Top 10 Events To Date Involving Some Type of Injury to My Head and/or Face
I've had the dubious pleasure at several points in my life of enduring fairly significant damage to my cranial area. Fortunately, none of these events was life-threatening. Still, many of them left physical and mental scars. They are memorialized here in a rough approximation of chronological order. If I managed to switch the sequence incorrectly, I apologize. It's probably, you know, brain damage.
1. Teeth through the bottom lip
My longest standing scar stems from the primordial infant days before memory. A seemingly innocuous fall resulted in my two bottom chiclet teeth piercing a through-and-through hole in the soft tissue between my lower lip and chin. The laceration became a bloody, second mini-mouth that needed to be sutured shut. For a brief time, I imagine it looked a little like Kuato:
Ooopen your miiiiiinddd....
2. Earthmover of doom
When we moved to our home in West Bloomfield, MI, we were the first house on the block. For much of my early memories there, the neighborhood was in various states of construction.
On a scouting excursion with my brother, we happened across a mud-encrusted earthmover. Surrounded by splintered lumber and concrete ready-mix detritus, I spied a misshapen cement meteor. I decided to put that meteor into orbit, plotting a trajectory aimed at the huge tire on the front right of the rig. I learned a hard physics lesson that day. The boulder described a harmless arc at the solid rubber wheel, but gained terminal velocity as it shot directly back at my forehead. Flames of atmospheric re-entry burned white-hot. I can still hear Jeff knowingly howling "nooooooo" as the rock left my hands.
The behemoth rock blew be straight back, flattening me to the ground. Within seconds, my screams resounded off every tree, foundation and frame. Within minutes, my forehead ballooned to hydrocephalic proportions. Here's a photo of me shortly after the accident:
I believe this event is responsible for the quarter-sized mound of scar tissue still visible in bas relief above my left eye.
3. Crack the wall by the bathroom door
During one of countless domestic disputes, a seemingly harmless push from my brother resulted in me making an indelible impression on the wall next to our shared bathroom. Imagine cracking the shell of a hard boiled egg and you get a picture of the fractured imprint left in the drywall. And my braincase. That ding stood as an enduring, Alamo-like testament to my never-ending torment for years to come. Remember the wallll...
4. Ding in the TV speaker
Not long after the infamous wall cratering event, a playful (I'm sure) back-of-the-head push from said brother during a TV commercial break left yet another mark on my psyche. And family hardware. Seeing as how I watched television from nose-length, even the slightest forward momentum was bound to do damage. This day, some portion of my shouldertop anatomy with the diameter of a pencil eraser plunged into the gold, plastic grill that covered the TV's sole speaker, leaving a visible depression for all to see. If I had smashed into it only a few inches higher, the lightning bolt Zenith logo would've been emblazoned across my brow and I could've made a career as an over-aged Harry Potter impersonator. Alas, this was not my fate.
5. Shattering the cousins' sidewalk
On a rare trip to our cousins' home in Mansfield, Ohio, I recall happily playing football in their front yard with Jeff and our cousin, Pete. Taking an errant step, I plunged to terra firma...also known as the impossibly hard sidewalk. I erupted into tears. To this day, I'm not sure if my head really broke the two-foot-square section of concrete, or if my brother's incredulous claim that I fragmented the ground was an opportunistic attempt to quell my mounting hysteria. Coincidence or not, it worked. I was amazed at the destructive power of my own cranium. That day, the damage my iron head could mete out began taking on mythical proportions.
6. Rabbit gnashes my head.
Dead of winter. Yellow VW Rabbit. Dirty, snowplowed street. Me, backseat. Jeff, front passenger, Mom, driving. On the left, we pass the new Gerald Ford Hospital on the outskirts of town where my class will soon be taking a field trip.
Me: "Hey, I want to go see the new hospital."
Jeff: [Insert aspersion here]
Me: [Insert needling taunt here]
Mom: [Insert exhausted warning here]
Me: [rolling on back seat after poking at Jeff]
Jeff: [turning toward back seat to tickle and/or slug me]
Me: [giggling and rolling off backseat onto floor]
VW Rabbit: [plunging exposed seat rail into back of my head]
Blood: "Make for the windows and the ceiling!" *gurgle, spray*
Me, Jeff, Mom: [turning 180 degrees to visit Gerald Ford Hospital]
I still recall the sensation and sound of having my head shaved around the gash and the pillowy resistance of the large white bandage placed over it.
