accident

In the third grade I had an accident. I was sitting in something like a cathedral alcove at the top of the monkey bars, watching another little boy swing back and forth. He had never done anything to me. I had never seen him before. Perhaps he was an angel. If so, that may explain why, without cause, I suddenly grabbed the bars and lunged at him as he swung by, hoping to knock him to the ground. I lost my grip and fell like a sock monkey, like a shiny little ball in a pachinko machine. Until that moment, with the exception of a few childhood sexual perturbations, I had considered myself saint material.

The first thing I remember is the bright noon sun, accompanied by the distant sound of many voices, shining through a prism of broken glass near my face. Two nuns dragged me out by my feet, packed me into a car and drove around according to my instructions, until they realized I was in shock and had no idea where I was or where we were going. They returned to the school to use the phone while I sat patiently in the car, trying not to bleed on the upholstery. When we eventually arrived at my house, they stood me in the middle of the living room and stripped me down to my underwear while nearby stood my parents, aunts and uncles, having all left work for their love of me, staring wide-eyed with fear and concern at my bruised and bloody body.

We finally went to the hospital where my arm was put in a cast, my ankles were bandaged, my lower lip was stitched and my parents got to see an x-ray of my skull. I spent the night under observation at my aunt’s house in my older cousin’s bedroom where I slept next to his laboratory rats. It was there that I achieved Enlightenment, my life filled with a bodhisattva’s empathy, not so much for the rats as for the boy.