Preface To Sand: A Sad Sandbox Story

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.