7. Blindsided at the bus stop
Our bus stop was at the corner of Patrick and Culpepper Roads in the front yard of someone's home. During the winter months, the collection of 10 or 15 kids who met there would build forts from the residual, brown snowslush left behind by the snowplows. Many a morning witnessed snowball fights of varying intensities.
By January, the snow fort was more or less a pint-sized Everest. We each took our turn playing king of the hill and being the target of countless frozen projectiles. This morning, the projectiles were all-ice and rock-hard. After descending from the hill during my brief stint as royalty at altitude, I got blindsided by an ice boulder twice the size of my head. I'm talking a Yeti's gall bladder. I was knocked off my feet – the quintessential 'ass over elbows' moment.
The experience was totally disorienting – enhanced by the fact that it t-boned my ear, making everything sound like it was underwater. I confronted that awkward sociophysical recovery every kid is challenged by. Not wanting to cry, and too little to fight, I tried to laugh the whole thing off. As I looked around, half the kids were oblivious and half the kids were laughing with Lord of the Flies vengeance in their eyes. I stood there, stunned, like Piggy with his brains in his hands, wondering if I did something to deserve the blow or if I was the recipient of random malice. I never did figure that one out.
8. Double-decker forehead whammy
After-school afternoons were anyone's game. But I rarely came out on the winning team. After playing "Where's mom?/She's dead." and "Come ON!/Where are we going?" Q&A for thirty, frustrating minutes or so with Jeff, most afternoons rapidly escalated into cat-and-mouse hostilities.
This day, I found myself on my bed, flat on my back, with Jeff sitting on top of me. Whatever meager provocation I offered resulted in an improvised game of mumbly-peg fisticuffs. I roll my head to the left, Jeff punches pillow to my right. I roll my head to the right, he punches pillow to left. And so on. Faster. Until I get the great idea to double juke, quickly reversing direction. I was rewarded with a punch square in the middle of my forehead. Apologies, interspersed with "you big dummy, why did you change it?", did little to assuage my sorrow.
Seeking solace away from my brother, I went to our Doberman, Liebe, for comfort. Normally a kind and compliant creature, Liebe apparently took exception to me cuddling with her this afternoon. Maybe it was the throbbing, Fred Flintstone lump protruding from between my eyes. Whatever the cause, Liebe proceeded to bite me on my forehead, immediately on top of my previous contusion.
I ran around the house for a few hours decrying the galactic injustice visited upon me. When my mom came home from work, she found me with a two-tiered lump square in my forehead. Head-on, I probably looked like a runt rhino with a crimson horn. Like someone had baked a wedding cake bruise between my eyes. Like my brother and dog conspired to sculpt a fleshy chess bishop from the soft tissue that stood as the only protection between my brain and a cold, indifferent world. GOD, my suffering!
9. Brained by the Mexican bully
Fast forward to high school. Arizona. During my freshman year, I suffered a brief stint as the P.E. class whipping boy. Barely five-foot-two and probably 130 pounds, I suffered a few weeks of hazing and de-pantsing in the locker room. (I also recall a somewhat sympathetic Senior reassuring me that "it would all end as soon as I grew hair on my ass." Such good fun. Anyway, to the head-cracking.)
One day after changing into our gym gear, as we stood awaiting our teacher's arrival, some three hundred-pound Mexican guy who was purportedly in his fifth or sixth year of high school put me in a headlock and joked aloud that I was a helicopter. Who knows how his dammed stream of consciousness formulated the gag, but it manifested into him spinning me around with my head clamped underneath his fetid armpit. Next thing I know, what I believe to be an early period bell is actually the top of my head ringing the metal tetherball pole. The force of the blow popped me backward out of his vice. I don't recall falling down, but while I stood there with the trolley in my head going clang, clang, clang, I vividly recall the "Oh, shit!" expression on said Mexican's face as he tried unsuccessfully to disappear into the crowd.
