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StoryWorth: I Did It Myself!
Dec. 28th, 2018 05:37 pmDid you have any serious accidents as a child?
The parsonage that I grew up in had a concrete porch with cast iron railings all around it. From pictures I know that it was all wooden when my parents and sisters moved into it, several years before I was born, but somewhere along the line my dad must have convinced the church to replace it with a more modern solution.
For my third birthday I received a beautiful purple tricycle with a white seat and white handles with plastic fringe hanging from them that would flap around in the breeze of my cycling. I loved that tricycle and would ride it for hours. Unless someone was around to supervise me (and carry the tricycle back up the steps) I was only allowed to ride it on the porch. The way my mother phrased this rule was "Never ride your tricycle off the porch," which I interpreted to mean "Do not ride your tricycle down the steps," and since she said it so often, I decided that it must be a fun thing to do.
So one sunny day I got as much of a racing start as I could in six feet of porch and launched myself down the steps. I can't actually remember the sensation of tumbling, or landing, and the pain has long faded from memory as well. What I remember was my mother standing over me, looking down in horror.
With the resilience of childhood I had avoided breaking any bones, but I had scraped all the skin off the right side of my face, bitten my tongue so hard that the skin sloughed off, and knocked both of my front teeth out. Well, not quite out--they were dangling by the roots.
My mother grew up on a tobacco farm in rural North Carolina during the Great Depression. Going for the doctor was an hours long drive and I'm not sure where the nearest hospital was back then. So despite having medical care much closer to home, she still tended to take care of anything she felt she knew how to handle.
She pushed my teeth back up into the gums, picked the gravel out of my face, washed and bandaged me up, and put me to bed. Miraculously, the teeth returned happily to their beds, and my face healed eventually.
But before it did I decided, in the way of small children, to take control of my appearance. One evening while I was lying under the marble-topped coffee table in the center of the living room, where I could play without being underfoot, I took my safety scissors and hacked away several inches of my hair all over the top of my head.
Mom said that going to the grocery store after that was a real treat. People would look at me, my face banged up, my teeth at odd angles, my hair sticking up at every angle and look askance at my mother, who could only shrug and say "She did it herself!"
The parsonage that I grew up in had a concrete porch with cast iron railings all around it. From pictures I know that it was all wooden when my parents and sisters moved into it, several years before I was born, but somewhere along the line my dad must have convinced the church to replace it with a more modern solution.
For my third birthday I received a beautiful purple tricycle with a white seat and white handles with plastic fringe hanging from them that would flap around in the breeze of my cycling. I loved that tricycle and would ride it for hours. Unless someone was around to supervise me (and carry the tricycle back up the steps) I was only allowed to ride it on the porch. The way my mother phrased this rule was "Never ride your tricycle off the porch," which I interpreted to mean "Do not ride your tricycle down the steps," and since she said it so often, I decided that it must be a fun thing to do.
So one sunny day I got as much of a racing start as I could in six feet of porch and launched myself down the steps. I can't actually remember the sensation of tumbling, or landing, and the pain has long faded from memory as well. What I remember was my mother standing over me, looking down in horror.
With the resilience of childhood I had avoided breaking any bones, but I had scraped all the skin off the right side of my face, bitten my tongue so hard that the skin sloughed off, and knocked both of my front teeth out. Well, not quite out--they were dangling by the roots.
My mother grew up on a tobacco farm in rural North Carolina during the Great Depression. Going for the doctor was an hours long drive and I'm not sure where the nearest hospital was back then. So despite having medical care much closer to home, she still tended to take care of anything she felt she knew how to handle.
She pushed my teeth back up into the gums, picked the gravel out of my face, washed and bandaged me up, and put me to bed. Miraculously, the teeth returned happily to their beds, and my face healed eventually.
But before it did I decided, in the way of small children, to take control of my appearance. One evening while I was lying under the marble-topped coffee table in the center of the living room, where I could play without being underfoot, I took my safety scissors and hacked away several inches of my hair all over the top of my head.
Mom said that going to the grocery store after that was a real treat. People would look at me, my face banged up, my teeth at odd angles, my hair sticking up at every angle and look askance at my mother, who could only shrug and say "She did it herself!"
