Hello again! I would like to apologize to my single-digit followers for my absence, but as it turns out, grad school is pretty life-consuming. Case and point: I live about 10 miles away from my sister and am lucky if I get to visit with her once a week.
Thankfully, though, my fellow classmates in the Forensic Science program are enjoyable to be around; this is especially good news since I am with them about 12 hours a day. The dynamic is so good, in fact, that we often derail from studying to tell jokes or stories. Somehow, during one of these derailments, I recounted a couple of stories from my youth in which my ignorance, naivete, or just plain stupidity should have led to my ultimate demise. I say should have, because somehow I miraculously remain alive. Given the obscurity of these scenarios and the fact that I still live, I have a picture in my head of Death chasing after me and being thwarted like a sinister Wile E. Coyote as I jauntily saunter away, completely oblivious to the battered buffoon behind me (hey, alliteration!) So, I present you with Part 1 in a running series of instances that should have caused my death.
I begin the series in junior high. I was in a class called Differential Curriculum, essentially a Gifted & Talented History/Social Studies class. Every morning in D.C., two students would take the school's American flag and run it up the flag pole in front of the school. One fateful morning, it was my turn to take the flag out with my friend/classmate, Clarissa. We brought the flag outside and began.
If I remember the mechanism of this flag pole correctly, it operates under a basic pulley system. Through a compartment in the pole, Clarissa and I removed all of the extra rope and untied the knot that keeps the flag at the appropriate height. Or whatever.
After Clarissa untied the rope knot, she began to feed the rope into the pole that drops the weight at the top so that we could attach the flag. I watched her as I leaned against the flag pole. Being kids, we always tried to find a more fun way to do any task. Clarissa realized that she could let go of the rope and watch it zip through her fingers at racing speeds. She and I chuckled as we watched the rope get sucked into the flap pole like the end of a tape measure.
Suddenly, I was blinded. Unbeknownst to me, as I watched the rope zip through Clarissa's open hands, the heavy weight at the top of the flag pole was also racing towards the top of my head, directly in its flight path. The weight (which had to be about 3-4 pounds) crashed into the top of my skull at an alarming speed. Perhaps more surprising than the weight not shattering my skull and pulpifying my brain matter is the fact that I didn't even lose consciousness. Instead, my knees buckled under me as I reached up to grab my blazing head. Before collapsing to the ground, though, my legs noodled around to regain stability. My legs engaged the rest of my body in a strange dance in which they desperately tried to counterbalance the inertia of my body trying to hit the ground. I swayed back and forth like an inflatable tube-arm man at a car dealership, and every possible color flashed in my eyes.
Clarissa, after watching me for a brief second in utter confusion, soon made the connection once the flag weight clunked to the ground. She helped me sit down and kept me there until I stopped moaning unintelligibly. Eventually, the searing pain in my head subsided into a dull ache, and the top of my skull remained intact yet extremely tender to the touch. Instead of wondering about the possibility of a concussion or other trauma to my head, Clarissa and I both feared getting in trouble and vowed not to tell our teacher what had happened.
We hastily finished running the flag up the flag pole, and we hurried to class, where our lesson continued on the Alamo or the Battle of Bighorn or something. We thought we were in the clear, but at recess that day, two kids ran up to me and asked me if I was okay. When I tried to play it off and asked them what they were talking about, they told me they had been gazing out of their classroom's window and seen me do my inflatable tube man dance, clutching at my brains. Witnesses to my shame.
I'd like to say that there was no lasting damage to this event, but to be honest, I'm not sure about that. I am not even positive that those two kids came up to me at recess; they could be figments of my imagination from that blow to the head, and I had been talking to myself that day. I do sometimes recall memories that nobody else remembers happening that way, so perhaps that is something to think about.
But for now, I'm going to use this miracle head to eat some leftover pizza and steak and try to prepare for the week ahead in school. Unless my life up until now has all been a random dream in the mind of my post-flag pole comatose state. But I doubt that....
