Goose Eggs and Black Eyes

The most exciting thing to happen to me lately was not a very captivationg story, so I decided to spice it up a little with a trip down memory lane. Prepare to be treated to a compilation of injuries that have occurred on the upper third-ish portion of mostly my own skull.

You're welcome, in advance...

When I was seven or so, in the last year of public school for me, I received two marvellous blows to the head that resulted in goose eggs.

This is not going to be a very exciting story, so allow me to gift you with too many details...

First of all, grade two was the absolute summit of my social life until, in my twenties, I went to a Catholic college and got locked in an old convent with thirty people my age and a portion of everyone's tuition was dedicated to making us all get along. Money well spent, but the portion of my tuition that I assumed went towards sneakily snaring a spouse was, I must admit, a rip off (though not for everyone).

Anyway.

Grade two was my secular prime. In grade two, we moved to a different school, where so few new kids were ever introduced that I held ‘new kid’ status for the whole, glorious year. I was treated like the shiny new treasure that I am, and, you know, it is nice to be appreciated.

Also in my favour, and I’m not gonna lie, this was vastly in my favour, I was the only girl in grade two.

There’s a newish Smurf movie out there that you would only have seen if you were trying to entertain kids or have a taste for tacky movies. In this movie, there’s one female smurf in a whole village of male smurves (I have decided this is the plural of smurf). As you can imagine, the lady smurf is pretty much adored. If you want reference for how it felt to be the only girl in grade two, you just have to watch that movie, because that was me, and it was awesome.

Fortunately, feminine friendship was still available to me, since we had a split classroom for grades one and two. Grade one had plenty of girls, which was good news for birthday parties. We had a strict 3-invitee rule for birthdays. No one ever broached the subject of inviting the opposite gender, but since somewhere in our father’s canals of logic he protected us from losing our innocence by banning makeup, I’m pretty sure boys would not have been allowed.

That’s not to say I’m ungrateful. When I got a pair of earrings in a gift exchange and Dad offered to pierce my ears with the cattle tagging pliers, who knew that my future way out of having no sense of fashion would be to blame my father’s protectiveness?

Besides, everyone has earrings and makeup these days; the thing that makes me really special is not having those things (that’s it; that’s all that’s special about me. Now you know my secret, like Samson’s Delilah).

Anyway, back to the school.

I was just living my best grade two life, friends with pretty much everyone (except that one girl who stole something from me), and willing to spend recess with pretty much anyone (except that grade one kid that liked Pokémon way too much for me).

Once upon a lunch break, I found myself in the classroom with a classmate. I don’t know how we came about being there unsupervised and alone, but we were apparently taking advantage of it by chasing each other around the desks. I don’t remember consciously breaking the rules, but as I recollect it now, it certainly seems like the sort of thing that wouldn’t be allowed.

Anyway, the kid grabbed my lunch bag and started swinging it around his head as a means to defend himself. It was more effective than he thought.

I remember it vividly. It was a purple lunch kit, and the scene seemed to play out in slow motion as I realized the zipper was open slightly and centrifugal force was pulling the small Tupperware dish out of it. I didn’t realize at that time that centrifugal force was the name for what was occurring, but I appreciated the general concept.

We still have those Tupperware containers; opaque with green lids that had a yellow blowhole to pop open so your meals wouldn’t blow up in the microwave. They were frequently used to send us to school with instant noodles.

And they were very hard.

The dish sailed out and whacked me dead on the forehead at point-blank ranges. It was a heck of a shot.

I don’t remember crying, myself. It hurt, for sure, and there was definitely forehead-clutching. What I remember most is that poor boy running to me, crying, and pleading to forgive him, it was an accident, and don’t tell the teacher.

I did all of these things, assuring him that it wasn’t his fault. However, when Mrs Teacher caught sight of the shiner I had front and center, she had to ask what I did, and I had to answer.

In my defence, I didn’t try to rat him out. I tried to make it sound like we were both maybe just sort of swinging lunch boxes a teeny bit and maybe one of them was very accidentally not closed completely all the way and maybe a not-so-soft container came out and kind of clipped me on the forehead a little.

Mrs Teacher just kind of frowned and told us we should go outside when we’re done our lunch in the future.

If only that would keep me safe.

For the other shiner I got at that school, there were no classmates to help. Just gravity and iron.

As a kid, I was built pretty strong. Not particularly aerodynamic, but a fair amount of upper body strength. Word on the street is that I could drop down and do, not hundreds, but at least tens of rapid pushups. It was a party trick of mine that my dad pulled out to impress his friends.

