Chap. 1 part deux - The Ball Player

I used to enjoy playing softball.  I enjoyed it immensely, actually; the seeming lack of athleticism required to play slow pitch softball makes it available for all ages.

Once, after watching the pitcher lift the hardball ten feet in the air which then arced down over the plate, I crushed the ball to centerfield.  Because it was a rarity for me to actually get on base, I lumbered down the first base line as fast as I could.  Thinking that I could turn this seeing-eye single into a double, I attempted to round first base. 

If I was a commentator, I would struggle to describe how anyone, in the vigorous sport of slow-pitch softball, could actually trip over the square white bag and literally slide from first base across an acre of gravel, into the outfield.  I did not receive a graceful award and as the centerfielder threw the ball to the first basemen to tag me out, he did so with forced neutrality. 

“You’d better get that looked at,” he said pointing down to my leg with the ball in the glove.

“Doesn’t hurt,” I said, but, in reality, it felt like someone had just shaved my leg with a chain saw.  I made the mistake of looking at it.  There were pieces of gravel sticking up at various intervals from my shin.

“Whatever,” the first basemen said as he threw the ball back to the ‘athlete’ that some would call the ‘pitcher.’ 

That night as I staggered into home hoping that Christine would take great pity on me, I walked past her grunting a little bit.  As she was on the computer, she didn’t pay attention to me at first.  Not wanting to be a baby about it, but realistically wanting to be treated like a baby, I stood near her, looking over her shoulder, not really caring what she was typing, but hoping that she’d notice me in my pitiful condition. 

She didn’t.  So, I moved in closer, lightly touched my leg to the desk and audibly winced.  You know, when you scrunch up your eyes, suck the air through your teeth, make a little moaning noise in the back of the throat like a cat that’s about ready to toss a furball – that’s what I did.  Finally, she noticed my immense misery.

“I knew you’d do that.  You just can’t play sports without hurting yourself.  You’re getting too old for this tomfoolery.”  It was not the response I was expecting.  I wanted that woman who, when we were first married, actually went to the softball games to cheer her hero on; I wanted that woman who, when her hero was hurt, looked horrified that her Prince Charming was in pain, and, frankly, she was shocked that her superhero could actually bleed.  I wanted that woman, who, when we were first married, encased me in her arms to make me feel better.

Not that woman whose first words were, “I told you so.”.

I backed away from her.  She took one last look at the computer screen, saved her work, shut down the computer, yawned loudly into her hand, walked into the kitchen, turned on the kettle, switched off the light and then said, “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

Dang.  I knew what that meant and I shouldn’t have brought to her attention that I had been wounded in the true coliseum of middle aged athleticism.  I knew what was coming; she took one look at my leg and thought,

Yes, that’s going to seep all over our sheets tonight.

Into the bathroom she led me where she began to draw a bath.  She rolled up my pant leg to take a look at the wound.  Let’s just say she wasn’t gentle.

“Ouch,” I complained. 

“Don’t be such a baby.  Get into the bath.”  I stripped down the rest of the way making sure the rest of my clothes made no contact with the wound. 

Putting my good leg into the hot water, I gave a real wince this time.  “Does it have to be this hot?”

“Just sit down,” she said while organizing her tools.  Like a surgeon’s assistant, she had placed a towel on the floor beside her lined with the instruments of my torture.  Washcloth. Abrasive pad.  Tweezers. Antibiotic cream.  Wrap.

“Can’t we just soak it in the water a little bit?  Won’t the gravel naturally just loosen and float to the bottom of the tub?”

She gave me one of those looks that said, please- get real.  You know, the one where she tilts her head to the side, scrunches up that little place between her eyes, fake little smile playing across her face as if to say ‘I can think of a thousand other things that I’d rather be doing than playing nurse to my past-his-athletic-prime husband.’

Just as she was about to start scrubbing, I said the worst thing possible.

“You don’t want to get your clothes wet.  Don’t you think you should get in too?”

Christine wet the washcloth and threw it on my roadrashed leg.  Pain shot through me like I’d received an electric shock.  “You can do this yourself.”  So, my wife of multiple years, who had transitioned to adulthood many years before, walked out on me, her husband, who had yet to fully embrace maturity.

