Sunday, March 28, 2010

ACCIDENT PRONE


Recalling the years after my family moved into our home at 3225 Columbia Street, in San Diego, it seems that we four kids suffered more than our share of accidents and injuries.

I injured my back severely when I was about twelve, while stupidly playing bucking bronco with my younger brothers, an injury that has recurred over the years and has plagued me with a vengeance since I turned 70.

My oldest brother Reid broke off half a front tooth swimming at the “Y,” and
middle brother Dwain fell off a teeter-totter onto a concrete retaining wall when Janice Hoskins suddenly lost interest in either teetering or tottering and simply jumped off and walked away. The head wound he suffered healed without benefit of a doctor’s visit, but left him with a permanent dent in his skull, which he’ll let you feel if you simply ask.

It was youngest brother Glenn who suffered the most frequent and interesting childhood injuries. To this day, he manages to spice up our lives, once barely escaping death when his motor home skidded on icy snow and came to a hair-raising stop at the very edge of a snowy ravine. Most recently, he was attacked by his own golf cart, which made several attempts to roll on top of him.

As a child, Glenn was in constant danger. My stomach still roils when I think of the time we went to the beach, and he impaled his foot on a huge fishhook left among the sandy rocks. Dad actually tried to pull that rusty thing out with pliers amid Glenn’s screams—which is where the stomach roiling comes in. Dad couldn’t budge the hook, and the six of us ended up trooping over to a nearby doctor’s office, where the hook was removed.

Most of our accidents happened in or near our home. We had bought an older house, financed by the seller, since we could never have qualified otherwise on Dad’s small salary as a watchmaker. Financing was also a distinct advantage to the seller, who didn’t have to worry about any pesky truth-in- lending disclosures about the leaky roof, the ravenous termites, the unique plumbing, and the myriad other defects the house would disclose—assuming there was such a thing as disclosure in the late 1940’s.

The house overlooked Mission Bay and, beyond, the Pacific Ocean, which more than compensated for any defects, to my dad’s way of thinking. It also overlooked San Diego’s airport, Lindbergh Field, and we grew used to the sounds of planes taking off and landing at any time of day or night, long before any curfews on departures or arrivals.

There was a vacant lot next door to our new home, from which cliffs dropped on two sides, a most dangerous place to raise three active boys and a clumsy girl. My parents must have been out of their minds to expose us to such dangers. The cliff on one side had a sheer drop of several hundred feet, and I never ventured near the edge of that one, although my brothers were more adventurous and would sit on the ice plant that grew over the edge. The dirt that had been removed from below and created the cliff was supposed to have been used for landfill for the construction of Lindbergh Field.

The cliff on the second side of the vacant lot dropped “only” about 30 feet, onto a city street. There was a rough lateral path along the side of that cliff, and we scrambled up and down it like goats, each time leaping a small crevasse on the path. Over time, that crevasse eroded so that the leap across it became progressively more dangerous as we grew progressively older and more bold.

As the oldest, I was the one who first gave up cliff climbing and began to take an alternate route, a long flight of steep stairs accessing our property from the rear. They looked like stairs you might see in San Francisco, and caused a great deal of wheezing and panting, but at least they were safe.

My brothers continued climbing the cliff several more years, as the eroding path became more dangerous. One day middle brother Dwain asked Mom, “Did you ever see anyone do a flip-flop in the air?”

Mom replied, “No, I don’t believe I ever have. Did you?”

Dwain said, “Yeah, the time Glenn fell off the cliff!”

Mother nearly fainted. Apparently Glenn had done a fairly spectacular flip of about ten or fifteen feet off the path somewhere past the halfway point, while trying to dislodge a marble in the side of the cliff. Dwain described the fall as, “High as a house.”

Dwain himself remembers a similar fall, without the theatrical flip. He too, was unhurt, then walked all the way up the back stairs, not starting to cry until he began to tell Mom what had happened and realized he could have been killed.

