[Granny and me, August 1972]When I was two years old I rubbed noses with a giant dog named Thor that bit my face. I had to get stitches on the inside of my mouth and I still have a little scar above my lip. At some point every young man learns that it can be difficult to walk with your pants down. Before I’d even turned two years old my father built a small wooden block for me to stand on so I could use the Big People’s Toilet. Seconds after my first successful effort, I tumbled into the bathtub where the cold water spigot slashed open my temple less than a quarter of an inch from my right eye. More stitches. Another scar. Imagine my parents standing in the bathroom doorway, proudly observing their toddler’s accomplishment and in a flash the mood shifts to abject horror as the kid topples into a tub that’s rapidly filling with blood gushing from his face. I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I tried to walk with my pants down.
When I was around 6 or 7 my sister was riding her bike down the street with me as a passenger on the back of the bike. I fell off the bike and into a ditch where I broke my leg. It would be impossible to enumerate every bicycle accident I suffered as a child. One particularly memorable wipe out was at the end of my street when I slid sideways through a 15-foot long smattering of gravel. My leg wasn’t cut very deep. There wasn’t a lot of blood. But a good dozen or so pebbles had been forcibly wedged up under my skin as my leg scraped across the surface of the road. My dad was on his bike just a few yards away. He came over to console me and make sure I was alright but his face turned white as a cotton ball when he saw those rocks embedded in my flesh. He told me I was gonna be alright, but as I recall he didn’t sound too convincing.
One time on a family trip to Tennessee I got to ride on the back of my Uncle Bobby’s motorcycle. Afterwards he said, “Don’t touch the muffler. It’s very hot.” I wasn’t a very bright kid. After being told what not to do and exactly why, I ended up spending the rest of the day with my hand buried in a bucket of ice. In my memory I have always considered those family trips to Tennessee as some of the best times of my childhood. But in retrospect it now seems like each vacation involved some kind of injurious personal trauma. Walking with a group of my cousins through a vast field one afternoon, I was advised to “watch out for the electric fence”. So, you know, I’m looking for a FENCE. Like a chain-link fence with posts and a gate or whatever. A goofy kid just bouncing along through a grassy field with his cousins is neither looking for nor likely to see a single wire draped randomly across the horizon. I walked right into it and I can still hear my cousins laughing. I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I walked through a vast field of tall grass.
That might have been the same afternoon that a group of us went horseback riding and my horse decided to bolt for the border at the speed of lightning. Off I went, bounding over hill and dale on a bareback horse, just clutching onto its mane and neck, eyes bugging out of my head, and probably wimpering and wailing in unhinged terror all the way to Birmingham it seemed like. That horse heeded me not one wit, only gradually slowing to a nice leisurely pace when it grew weary of the high speed dash through Appalachia. When the horse finally did slow down, he and I were a good two miles or so from where we had started out. I had no idea where I was or where my cousins were or how to find my way back to them. It’s a miracle they found me and when they did it was almost nightfall. I guess I could have dismounted and walked back. But, you know: Vast field. Tall grass.
Though it hardly qualifies as a childhood injury, it was during one of our family visits to Tennessee that I was briefly bedridden with some kind of mysterious illness. At the time, my parents thought I had a bad cold or the flu. So they bundled me up in big wool blanket and rested my head on a feather pillow but it just made me feel even more miserable. I couldn’t breathe. My throat itched. My eyes were puffy and red. My nose was completely stuffed up. Sometime later we found out that I’m allergic to wool and feathers.
I used to love to go fishing with my Granny. But it took me a while to really get the hang of it. Let’s face it: Any kid who can immediately embrace the skewering of a live worm onto a fishing hook is likely a child with some cruel emotional issues. To this day I still can’t impale a worm on a fishing hook in order to engage its services as bait. I’m still convinced I will eventually figure out a way to tie the worm in an inescapable knot around the hook. On my very first fishing trip with Granny she reeled in a 2-foot long large mouth monster of a fish that sent me running off into the woods where I ran face first into a tree.
I think I was around eight years old when I jumped into a swimming pool backwards and slammed my chin on the pool’s edge, knocking myself unconscious. When I awoke, I was seated on a table with a huge crowd of concerned faces gathered around me and a strange man looking at my chin. This man was a doctor who recommended that I be taken immediately to the emergency room. In my mind I still have a very vivid memory of a doctor’s hands working a needle and thread through my flesh, sewing shut the big hole I’d sliced open under my chin. Got a big scar to show for that one, too.
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