I think that morning was among the last of my days as the Phys Ed lickspittle. My dues were paid in splintered skull.
10. MetroCenter mauling
The one element missing from all of my previous injuries was a healthy dose of sexual humiliation. Beyond physical pain, pubescent opprobrium is so much more enduring.
One fine day, while walking at sufficient distance behind my mother so as to indicate to passersby that I was coolly independent, I exited the main entrance of the MetroCenter shopping mall. This entrance abutted the new social epicenter of the Eighties...the Food Court. The place for high school kids to see and be seen. Not particularly wanting to be seen with my mother, or by anyone for that matter – what with my scrawny, big hair, gangly-limbed, velour-adorned, brace-faced form hardly inspiring admiration or lust in the minds or loins of any contemporaries – I set eyes to ground and tried to quickly run the gauntlet of teenage girls with their Def Leppard hair and budding breasts as inconspicuously as possible. I failed miserably.
Crossing the street immediately in front of the endorphin-stirring ingenues, my averted eyes failed to steer me clear of impact with a large, yellow metal bar. The bar crunched right across my nose and mouth. In a reflexive moment in time, (think Matrix bullet-cam) I threw the stack of packages in the air, grabbed my face, girls roared with laughter behind me and the sound of my impact echoed with clarion resonance.
But it gets better.
My mother turns to the sound of church bells that was my teeth striking metal and immediately breaks into embarrassed laughter. Let me assure you, nothing soothes the mangled spirit of a 13 year-old boy like his own mother joining a group of girls in a chorus of mocking laughter. You could practically hear the the hormones draining out of me into a lifeless puddle in the parking lot.
Picking up the scattered parcels I threw to the ground moments prior, I stormed to the car with my mother apologizing amidst stifled giggles. Throwing the boxes in the trunk, I put my fingers to my front teeth – my lips bloodied after being pureed by my braces. My eyes shot wide as I whined loudly between wiggling thumb and forefinger, "My tooth ith looth! My tooth ith looth! Are you happy?!"
A red letter day.
Still, I have made it to age 38 in one relative piece – body and soul intact. I have a soft spot in my heart for all these memories. And, undoubtedly, several in my head.
1. Teeth through the bottom lip
My longest standing scar stems from the primordial infant days before memory. A seemingly innocuous fall resulted in my two bottom chiclet teeth piercing a through-and-through hole in the soft tissue between my lower lip and chin. The laceration became a bloody, second mini-mouth that needed to be sutured shut. For a brief time, I imagine it looked a little like Kuato:
Ooopen your miiiiiinddd....
2. Earthmover of doom
When we moved to our home in West Bloomfield, MI, we were the first house on the block. For much of my early memories there, the neighborhood was in various states of construction.
On a scouting excursion with my brother, we happened across a mud-encrusted earthmover. Surrounded by splintered lumber and concrete ready-mix detritus, I spied a misshapen cement meteor. I decided to put that meteor into orbit, plotting a trajectory aimed at the huge tire on the front right of the rig. I learned a hard physics lesson that day. The boulder described a harmless arc at the solid rubber wheel, but gained terminal velocity as it shot directly back at my forehead. Flames of atmospheric re-entry burned white-hot. I can still hear Jeff knowingly howling "nooooooo" as the rock left my hands.
The behemoth rock blew be straight back, flattening me to the ground. Within seconds, my screams resounded off every tree, foundation and frame. Within minutes, my forehead ballooned to hydrocephalic proportions. Here's a photo of me shortly after the accident:
I believe this event is responsible for the quarter-sized mound of scar tissue still visible in bas relief above my left eye.
3. Crack the wall by the bathroom door
During one of countless domestic disputes, a seemingly harmless push from my brother resulted in me making an indelible impression on the wall next to our shared bathroom. Imagine cracking the shell of a hard boiled egg and you get a picture of the fractured imprint left in the drywall. And my braincase. That ding stood as an enduring, Alamo-like testament to my never-ending torment for years to come. Remember the wallll...
