As a mother, I think the thing I worry about most is something bad happening to my child. I managed to get myself into all sorts of scrapes and scratches and predicaments as a kid. I was a master tree climber as well as being the best carver in the neighborhood. I was often hired, for a few pieces of candy or simply bragging rights, to climb high up into the ancient maple tree in our front yard and carve in someone’s name, or two names of two kids who liked one another, or an “I’m going to kick Larry’s ASS” message. I never once, in all the years I climbed, fell out of a tree. I jumped out once from the very, tippy top of a pine tree at my grandmother’s house. Pines are great because they’re so easy to climb. They’re just like climbing a ladder, except sticky. I had stood up quickly and proud and not just a little snotty-looking, and yelled down to my little brother from high above the yard, me aloft and bouncing on a pine branch, “See!!! I TOLD you I could do it!!” Right at the end of my sentence, as if to truly punctuate my statement, I stuck my head right into a hornet’s nest. They swirled out around me in a furious buzz and got stuck in my long hair, stinging me all over. Panicked I did what any right minded person would do. I jumped. My uncle swears both ankles should have been broken and might have been had I not hit the ground running. He tackled me and threw me into the nearby creek dunking me under the water over and over until the hornets lost interest and left the scene of the crime.
I was fantastic at getting hurt. Still am! Once, my friend Kelly, who was a bike trickster, showed me how, if he shoved his foot, just so, into and under the front fender of his bike while moving, he could pop the back wheel of his bicycle off the ground like he was riding a bucking bronco. I had never seen anything so neat. I tried and tried but couldn’t get the hang of it. Later that week I was riding down the huge hill on the street next to my house when it hit me. Speed! I hadn’t been getting enough speed! I jammed my sneaker under the fender and instantly catapulted myself into a series of somersaults ending in terrifying silence with me staring up at the sky spitting dirt and blood out of my mouth while trying not to cry. I was a bloody mess and couldn’t walk very well but the mortification of how stupidly I had performed the trick got me back on my feet. I stumbled home, pushing my busted up bike, limping the whole way on a foot with surely broken toes. After all, I had unceremoniously jammed them into a bike fender of a bike traveling at god only knows how many miles an hour. I was too scared to actually get back on my bike and ride it so I pretended to all my awed and horrified friends that I was sure the bike was busted but good and I ought to get it home and get it fixed so I could try that awesome trick again. Fat chance.
I managed to draw blood even while inside my own house being somewhat supervised. The first time I decided to try shaving my legs I waited until everyone in the house had been asleep for at least two hours. I snuck downstairs and quietly retrieved my mother’s razor from the bathtub shelf. I smoothed on shaving cream and gently scraped a four inch by 1/2 inch slice of skin from my shin. Blood was EVERYWHERE. I had no idea that much blood was even IN my body. Was I going to bleed to death??? After going through an entire roll of toilet paper trying to stop it I finally went and woke my mother. She was justifiably pissed.
“I thought I told you you were too young? I thought I told you that once you start you can never, ever stop!! What the HELL were you thinking?”
“Mom. I TOLD you. I look like a GORILLA. No one is ever going to want to kiss me with legs like this!”
“Good!!!”
My being accident prone (a.k.a sometimes stupid and/or clumsy) didn’t stop when I got a little more grown up. In college I drunkenly ran up the stairs to my apartment wearing my much loved Birkenstock sandals. The front of my right shoe hit the front of the stair, but my toes extended out over the stair, then bent all the way back as the shoe dropped and my toes caught the step breaking all the toes on my foot. Not having my wits about me (a.k.a. being inebriated) and having a party to host, I limped up the stairs, hardly breathing I was in so much pain, drank more gin, walked to the bar a half mile away, drank more gin and woke up with a blackened, swollen foot which no shoe could hold. As I had no insurance, I did what daddy taught me. I fixed it all up with duct tape and hoped for a good turn-out in the end. Hell, it worked for my bike.
I don’t know; these all feel like really great memories. Still, looking back at all this, maybe I’m right to worry so much about my kid’s safety. After all, look at the DNA that poor kid is carrying around.
No comments:
Post a Comment