Those incidents pretty much ended the cliff climbing, but there was still plenty to keep us occupied. In those days, kids could roam the neighborhood in safety all day long, driven home only by hunger or darkness. There were other vacant lots in the neighborhood, and my brothers were responsible for several brush fires, as a result of playing with firecrackers, matches, and pieces of shiny glass. We always figured Glenn became a fireman to help atone for his earlier behavior.

If we found soft drink bottles, we would walk a couple of blocks to the neighborhood grocery store, Porter’s, to cash them in. Sometimes we went to the store for Mom, who would allow us to “keep the change.” That only meant the pennies, of course, so we always hoped for the bonanza—four pennies in change.

One time, before the 7-11 type of chain stores put our neighborhood groceries out of business and it became too far to walk to the store, Glenn and Dwain went to Porter’s and bought a can of condensed milk for Mom. On the way home, Glenn kept pestering Dwain to carry the paper sack with the milk, until Dwain, fed up, took the sack by its twisted top and bopped Glenn on the head with it. Glenn began to bleed, and to cry, and Dwain immediately capitulated, desperately offering to let him carry the sack. Glenn refused and kept on crying, eager to get home and tattle, while Dwain frantically tried to get him to shut up, carry the sack, and forget the whole thing.

The vacant cliff lot remained an important part of our lives. All my brothers became expert at capturing trapdoor spiders there, those fearsome-looking creatures that were harmless and simply wanted to be left alone.

Dad parked our Jeep on that cliff. One night, in the rain, the starter apparently kept shorting out and, while we slept, the Jeep slowly inched its way backward jerkily off the cliff down onto the street. The next morning, a police officer knocked on the door to tell my surprised father what had happened.

The Jeep had wedged itself vertically between the cliff and a telephone pole. It took some doing to jog it loose, but it wasn’t much the worse for wear, and continued to provide beach and desert rides for the family for several years.

Youngest brother Glenn was fascinated with bees and couldn’t resist catching them. He was stung on a regular basis, generally between the eyes, which would swell almost shut.

Glenn also suffered a broken limb, which wasn’t out of the ordinary, but he was the only one of us four kids to break a bone.

One time Glenn was playing with a BB gun with his friends and they decided to take turns being targets. Glenn put on a “helmet” for protection, but it wasn’t a true helmet, just the hard plastic helmet liner. His “best friend” took aim at Glenn’s head and hit the helmet liner. The BB went right through it and lodged in Glenn’s forehead. When he took off the helmet and touched his head, the BB fell harmlessly to the ground. Glenn seemed to lead a charmed life.

On another occasion, Glenn and his friend, Ronnie Norrell, were taking turns jumping across an open manhole that had been abandoned. Glenn fell into the hole and down about twenty feet, hitting his head. He was too short to reach the rungs of the ladder built into the side of the manhole so, crying all the way, he crawled through the pipe itself, about half a block, until he emerged into a canyon, and climbed wooden stairs back to the street. Ronnie had gone to tell his mother who, none too concerned, waited at the top to see that he was all in one piece, and then left. Glenn went home and confessed to Mom. We were in awe of his adventure and the bump on his head, which was literally the size of a goose egg. Other than the bump and being filthy, he was fine. Today that incident would have warranted a search and rescue operation, TV coverage, and an investigation.

Another time, Mom had been cleaning the boys’ bedroom and was standing in the hallway, tossing things back into the room. She was irritated because she had told them to clean the room, and of course they hadn’t. She grabbed a clock and pitched it into the room, then looked up and saw Glenn’s surprised face. Mom had nailed him with the clock. She didn’t even know he was there! She apologized, of course, but said later that the worst part was that she couldn’t warn Glenn not to say his mother had hit him with a clock, because he most certainly would tell people that he had been told not to tell. The only thing she could do was keep quiet and hope he forgot about it!

When I was young, I generally viewed my brothers as a plague upon my existence, but reflecting on some of the close calls they had, I am so very grateful they were able to survive relatively unscathed, and that I can now appreciate them for the wonderful human beings they turned out to be.



No comments:

Post a Comment