Accidents Happen

I thought I could count on one hand the number of memorable accidents, cuts, scrapes, breaks, bruises I'd had while growing up. Without asking my parents or my sister for suggestions, the list stands at a pretty tepid six. A few things don't make the list, and the ones that do are nothing terribly spectacular, no repeated hospital visits, no accident-prone falls down staircases or ladders or grade school roofs, but a good thing to inventory nonetheless.

Here is the sum total of all my childhood mishaps:

1. When my parents brought me home from the hospital, my older sister, all of twenty-one months, welcomed me to the family with a swift punch to my head. I don't think there was any permanent damage.
2. Camping trip to Montana with Dad, Jane, and big sister. I'm two hands old, plus or minus a couple of fingers. Flathead Lake. I want to say that we were visiting with some college friends of Dad's, or maybe one of my step mom's relatives. There was a cabin on the hill, and a couple of other kids. Water-skiing was to be on the agenda later in the day. Summer, lazy, so hot it hums.

   There was a chase. A contest. There was a contest between the kids to see who could make it to the dock first. Oh, yes. A shortcut appeared between the pine trees, the shine of the lake straight ahead while the other kids took the zig and zag of the long gravel driveway. I'm running and ducking and weaving, but I've got the beeline. I've got the advantage.

   When trees grow next to steep drop-offs, roots will sometimes become exposed. This one formed a kind of hook that was low to the ground, but not so low that my foot didn't catch it. Balance was lost. I went ass-over-teakettle down the embankment.

   I landed on the driveway. Tiny pebbles embedded themselves in my hands. Skin peeled away from both knees. Believe me, the low steady hum of summer gave way to an ear-piercing scream. Which wasn't nearly as bad -- shocking, instantaneous pain -- as what came later with tweezers and peroxide and expectation. At least I'd been given a hand towel to bite into.

   Needless to say, I watched the water-skiing from shore.

3. Lots of hills growing up in Seattle. Even though I haven't been to the childhood house (long since sold) in well over ten years, and I can't remember street names or numbers, the mental map is still clear: it walks me along the pipeline at the back of Nelson Jr. High, past the daycare Laura and I attended for years, across the street, past Cascade Elementary, then there's the hill, down, right at the T intersection, first left, first right, follow the street up and around to the middle of the block.

   But that's walking. Riding my back home from school is a slightly different path, because you want to get on the road, instead of the rumbling gravel of the pipeline path. You're flat for a little while as you pedal away from the grade school, but you know the hill is coming, and it's a good, short, steep one, so you pedal faster so you can coast downhill. Maybe there's a baseball card attached to the front spokes with a clothespin and you hit the top of the hill and you're a dirt bike, dropping down, not pedaling anymore, tucking, aiming for the corner (right at the T intersection), hoping you can blow through the stop sign because then you shouldn't have to start pedaling again until you get to the slight uphill to get you back home.

   Except for one day you're alert enough to notice that there's a car backing out of the driveway at the bottom of the hill. You don't panic. You're cool. But you brake hard enough to make sure you stop well before the driveway.

   And this is where you learn your first important lesson about inertia. A body in motion will continue in motion, or some shoot like that, which simply means that your bike stops but you don't. Hands are gripped firmly on the handlebars. Everything pivots on the front tire. You, the back tire, everything gets lifted up and over. Your bike isn't much worse for the wear, but your nose is smashed and bloody after it hits the pavement.

4. Second grade? Third grade? Maybe third. For some reason I'm hanging out after school with one of the cool kids. He's probably no more than a year older than me, but he's got a skateboard, and he's older, and he's the cat's meow. He's Arthur Fonzarelli to my Richie Cunningham.

   The layout of the school isn't all that important except for the fact that the playground -- the asphalt covered play area with basketball hoops and four-square courts, just next to a couple of baseball fields -- was slightly downhill. Nothing huge, but more hills. A recurring theme that I didn't think existed.

   So I'm gonna be the cool, kid, right, and the shortest version is that I'm all experienced and cool (that's just a little white lie, between you and me) and I can ride that board right on down that little hill because that's the kind of thing I do in my sleep (another harmless little untruth).

   The longer version is that I had enough balance to make it to the bottom of the hill. Problem was that I'd picked up some pretty good speed by that point, and I wasn't sure how to stop. Somewhere in the middle of that nice stretch of asphalt, I flopped. My right arm flopped harder than the rest of my body. When I looked at it later, I could see two bones that were in places I didn't expect them to be, just below the inside of my wrist.

   It didn't hurt. I didn't cry or scream or run. But you should've seen Joe Cool. He was absolutely freaking out. We're walking back up the hill together and he's asking me what I'm gonna do, suggesting -- seriously f***ing suggesting -- that I just walk up to a wall and hit it in the other direction so the bones go back where they're supposed to belong.

   You're not gonna tell, he asks. Whaddya gonna say? Whaddya gonna do? More concerned that he might get busted than about my busted arm.

   He drifted off into the permanent role of bit player in the story of the only broken bone(s) in my life, while I steadily (in shock, no doubt) marched to the office, where my arm was wrapped in a makeshift splint consisting of the Yellow Pages and lots of twine.

   I only remember two other things about that broken arm: it itched like crazy, and when we visited my cousins in California that winter, my cast was wrapped in a plastic bag that didn't really keep the water out very well, but helped exacerbate the unbearable itching during the drive back up I-5.

