What might have been . . .

I'm eight years old and my dad has acquired a massive wooden spool, the kind they wind industrial electrical wire on, and it's in the back yard. We picnic on it, we smash things with it, we turn it on its side and, walking backwards on it's middle, cruise up the street.

I'm at the bottom of the driveway (not yet rotted and gravelly) and I'm standing on the grand spool. My feet are clammy, and if I really put some umph into it, I can go UP the driveway, through the carport, and s - q - u - eeze through the brick and wood between the house and the carport storage.

My feet are fleet and brown, I smell like eight and boy, my lips are pursed and foreshadowing future focused activities like drumming and breakdancing (both to be done on the future gravelly driveway). I'm past the back steps when I realize that I'm going too fast. My up-hill thrust has carried me toward the slivering, brick cube which I'd hoped to gleam--just not so quickly. I reach the portal at the same time I reach down to glasp each side of the giant spool, and, just like my drumming, my timing is perfect: four fingers from both hands get tightly thrust and wedged between spool and brick on the right, and spool and wood on the left.

blah, blah, scream, blood, skin, blah, yank, wash, cry, blah, story, blah, blah, blood, blah . . .

Two weeks later the dirt that had so comfortably inhabited my body prior to my lesson at spool school, started to infiltrate the wounds. I had eight infected fingers and Dad wasn't going to take me to the doctor. He got a good, stiff-bristled, white scrubbing brush (I think he had boiled it first--thanks, dad) and took me in the girls' bathroom. He ran my hands under the cold water and buffed those yellow, bloody digits. The cold helped. More than the white of the wounds, I remember dad's grip on my wrists. Great fleshy vice grips that had played 6-hour gigs in Navy/Italy were now holding my resistent boney wrists (not much thicker than Vic Firth 5C's) -- and like an anxious fisherman de-hooking his fish, he was trying to get it done quick.

I recovered. I don't have hair on those fingers like dad does. I bet Dad wishes he could have taken all of his kids when he saw (sees) them in their infection, and run a good stiff brush across them under cold water--turn them white.