Dispatch No. 6
A mauled cornea and dress shoes
From the archive : Falling Backward | Pioneers | Selective Immortality
Missed something? Sketchbook | Stories | Dispatches
Squeamish? Without kids? Skip to the next section…
Cornea scalping
Getting children dressed has been described as drying an alligator with a hand towel. I can confirm. The solution, parents are told, is to make doing mundane things a game. So, the other day I had my 3yo act out different animals like, “wiggle your toes like worms into the socks” or “be an underground mole and come through the opening in the shirt.” These excited pantomimes seemed to be working well. Until they didn’t.
Somehow I got the bright idea to say, “jump into your pants like a kangaroo.” Gleefully, he did. What happened, though, was a split-second of windmilling arms – with a talon on each. The jump was a failure, instead he hit me in the eye. Not just a poke but an unkempt, razor sharp fingernail slashed through the air and, with John Wick-like precision, nicked my eyeball.
Men wince if someone mentions a graze to the testicles – but, man, I’m telling you – I’d trade a punch to the junk for the pain of a scratched cornea. For two days I could feel a handful of broken glass under my eyelid, crunching with each blink.
ER. Cipro. Low light. Rest.
Luckily, eyes heal fast and I’m now able to see write again. I’m a little behind but, don’t worry, I have a doctor’s note.
And one from my 7 month old —
*Wailing for a toy I’ve taken away*
“Hold on, daddy has to clean—“
More wailing
“…it has spit-up on it…”
Wailing stops
(How does he understand this already?)
Basketball
When I was eleven my sister drowned. She was 3, the age my oldest son is now. It was a tragic event that sent ripples through my family. If you ask, it probably still does nearly fourty years later. My memories from when it happened are spotty: my father leaping over a locked gate, a helicopter landing in the street, a long ride to the hospital, a trembling cup of coffee in my grandfather’s hand, my sister’s body wrapped in a blanket, her hair wet, lips blue. These are the flashbulb memories I have of that day. Then, poof. Nothing. Like a projector light flickering dark at the end of a movie.
The other day I had a memory flash from after the graveside service. It’s a damp, fall day with people milling about and flowers around our house. But that’s not the part I remember first – I remember a basketball game. I see the bougainvillea-lined court beside a Methodist Church and…dress shoes. There, in my memory, are a handful of us lobbing a basketball around the court in our Sunday best. They’re dark-dressed shapes of people without faces frozen in a free throw, a layup. I don’t think it at the time but, now, as the memory comes and goes, I’m pondering why we’re there at all? I like basketball as an abstraction, but never played much. A year later I try out for a school basketball team, one of twelve boys in my class, but won’t make the cut. So, why, in the midst of this upheaval, have we chosen to tromp down the street and play basketball in funeral attire?
I suppose the answer was to take our mind off things. Who would have told us differently? Like a gentle touchstone of the known world when so much else was topsy-turvy. A pause. A respite. As if someone knew there’d be time after sinking a few hoops, or decades later, to try solving the puzzle of how things might have been different “if only…”
I don’t know who suggested it, and I don’t know where the basketball came from – we didn’t own one – but it did take our minds off things for a while.
Books-on-Tap
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut. The John Malkovich audio version is so quirky the New York Times wrote an article about it.
Mesoamerican Mythology - Matt Clayton
Collected Stories of Jessamyn West - Jessamyn West
Things I’m reading on Substack:
Next Draft by
— I feel like I’ve been getting the best news and commentary from Dave for years. By the looks of the faded, dirty Next Draft sticker on my motorcycle it has been years. But, unlike the sticker, Dave’s writing hasn’t lost its shine one bit.
BIG by
– You know all those big monopoly cases the FTC has been running down? Those are Matt’s beat. And his ability to summarize the cases and logic from both sides is unparalleled. In my, sometimes, day job as a consultant for product development companies these stories float through the halls and having BIG as a way to get caught up quickly.
"Like a gentle touchstone of the known world when so much else was topsy-turvy. A pause. A respite." Today, more than ever, it seems, we can all use a touchstone, a break from what is happening around us. This image of those confused boys and grown men in suits bouncing that ball at a funeral seems so right, J.