4. Ding in the TV speaker
Not long after the infamous wall cratering event, a playful (I'm sure) back-of-the-head push from said brother during a TV commercial break left yet another mark on my psyche. And family hardware. Seeing as how I watched television from nose-length, even the slightest forward momentum was bound to do damage. This day, some portion of my shouldertop anatomy with the diameter of a pencil eraser plunged into the gold, plastic grill that covered the TV's sole speaker, leaving a visible depression for all to see. If I had smashed into it only a few inches higher, the lightning bolt Zenith logo would've been emblazoned across my brow and I could've made a career as an over-aged Harry Potter impersonator. Alas, this was not my fate.
5. Shattering the cousins' sidewalk
On a rare trip to our cousins' home in Mansfield, Ohio, I recall happily playing football in their front yard with Jeff and our cousin, Pete. Taking an errant step, I plunged to terra firma...also known as the impossibly hard sidewalk. I erupted into tears. To this day, I'm not sure if my head really broke the two-foot-square section of concrete, or if my brother's incredulous claim that I fragmented the ground was an opportunistic attempt to quell my mounting hysteria. Coincidence or not, it worked. I was amazed at the destructive power of my own cranium. That day, the damage my iron head could mete out began taking on mythical proportions.
6. Rabbit gnashes my head.
Dead of winter. Yellow VW Rabbit. Dirty, snowplowed street. Me, backseat. Jeff, front passenger, Mom, driving. On the left, we pass the new Gerald Ford Hospital on the outskirts of town where my class will soon be taking a field trip.
Me: "Hey, I want to go see the new hospital."
Jeff: [Insert aspersion here]
Me: [Insert needling taunt here]
Mom: [Insert exhausted warning here]
Me: [rolling on back seat after poking at Jeff]
Jeff: [turning toward back seat to tickle and/or slug me]
Me: [giggling and rolling off backseat onto floor]
VW Rabbit: [plunging exposed seat rail into back of my head]
Blood: "Make for the windows and the ceiling!" *gurgle, spray*
Me, Jeff, Mom: [turning 180 degrees to visit Gerald Ford Hospital]
I still recall the sensation and sound of having my head shaved around the gash and the pillowy resistance of the large white bandage placed over it.
7. Blindsided at the bus stop
Our bus stop was at the corner of Patrick and Culpepper Roads in the front yard of someone's home. During the winter months, the collection of 10 or 15 kids who met there would build forts from the residual, brown snowslush left behind by the snowplows. Many a morning witnessed snowball fights of varying intensities.
By January, the snow fort was more or less a pint-sized Everest. We each took our turn playing king of the hill and being the target of countless frozen projectiles. This morning, the projectiles were all-ice and rock-hard. After descending from the hill during my brief stint as royalty at altitude, I got blindsided by an ice boulder twice the size of my head. I'm talking a Yeti's gall bladder. I was knocked off my feet – the quintessential 'ass over elbows' moment.
The experience was totally disorienting – enhanced by the fact that it t-boned my ear, making everything sound like it was underwater. I confronted that awkward sociophysical recovery every kid is challenged by. Not wanting to cry, and too little to fight, I tried to laugh the whole thing off. As I looked around, half the kids were oblivious and half the kids were laughing with Lord of the Flies vengeance in their eyes. I stood there, stunned, like Piggy with his brains in his hands, wondering if I did something to deserve the blow or if I was the recipient of random malice. I never did figure that one out.
8. Double-decker forehead whammy
After-school afternoons were anyone's game. But I rarely came out on the winning team. After playing "Where's mom?/She's dead." and "Come ON!/Where are we going?" Q&A for thirty, frustrating minutes or so with Jeff, most afternoons rapidly escalated into cat-and-mouse hostilities.
This day, I found myself on my bed, flat on my back, with Jeff sitting on top of me. Whatever meager provocation I offered resulted in an improvised game of mumbly-peg fisticuffs. I roll my head to the left, Jeff punches pillow to my right. I roll my head to the right, he punches pillow to left. And so on. Faster. Until I get the great idea to double juke, quickly reversing direction. I was rewarded with a punch square in the middle of my forehead. Apologies, interspersed with "you big dummy, why did you change it?", did little to assuage my sorrow.