Sitting in the hot tub of water, staring down at the menagerie of medicinal tools, I decided to just let the water take hold.  Surely, the gravel would be ejected naturally by God’s own universal solvent.

It hurt too much to rub the cloth over it fully, so I picked out the biggest pieces of dirt, ran moving water over the rest and called it good.  I could hear Christine in the other room typing furiously away, probably editing her Facebook page to read, “Infantile husband cleaning up his leg after losing a skirmish with his age.” 

Lots of thumbs up for that one, I would guess.

 After air drying as best I could, I left the tweezers where they lay.  There was too much pus oozing from the eight inch scrape on the right side of my calf so I couldn’t see the gravel anyway.  Leaving all the other tools that Christine would have used, I went straight for the bandage.  I just needed to get that thing wrapped. 

I don’t know why I have a fascination with bandages.  They’re stretchy and so much fun to roll up.  I was actually looking forward to wrapping my leg.  Placing one end directly in the middle of the wound, I held it lightly with my left hand while pulling it tight with the right.  Then, circling the leg almost a dozen times up and down my calf, I tucked the trailing end into the bottom on the back side of my leg (I would have used the little sharp, clippy things but I’d lost them in a previous accident.)

The handiwork was well done.  The compression on the road rash felt much better and I almost whistled as I prepared for bed.

“Did you use the lubricating ointment?” Christine queried from the other room.  “If you don’t use that, the bandage is going to stick.”

“Yup,” I said.  My own body’s lubricating ointment of pus would work just fine.  What did she know anyway?

It was uncomfortable that night, but eventually sleep found me.  The next morning, I pulled back the covers and noticed that my wound had indeed seeped all the way through twelve layers of bandage and left some beautiful smudges on the sheets and quilt.  Quickly I pulled the covers back over the bed hoping that Christine would not notice the necessity for washing sheets, but, that would definitely be an alternate universe when Christine does not notice something.

I padded across the wooden floor down the hallway to the bathroom where I turned on the light.  I sat down on the toilet and began to unwrap.  What had been done ten hours earlier in relative ease became forty-five minutes of agony.  Each layer of wrap had stuck to the next and as I pulled one back after another, I literally had to bite back the scream.  Then, the last layer, almost there.  But then I remember I had put the end piece right in the middle of the wound. 

Idiot.

I looked around for a wooden stick to put between my teeth, like they do in the movies, but all that I could find was the discarded cardboard center from a toilet paper roll.  Couldn’t be choosy.  I bit down on the cardboard feeling my teeth make imprints preparing for the worst.

With a quick motion (like you are supposed to do with bandages, right?) I ripped back the final layer and with great agony I bounced around the bathroom, hopping around like a fox post-trap, mouthing the words that I desperately wanted to shout out loud.  They rang inside my head – a gong – nothing can describe pain like that. 

And then I saw Christine standing at the door, arms crossed, hair recently mussed by her pillow.  “You didn’t put on the lubricating cream, did you?”

See, that’s what it’s like to move to fifteen different houses in fifteen years and keep packing and unpacking, garage sailing and garage selling, hawking treasures that you haven’t used for years but each one of them has a memory so indelibly attached that the pain of actually seeing it walk away is greater than the pain of packing it one more time.  But when we do cull the things that we have, it is like peeling back a bandage quickly.  The moments must be lubricated by reflection and good old fashioned mourning. 

But it’s still painful. 

Especially when you have to move from comfortable to dis-comfortable.  I don’t say ‘uncomfortable’ because that carries with it this idea of the Princess and the Pea, that something small has caused a rough night of sleep.  That’s ‘uncomfortable.’  On the other hand ‘dis-comfortable,’ is not just about physical pain, but emotional, spiritual and psychological also. 

Transition causes dis-comfort because it requires we give something up, not just location, but perspective and ignorance.  This book is about life and its transitions and the things that get lost in the between.  Hopefully you will find yourself in the spaces between words as I have found balm for the memories of transition.