A Thump on the Head

We all have those confounding moments. Times when you lock yourself out or lose a coffee mug in the house. Maybe you are like me and can’t type. I took typing in high school and bombed that, just like I blew a typing test for a job. I think my hands battle with each other. Maybe it is my brain that is the true battleground.

I am ditsy. I may not seem that way at first. My British ancestry must give me that polished image. My husband is mostly of Irish and Norwegian ancestry. His influence has freed me. The word “should” is seldom used here. We live on a play-by-play basis, I’d say. Ditsy is accepted. I know partly where it must have come from.

When I was about ten, I had a big thump on the head. My friends, male and female, and I lived in a place where new homes were being built. We spent all our free time making forts and swinging from vines across the creek. My house was just below a circle. Our band of trespassers had been constructing a lean-to, with lumber the contractors left after a job. Normally, we used whatever we needed. We used the bathroom outdoors too.

For some reason on that day, I jumped on my bike with a “See y’all later. I have to go potty!” I flew down Old Springhouse Lane like Lassie running to a near disaster. That is all I remember. Even to this day, it is a black hole in my memory as strange as being abducted by aliens.

Pure and simple, I wrecked. My sister had been playing with gravel just above our driveway. When I cut my front wheel to the left at that troublesome spot, I body slammed myself. Nobody saw me crash. I got up, dusted myself off and went into my house to use the bathroom.

My mother wondered why I was taking so long. When I think of this moment in time, I feel queasy. It’s a wonder I didn’t go in the bathtub. When my mother went in to check on me, I was babbling. That is, I just repeated the same sentence over and over, they tell me. Maybe she thought the body snatchers had found me. My family hunted down my band of friends and tried to solve the mystery. It was like television when the satellite goes down. They had to get my signals uncrossed.

So, a trip to the family doctor did the trick. I remember smelling salts. If more than that was needed to snap me back into reality, I don’t know of it. Today, there would be an M.R.I. and much more.  I am sure there was a pump knot on my head the size of Stone Mountain.

Kids bounce back fast as Bolo balls on a paddle. You know that wooden gadget shaped like a porkchop that has a rubber ball tethered to it by a long rubber band. In no time flat, the gang was back at it, building our Taj Mahal on an empty lot. We hunkered down in ditches like it was wartime. We threw red dirt clods at any invaders. Instead of blueprints we had pokeberry juice on our fingers.

The day we wandered out to the shack, to find every board gone was when the whistle blew. Construction workers were onto us. Things had to change. I had even snuck into a home almost completed and threw a paper wad onto a newly varnished hardwood floor. To this day I feel immense guilt about that stunt. Kids really know no boundaries unless they are prickly as barbed wire. We collected slugs, the metal kind. We were a menace in our subivision. In fairness, my parents were strick like most. Emerging subdivisions just seemed ripe with mischief, like the Wild West. The new frontier was such a temptation. In time the open spaces and uninhabited homes were done for. Much more than a just a loss of innocence, I think I lost something too.

My head was knocked to the ground like I was a blow-up punching bag. In this day and time, when I am forgetful, I wonder if I didn’t get rewired when I had my bell rung on that day. Truth be told, I have been ditsy from day one but the day of the bike wreck is a wrinkle in time for me. Maybe you have been there. If you go into the bathroom and don’t come out, there you have it!  Brain farts are regular as rain.