When I was 11, my family acquired one of those cheap-ass volleyball/badminton sets – the ones with the net made of twine only slightly thicker than sewing thread, and the posts made of a couple of pieces of sheet metal rolled into tubes, where the bottom one goes into the ground and the top one slides into the open top of the bottom one. We were attempting to erect the net, and determined that the first of the two bottom pieces of the posts needed to be moved after it had already been shoved into the ground. I set about attempting to pull it out, and was unsuccessful in my first few attempts. I repositioned myself so that I was straddling the post, leaned down over it, grasped it firmly with both hands, and proceeded to pull upward. This time I was successful – so much so that the post came straight up into my face – my upper lip, to be precise. Twenty-nine years later I still have a faint but visible crescent-shaped scar bisecting my philtrum.
Late one night when I was in high school, after everyone else in the house had gone to bed, I was working on scavenging parts from an old record player my mom had had since she was in high school. I’d attempted to make use of a whole subsystem intact (the amp, IIRC), but it wasn’t working, so I decided to give up and just take it apart to use the pieces. So I cut through the power cord with a knife just where it entered the power supply. But I forgot to unplug it first. Flash, pop, slice. The jolt from the current caused me to jump enough that I sliced open the index finger on my left hand. It also burned a notch into the edge of the knife blade and left me with a serious case of the shakes. The worst part, however, was that the circuit breaker was in a closet in my parents’ bedroom, so I had to wake them up and admit the stupidity of what I’d done. The scar on my finger is less noticeable than the one on my lip, but you can find it if you know where to look.
The other one, which was even worse, happened when I was four (and hence, I maintain, too young for it to be really considered stupid, though my family disagrees). I was staying with my grandparents while my mom was in the hospital following the birth of my sister. They lived in an old farmhouse way out in the country. Being in bottomland less than a mile from the river, the house was elevated about five or six feet off the ground, so that it generally stayed above the occasional floods. There was a large front porch with no side railings, painted in that battleship grey floor paint. I discovered that, with the thin film of dust that always covered it, the surface was fairly slick – slick enough that, in sock feet, you could run a few steps and then slide. On the day mom and baby sis were coming home, I was amusing myself in this way while my grandparents were standing around a car 20 yards or so away chatting with some other relatives who’d come by to visit. I took a few extra running steps to get even more speed up and then slid right off the end of the porch. I went more or less horizontal during the fall, and landed face up, with the breath completely knocked out of me and the back of my head against one of the bricks that lined the flower bed around the porch. To this day I have fairly vivid memories of laying there without enough breath to yell or cry, wondering how long it’d be before someone noticed me. Eventually they did, bundled me into a car and bumped over 5 miles of dirt road to the highway and then ten miles into town to the doctor, where I got the first (and so far only) stitches of my life – six of them.