Seeking solace away from my brother, I went to our Doberman, Liebe, for comfort. Normally a kind and compliant creature, Liebe apparently took exception to me cuddling with her this afternoon. Maybe it was the throbbing, Fred Flintstone lump protruding from between my eyes. Whatever the cause, Liebe proceeded to bite me on my forehead, immediately on top of my previous contusion.
I ran around the house for a few hours decrying the galactic injustice visited upon me. When my mom came home from work, she found me with a two-tiered lump square in my forehead. Head-on, I probably looked like a runt rhino with a crimson horn. Like someone had baked a wedding cake bruise between my eyes. Like my brother and dog conspired to sculpt a fleshy chess bishop from the soft tissue that stood as the only protection between my brain and a cold, indifferent world. GOD, my suffering!
9. Brained by the Mexican bully
Fast forward to high school. Arizona. During my freshman year, I suffered a brief stint as the P.E. class whipping boy. Barely five-foot-two and probably 130 pounds, I suffered a few weeks of hazing and de-pantsing in the locker room. (I also recall a somewhat sympathetic Senior reassuring me that "it would all end as soon as I grew hair on my ass." Such good fun. Anyway, to the head-cracking.)
One day after changing into our gym gear, as we stood awaiting our teacher's arrival, some three hundred-pound Mexican guy who was purportedly in his fifth or sixth year of high school put me in a headlock and joked aloud that I was a helicopter. Who knows how his dammed stream of consciousness formulated the gag, but it manifested into him spinning me around with my head clamped underneath his fetid armpit. Next thing I know, what I believe to be an early period bell is actually the top of my head ringing the metal tetherball pole. The force of the blow popped me backward out of his vice. I don't recall falling down, but while I stood there with the trolley in my head going clang, clang, clang, I vividly recall the "Oh, shit!" expression on said Mexican's face as he tried unsuccessfully to disappear into the crowd.
I think that morning was among the last of my days as the Phys Ed lickspittle. My dues were paid in splintered skull.
10. MetroCenter mauling
The one element missing from all of my previous injuries was a healthy dose of sexual humiliation. Beyond physical pain, pubescent opprobrium is so much more enduring.
One fine day, while walking at sufficient distance behind my mother so as to indicate to passersby that I was coolly independent, I exited the main entrance of the MetroCenter shopping mall. This entrance abutted the new social epicenter of the Eighties...the Food Court. The place for high school kids to see and be seen. Not particularly wanting to be seen with my mother, or by anyone for that matter – what with my scrawny, big hair, gangly-limbed, velour-adorned, brace-faced form hardly inspiring admiration or lust in the minds or loins of any contemporaries – I set eyes to ground and tried to quickly run the gauntlet of teenage girls with their Def Leppard hair and budding breasts as inconspicuously as possible. I failed miserably.
Crossing the street immediately in front of the endorphin-stirring ingenues, my averted eyes failed to steer me clear of impact with a large, yellow metal bar. The bar crunched right across my nose and mouth. In a reflexive moment in time, (think Matrix bullet-cam) I threw the stack of packages in the air, grabbed my face, girls roared with laughter behind me and the sound of my impact echoed with clarion resonance.
But it gets better.
My mother turns to the sound of church bells that was my teeth striking metal and immediately breaks into embarrassed laughter. Let me assure you, nothing soothes the mangled spirit of a 13 year-old boy like his own mother joining a group of girls in a chorus of mocking laughter. You could practically hear the the hormones draining out of me into a lifeless puddle in the parking lot.
Picking up the scattered parcels I threw to the ground moments prior, I stormed to the car with my mother apologizing amidst stifled giggles. Throwing the boxes in the trunk, I put my fingers to my front teeth – my lips bloodied after being pureed by my braces. My eyes shot wide as I whined loudly between wiggling thumb and forefinger, "My tooth ith looth! My tooth ith looth! Are you happy?!"
A red letter day.
Still, I have made it to age 38 in one relative piece – body and soul intact. I have a soft spot in my heart for all these memories. And, undoubtedly, several in my head.
Labels: Total recall
posted by JabberDrew at 11:54 PM
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