5. Across the street from my grade school was the day care where Laura and I spent countless hours. Single working mother, in the seventies, both sets of grandparents one state away. I'm pretty sure Mom didn't let us stay home alone until Laura was at least thirteen. But this one isn't all that significant anyway, except that it was my first (and only, at least until Lancaster) ambulance ride.

   There was this great play area at the daycare. Swing sets and a couple of basketball hoops where we would pretend to be the Sonics versus the Bullets (everybody fighting over who got to be Jack Sikma), and just past that, stretching the length of the day care, a wide field about the size of a football field, surrounded by a low chain-link fence. The woods probably aren't there anymore, but neighboring trees spilled through the fence and were allowed to create a small wooded play area just next to the grassy field.

   Whenever we played Capture-The-Flag -- which we did quite often in the spring and summer, when we weren't idolizing local basketball players -- the coin toss was mostly to determine which side of the field you got. It was much easier to defend the flag in the wooded section then the barren grassy open field.

   So one day I'm on the side without the advantage of the woods. We're strategic. We're crafty. We've got over half their team in prison, and time is running out for outside play, so we decide to rush the other team. Somebody's gonna get the flag.

   But the other team is crafty, too. They've decided to make up for their lack of players by using the natural defenses of the terrain. Or, as it applies to my childhood injuries, some anonymous kid had decided to bend back the low branch of a tree, waiting until some anonymous somebody (me) made a foolish attempt for the flag.

   Not only did the branch knock me flat on my ass, but it cut into the skin just above my right eye. There was a lot of blood. I held both hands firmly over both eyes, probably crying unintelligibly. I doubt that I was willing to move my hands an inch, even while the staff at the day care pleaded with me to see what had happened. Faced with a kid who was covering his eyes with bloody hands, they quickly called for an ambulance.

   There were stitches, but no permanent scars.

   I remember thinking it was pretty cool to be driven to a hospital in an ambulance. I don't remember much about the actual stitching process.

6. Both of my daughters think this last one is hilarious. Only eclipsed by the story about Auntie Laura causing serious damage to her knees after she ran into a tree while skiing, with me unable to explain to my parents where she was any better than a weak gesture up the mountain, up there somewhere.

   Ahh. The humor of decades old pain.

   Laura and I are tossing a baseball back and forth in the back yard. She played C. Ferociously proud of her ability throw out runners trying to steal second, she never wanted to practice with a softball. I played CF, and was equally proud of being able to make the throw to home without needing to hit the cutoff man. Suffice it to say that we chucked the ball pretty hard to one another. If your palm stung when you caught the ball, you wanted to be able to sting back. Accurately. Off-target balls were bullshoot.

   This day, Laura and I both remember clearly, we were sent outside in order to not disturb Mom. She'd already managed to put herself through school while raising two kids alone. I'm not sure what it was that she was working on or studying for, but I distinctly remember our collective reluctance to disturb her after the accident.

   It goes like this: I call timeout. I'd like to say that I shouted it, made it so obvious that my sister couldn't have missed it, but the truth is that I probably just muttered "time" under my breath so I could quickly tie my shoe and get back to playing catch.

   My sister had an absolute cannon of an arm when she was thirteen.

   "Watch out!" she yelled, after she realized that she'd thrown the ball back to me while I was still bent down over my laces.

   Did I mention accurate? To be required to move your mitt was the greatest insult. If you're gonna throw from home to second, or from center to home, the least you could do was be on target with your throw.

   It all happens in slow motion.

   It's hilarious.

   Laura yells at me to watch out.

   I don't know what I'm supposed to watch out for, so I straighten from my crouch. Still one knee down, one foot flat on the ground, loose laces halfway tied, but my back is straight, head up, ready for anything. Maybe it would have been better if Laura had yelled "Duck!" because then I wouldn't have been watching out for the baseball that clocked me but good.

   The accurate, hard-thrown baseball hits right where my mitt would have been, directly at my right eye. It's a good thing there's bone there. Bone immediately above the eye, nose, cheekbone. A triangle that absorbs the impact. Bruising was immediate, I'm sure.

   Both of us were more worried about breaking the news to Mom -- disturbing whatever work she'd been focusing on -- than assessing the damage. I stood out of sight on the back porch while Laura rapped on the sliding glass door, trying to get Mom's attention. Once she had it, though, we were quickly off to the hospital.

   Beyond the obvious humor of the warning that turned into the reason for the injury, the story is also memorable for the response from the late-seventies doctor after examining my X-rays. Sexist piece of shoot. First, he told us, there is no way that a girl could throw a baseball so hard to cause this kind of damage. Second, why on earth would a girl be throwing a baseball anyway? Third, Mrs. Brown (Ms, thank you very little), is there anything you'd like to tell me, off the record, about this particular injury?

   Ask either Mom or Laura about my black eye, and to this day they'll get pissed about the arrogant doctor and his assumptions about both of them. Me? Great shiner. Too bad I was too young to parlay it into a little sympathy from members of the opposite sex. That would come later, while playing Ultimate at Carleton, taking a Frisbee in the face that was meant to go about 60 yards past my head.

That's it. Black eye. Cut on the forehead. Two broken bones in my wrist. Broken nose. Wicked skinned knees and gravelly palms. An insignificant blow that illustrates very early sibling rivalry. Maybe a few more, here and there, certainly, but nothing, really.

Nothing but nothing.