Photo by Cara Shelton on Unsplash
I read Stephen King’s On Writing during my holiday break. Though I do think Lamott’s Bird by Bird is the better writing book, King’s memoir/how-to has got me thinking about writing and about documenting my own life and childhood. Like King, my memories of the past are shrouded in a fog. It’s not like popping in a VHS (remember those?) tape and watching back my life in jittering SD quality. No, it’s more like Enduro, the Atari racing videogame, the part when you get to the fog portion of the car race. As I get close to a memory, suddenly it will appear and develop as if out of thin air. That’s what’s been happening as I’ve sat down to write what I remember about my past. I’m going to try to document more of these memories for some of my weekly blog posts.
Another element of writing about my past is that more and more memories will start to well up as I spend time poking around in the dark.
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ― Stephen King
The year I broke my arm was a particularly memorable moment in my childhood.
I think I was around nine years old at the time. We lived in Southern California. Riverside, to be precise. My father was in the US Marines, and he worked on the El Toro military base. Our house was a one-story house that had a row of lovely roses in the front yard. My mother loved roses.
We lived in kind of a rundown neighborhood. We knew this because the types of people we lived next to were characters that didn’t bother to hide their peccadilloes. One memorable neighbor had nothing but cacti growing in his front yard. Now, I’m not a botanist, so I don’t know much about cacti, but I’m pretty sure they don’t need to be watered regularly outside of the water they would get in the Southern California climate. Yet, on a regular basis, our lanky, grizzled neighbor would get onto the roof of his house, dragging up his garden hose behind him, and water his front yard…standing in his underwear. The image of his greying, sagging, skinny body wearing tighty-whitey briefs perched precariously on the edge of the roof and mindlessly watering his cactus plants will forever be burned into my mind.
This was probably why my sister and I spent most of our time in the backyard. The backyard was not without its own dangers, however. We had a separate garage that no one wanted to go into because of the evil black widow spider that lived there. Someone had seen it once, maybe. But tales of its existence were enough to make none of us ever want to go in there.
But the backyard was also filled with fruit trees that my father planted. He is an eternally optimistic man, and he was forever hoping that the trees would bear fruit. He dreamed of growing lemons and figs and plums, but, alas, his fruit trees never fruited. We did have one green grapevine that produced tiny grapes, but even that over time eventually withered away. Still, it was the promise of fruit and abundance that kept my father’s hopes alive.
A sidewalk marched straight from the back of our house to the backyard garage in between the fruit trees. It was perfect for roller-skating. One summer, I had my heart set on roller-skating, but my skates were broken, and the only ones we had were my sister’s. They were the kind that adjusted to fit over your sneakers. Even though they were adjustable, they were far too small for my gargantuan feet. Still, I was determined to skate, and I shoved my too-big shoes into the metal skates and struggled to catch the Velcro straps around my shoes.
If I close my eyes right now, I can still hear the skrit, skrit, skrit of the skate wheels on the cement sidewalk. I was flying. Every few skates, I would hop up to jump a misaligned cement paver. After one glorious hop, my too-small skates slipped a bit off my foot, and one foot flew forward. I angled my torso ahead of my legs to try to balance myself and ended up overbalancing. In slow motion, I fell and landed on my left arm.
I felt pain after the fall, but I didn’t really know what had happened. I ran to the house and showed my mom my arm. Even though I didn’t understand why I was in such pain, I knew something was bad because my mom’s face had drained of all its color—a rarity, given my mom’s warm brown skin.
I looked down at my arm, and I could see that even though I was holding it out straight for her to see, there was a large lump poking up unnaturally at my wrist.
Broken.
The doctor proclaimed that the ulna was broken, and the radius was fractured. They would need to put me under to set them. The doctor was old and scary, and he told me to call him Dr. Bug. I think he meant to make me feel less scared, but the nickname had the exact opposite effect. I was terrified of being put under, but the only things I can remember after that procedure were how horrifically uncomfortable the cast was; how dirty it became; how I could never quite satisfy the many itches that developed under the cast; and how grossed out I was to see the cast finally come off and my shriveled, dirty, but healed arm finally appear.
My arm never fully healed though (I blame Dr. Bug for that, I mean with a nickname like that, how good at setting bones could he possibly be?). I lost some amount of rotation after that, and even now I can’t really turn my left hand fully flat when I rotate it. Damn. I would have to learn how to play guitar left-handed if I ever wanted to play.
I have often thought about how my life would have been different if that arm break had never happened. I was certainly much more cautious physically after that. And, of course, as mentioned, I never did learn how to play guitar. While I did learn how to play piano, I frequently wondered if I would have been a concert pianist if not for that accident. Or maybe a guitarist in a rock band.
Over the years, it became easy for me to blame my lack of success in certain areas on that broken arm.
I became neither a concert pianist nor a guitar rock god. Instead, here I am sitting in a cool room in Fort Myers, Florida, waiting for the new year to come. And, you know, what, I like this life. I like remembering things that were and thinking about things that will be. I like plumbing my memories for meaning and writing them all down. My broken arm can’t ever stop me from writing, that’s for sure.
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