Short Stories From 10 Years Ago – March 15, 2004
Black Eyes & Birthdays
Short Stories From 10 Years Ago – March 15, 2004 – If he was still living my dad ‘Charlie’ would be 83 years old today. I know he’s in a better place, but I miss him and always remember and acknowledge his birthday.
As I was thinking about Charlie today, I remembered an incident from my childhood that my father liked to recount. I was badly hurt at the time, and he certainly wasn’t amused by my pain, but rather by how I came to be in the situation.
Our family home was a centre hall house with a large entrance hallway. The living room ran the full depth of the house on the right side. The dining room was on the left and the kitchen was located right behind it. As kids, we used to chase each other from the hallway through the dining room, into the kitchen, back to the hallway and round and round again. We were like whirling dervishes.
A favourite defensive tactic of the person being chased was to careen past the hall closet door, opening it as we went, so the person in hot pursuit had to close it before continuing on. The second manoeuver was to fling the refrigerator door open in exactly the same manner. Anything to slow down the progress of the pursuer.
On one such day when I was five – Mike – my brother – would have been six, he was chasing me and I was managing to out-manoeuver him at every turn. After his last pass of the open fridge door, he stopped and arranged a clever trap for his little sister. Unbeknownst to me, he pulled out one of the chrome kitchen chairs and left it right in my path. By this time I had scampered into the hallway and was taunting him mercilessly. All was silent.
He suddenly appeared around the corner and I did my usual pull on the hall closet door handle and the door flew open in his face. He charged past it just as I was leaping into the dining room. He caught the back of my sweater. I was struggling to free myself as I started through the archway into the kitchen. Mike gave an awesome yank on the back of my sweater and then abruptly let it go. I staggered backward momentarily, but my momentum was so great that I immediately pitched forward, lost my footing and made a perfect headlong dive, head first into the chair.
I remember the intensity of the pain as my face hit the chrome bar on the side of the chair. I pitched over the chair and then sprawled out on my back on the kitchen floor. My father had just come up from his basement workshop and was about to walk into the kitchen when his airborne daughter flew into the room and hit the chair. Mike was standing over me with a stricken look on his face when my Mom came running into the room.
My mother knelt down beside me and put her hands on either side of my face. She said, “Rosemary – look at me. Just stay still”. Mike was despatched to get a blanket and a pillow, my father to call the hospital emergency. My eyes and nose had already started to swell and I remember I couldn’t feel my face. Once my mother had determined that I wasn’t about to pass into the next world, she slowly helped me to my feet and wrapped me in the blanket. She got ice from the fridge and made a small pack that she gave me to hold on the bridge of my nose. My parents then bundled us into the car and drove downtown to the hospital.
I had a broken nose and the two of the most spectacular black eyes imaginable. My face was swollen up like apumpkin, but surprisingly, over the next couple of days the intensity of the pain was far less acute. We were leaving that week-end for our annual summer vacation and my parents had to take me along looking like a raccoon. My brothers didn’t miss an opportunity to tell perfect strangers that I was born that way, and my parents finally stopped explaining the entire story to people and simply said, “She fell down”.
My celebrity at the cottage we stayed at knew no bounds. By the end of our two weeks away my eyes had faded to purple and yellow and the swelling was gone from around my nose. Mike, who had completely recovered from his initial sense of guilt at my formidable fall went back to being a typical brother, called me Shiner for months afterwards.
That incident didn’t stop us from tearing around the house like hellions, and my dad used to tell us that it would only be a matter of time before one of us would be airborne again. As time passed, what had once been a major catastrophe became an uproarious family legend. Years later Charlie would remind me of the day I flew through the kitchen door and did a face plant into the kitchen chair.
He would look at me and his sides would shake with laughter at the memory. I can only guess at the image he carried in his mind. It must have seemed like a Keystone Cops moment or a segment from a Peter Sellers movie, with Peter careening around the room with Kato. We all know how funny those sketches can be. So Happy 83rd Birthday – Charlie. Shiner is still here, thinking of you, missing you, but doing just fine!
