My childhood - at least before I started school, which is to say, first grade, which was the first grade of school I attended - was fraught with accidents. I was a clumsy, foolhardy child. At different times, I would drink alcohol I wasn't supposed to (thinking it was juice), I would run under teens playing basketball & get my ankle stepped on, or I would crack my head on the side of a table so hard & bloodily there's still a scar there (it's actually how I measure my receding hairline). I don't have many memories of these events, but they were fodder for "Gary is a dumbass" stories of my youth, so the stories themselves have been implanted in my brain.
One memory I do have involves a time - certainly I wasn't more than five - when I was playing in a sandbox in the apartment complex in which we lived. I was playing with trucks, I have a sense memory of moving a truck through the sandbox while I crawled behind it on my hands & knees - one hand, of course, maneuvering the truck. At some point, I got a big surprise - a piece of glass, from a broken soda bottle, had been hidden under the sand. I rammed my knee right into it.
The scar that used to be there disappeared with age, so I'm not sure whether it was my right or left knee. I do know I screamed bloody murder & there was in fact a great deal of blood. I was taken to the nearest hospital - probably the emergency room at Parkland Hospital - where I was seen & my knee stitched up. How many stitches? I couldn't see through the tears.
It's an indicator at the level of poverty in which I & my family lived that one could find broken glass hidden in a sandbox. I'm not insinuating that someone put it there deliberately. Rather, I think that broken glass was a commonplace. I'm sure if I could visit back there, I'd find our apartments lousy with roaches, I'd find lots of trash & litter all around (these were the days when soda cans had pull-off lids, & they were a hazard kids learned to avoid), not to mention cigarette butts. People in drunken frolic break glass. Some of that glass got into a sandbox. Some of the glass that got into a particular sandbox got into my knee.
It didn't deter me from sandboxes - there was another one at another apartment complex at which we lived that I played in all the time. But certainly those experiences, after a certain point, made me more careful. I didn't have any accident like that again in my childhood.
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