...I’ll get back to the bullies a little later, but for now, I need to touch on something I mentioned earlier—concussions. Seems like I was born to test the limits of how much damage a small boy could do to himself without actually dying. Looking back, it’s a wonder I made it out of childhood at all.
The first big scare came when we were still living in Midland City. We had this big ol’ magnolia tree in the yard, with low-hanging branches perfect for a five-year-old with no sense of self-preservation. This was during the golden age of Superman on TV, and I was absolutely obsessed. I wanted to fly so bad I could taste it. One day while Mama was in the kitchen cooking, I tied a beach towel around my neck like a cape and ran around the yard pretending to be the Man of Steel. But just running wasn’t cutting it—I needed to take flight.
So, up the magnolia tree I went, all full of courage and bad ideas. I don’t remember exactly what I thought would happen next, but the next thing I do remember is waking up in my bed, my mom and dad staring down at me like I’d just come back from the dead. Turns out I’d slipped and fallen from the tree. That towel I’d tied around my neck got snagged on a branch, and I was literally hanging there by my neck, limp and silent. By some miracle, Mama happened to glance out the kitchen window and saw me dangling there like a rag doll. She sprinted out, got me down, and somehow I lived to tell the tale.
But that wasn’t even the first time I got knocked out in that tree. Nope. That magnolia and I had a complicated relationship. I loved to climb, and I wasn’t afraid of heights—not then, anyway. One day I was way up in the branches again, probably higher than I had any business being, when the limb I was standing on just gave out. I came crashing down, limb to limb, like a pinball in a wooden machine. My head caught more than its fair share of branches on the way down, and I finally landed in the dirt, out cold.
Again, Mama was at the kitchen sink—our house must’ve been built so that she could keep one eye on dinner and the other on the backyard mayhem. She saw me fall and ran screaming out of the house, thinking I was dead for sure. Same scene: I woke up in bed with no memory of what happened, a goose egg on my head, and the worst case of nausea I’d ever had. Daddy had come home from work early and rushed me to the little hospital in town, where I spent most of the day in la-la land. That was my first real concussion.
The second one came years later when we were back in Leeds, living in the Rew Development. Our street was more like a shortcut for big rigs and delivery trucks than a quiet neighborhood road. We saw everything from poultry haulers to soft drink trucks rumbling past the house on a daily basis. It wasn’t unusual to find crates of live chickens spilled out on the roadside after a sharp turn or sudden stop. One time, my sister Lisa actually caught one and kept it as a pet for a while. That chicken lived in our yard like it belonged there.
Anyway, one summer afternoon, me and my sisters Janet and Lisa were out front when a Coca-Cola delivery truck rolled by and somehow dropped a large metal canister—one of those big compressed CO₂ tanks they use to carbonate soda. It just rolled off the truck and landed in the ditch like it was nothing. Well, it didn’t take long for us to drag it into our yard. The thing looked kind of like a scuba tank, with a heavy metal lid on top held in place by a big threaded collar.
Now, you’d think there’d be some kind of warning label on it, but if there was, I sure didn’t see it—or didn’t care. I stood it up, started turning that collar, and gas began to hiss out. No big deal, I figured. I kept unscrewing, and then—BAM—the lid blew off like a cannonball and smacked me right between the eyes. I flew backward and hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.
I wasn’t out for too long that time, but long enough to wake up to the sound of my sisters screaming and crying and talking about how much trouble we were all gonna be in. And they weren’t wrong. Daddy didn’t yell, but he gave me a long talk that stung worse than a spanking. Told me I “should’ve known better,” asked, “what were you thinking?” and reminded me just how easily I could’ve been killed—or worse, hurt one of my sisters.
Of course, that wasn’t the last time I did something stupid that ended with a hospital visit or a lecture about using my head. But those stories are for another day.
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