned almost everything we really need to know from Winnie the Pooh?