This picture of Alejandro Escovedo performing with David Pulkingham and Susan Voelz performing at the MFA last November has nothing to do with the following entry, but serves as a last warning for those who are squeamish.I cut my finger while preparing dinner last night. Nothing serious, I just bumped the back of my index finger with my excruciatingly sharp favorite knife. The cut was small but deep enough to start bleeding immediately. A curse on my part, and few tissues, blood droplets around the kitchen, a nice tight band-aid, and the bleeding stopped within 5 minutes, and I was back to chopping.
But it got me thinking. The boy who turns 14 in a couple has never really bled to any great degree. It may be due to the protected life he leads, and he is not a physical risk take. He has had a few skinned knees and bloody lips over the years, but nothing that require much more than a band-aid and certainly nothing that required stitches. I mentioned this to the boy, and he said that he didn’t see the need to change the situation.
I don’t care to change the situation either, but I remember back to my childhood and it seems to me that some one was always bleeding for some reason. Growing up in a family of 8 kids, with six being boys, perhaps the ratio per person was low, but added together it just seems like there was just lots more blood. Among my brothers, there are a couple of legendary events that required trips to the emergency room, which fortunately was just blocks from the house. There was the time when Pete was about four and he walked into the bedroom just as another brother kicked the door closed. Pete took the doorknob to the side of the head. Lots of blood and hysterical crying of course with the result being several stitches and a shaved spot on his head. Then there was the time Mike was playing in the woods across the street and fell on a broken coke bottle, it was one of those old thick green glass ones. He cut the palm of his hand pretty deeply, as I recall it took something like 13 stitches to close that one up. I recall that a couple of my brothers could produce a nosebleed at will. This was particularly useful in preventing themselves from being pounded to a pulp by their older brother (me). The blood would stop the fight without any real bodily harm actually being inflicted. (A side note: In spite of the sometimes knock-down-drag-out fights we had as kids, we are all very close as adults, even if our behavior is still childish.)
If it wasn’t our family, it was one of the myriad of other kids in the neighborhood courting disaster. Moe R. rode his bike down the ramp to their garage, unfortunately the door was closed at the time and he took the garage door handle in the mouth. (Moe was not considered the brightest kid on the block.) There were bloodstains on the concrete for days afterwards. Eddie K. stepped into Kirk A’s back swing with a 9-iron, taking the golf club at almost exactly the same location as Moe took the garage door handle. My recollection of that was mostly the resultant swelling and range of purple, greens and yellow that his face was for days after that. Lance R. who had mild cerebral palsy lost his balance walking from the garage to the patio and put his arm through the glass on the door. I don’t remember a whole lot of blood, but I do recall seeing all the tendons and muscles on the underside of his arm for that one. I there when that happened, and having been in Boy Scouts, I grabbed a towel and did the old direct pressure thing and brought him back over to his house. Again it was luck the hospital was just blocks away. I don’t recall anyone being permanently disfigured by these incidents, and with the exception of Moe, they were all just chance accidents.
As for myself, I never required stitches of any of my mishaps, but I did my share of bleeding never the less. My most memorable mishaps took place in 5th grade. There as a cul-de-sac on the block behind us, with a nice long sloping decline to it. Near the bottom, a neighbor kid had propped a slab of plywood against a concrete block making a crude ramp. I peddled my bicycle pell-mell down the maybe 100-yard length of the street and launched the bike and I into the air. The launch went fine, the landing not so much so. I think I tumbled entangled in the bike for another hundred yards before coming to a stop. I was bruised, scraped and lacerated, and bleeding from my scalp above my right ear. I somehow managed to peddle home before collapsing in tears at the back door, crying that I had cracked my head open, a fear of every boy of the 50’s and 60’s. I spent a day or two on the sofa after that one, and I can still feel the scar on my scalp.
Bicycles are a great device for providing cuts and other physical damage to kids. Another time while riding down the street, a friend riding along said’ Never try to steer you bike while crossing your arms and holding the handlebars.’ So, what did I do? Of course, I crossed my arms and grabbed the handlebars! The nearly immediate result was that I lost control and I found myself lying in the crushed rock on the side of the road. Arms were lacerated from taking the force of the fall. A word to the wise; the voice of experience, do not cross your arms and try to steer your bike!
There were numerous other incidents beyond those. I tended to lead with my head; I can find at least another 5 scars on my head beyond that previously mentioned. There was the time I didn’t duck low enough under the half-opened garage door, and took the front edge at my hairline, and the time I slipped on an area rug in my parents bedroom and connected my eyebrow with the cedar chest. That eyebrow has one other scar in it, and the other side eyebrow has at least one as well. I could go on, but my purpose here was not to list my entire history of bloodletting encounters, rather to illustrate that blood was an integral part of the growing up process when I was a kid.
So by my figuring, if the boy had been growing up at that time, there would have been a half-dozen times that he would have had bloodied himself by now. I think that they must find all their risk taking adventures in video games these days. Again not that I want him bleeding all over the place, but I wonder if he hasn’t missed out on some rite of passage.
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