Anyway, I just wanted to lead up to the point that I was bomb on the monkey bars. I remember loving them, and being perfectly content playing by myself on them for recess. I remember how thrilling it was to see how many bars I could skip, and my OCD tendencies were enthralled by the constant counting I could do. Oh to be young and limber! Monkey bars, and every possible adventure they offer, are now far too hurty for me to approach.

Anyway, it was one of these happy playtimes on the monkey bars that we now go to.

If my memory serves me correctly, and there’s reason to believe it may not as you’ll soon see, the bell had rung as I had swung my legs up to take hold of a bar with the backs of my knees. With what was intended to be a final, daring, and graceful finishing move, I allowed my upper body to fall, taking all the weight upon the backs of my knees as I swung down.

CLANG!!

At the peak of my momentum, my glorious move was cut short by the vertical portion of the monkey bars. I had chosen an unfortunate location for my dismount.

Here, my memory is fuzzy. I can’t quite recall if it was an older student who came to inquire after the seven-year-old who had fallen in a heap under the monkey bars, or if it was the classmate from my previous run-in with head trauma. Whoever it was, I seem to remember their eyes being wide with genuine concern, so thank you, whoever you were.

For reasons unrelated to my injuries, we only stayed at that school for a year.

I like to contemplate what could have been if I’d stayed in public/Catholic school. I really think the me that stayed in school would be not that great to be around day-to-day, but a lot of fun at parties. It’s an intriguing timeline to imagine.

I will not comment on how I am to be around day-to-day in this timeline, but I will say that I’m not that fun at parties.

Anyway, in the long run, I’m glad we homeschooled because I’m pretty happy with this timeline.

Now, let’s get back to my superficial cranial injuries...

I don’t remember how old I was when this next happening happened; probably around ten or so. It’s hard to judge, because I put a fair amount of reasonable, mature, thoughtful planning into doing a fairly dumb thing.

Like the time I used my mom’s cosmetic scissors to cut my eyelashes. It started out with a curious impulse, it intensified with the extremely satisfying snip! snip! snip! sounds, and it ended with me being mortified at the damage I’d done. The end was just the beginning of the damage, though, because I spent a lot of time trying to even out my lashes, reasoning that as long as each side was the same, no one would notice.

Well, I think you can guess how that goes.

Both sides were pretty even by the end. Evenly cut right down to stubbies.

I want to believe that I was very young when I did this, but the level of shame I felt indicates that I was older.

When a beloved, hawk-eyed aunt spotted my lashes, she couldn’t contain her laughter. Neither could anyone else after she loudly asked me what I’d done to them.

Jokes on you guys, fam. My eyelashes are now thick and glorious, so there.

(Just so we’re clear, even though this aunt of mine also cried with laughter as she pointed out that my nostrils look wonky when viewed from below, and that the tips of my ear lobes flip out, I really do love her dearly. Who knew it was my godmother’s duty to ensure I never became vain?)

Anyway, this is all just to give you an idea that intellectual maturity maybe had a little later onset for me.

Back to forehead injury number three.

We had already started homeschooling by this time, and Sister and I were working hard at our adjacent desks. Sister was probably doing actual school, and I was definitely not doing actual school.

I was playing with a toy we had gotten for Christmas.

The toy was a little, rubber, semi-sphere, as though someone had taken a hollow rubber ball and cut it in half. The premise of this toy was to flip it inside out, set it down on a flat surface, and watch it jump up as it flipped back into its resting position. Pretty exciting stuff. When all of us cousins discovered it in our stockings, we obviously found new and exciting ways to use them. We could position them on our fingers so that they would shoot towards people, and if someone was foolish enough to stand still for it as the proxy flat surface for take-off, they would be snapped pretty smartly.

Simple minds, simple pleasures all around.

But I was an adventurer.

A tester of new waters.

A discoverer of new territories.

An outstanding shirker of school work.

So there I was, at my school desk, many moons after Christmas, studying the physics of the simple toy.

The manufacturers had put a small hole through the top of the toy so that it wouldn’t get suctioned onto surfaces. I became fascinated with how stuck it could get to my desk when I covered the hole and pressed the half-ball down.

Excited, I fetched some electrical tape.

The ball suctioned to the desk pretty well, but the tape was slowly releasing air, so it didn’t stay.

More electrical tape.

I was learned enough to heat the rubber ball up by rubbing it, making the tape stick better. I was thorough enough to tape the hole on the outside and inside.

My scientific process included the discovery that it would stick to my desk indefinitely (a word which, here, means ‘longer than my patience’), and it would stick to parts of my arm that were flat enough, but would come off easily because the skin was elastic.

What excited me was the prospect of getting that toy as stuck to me as it could get to the desk.

I quickly discovered that the curvature of my skull was the precise surface for the job.

A couple of times, I just pressed the ball onto my forehead and was delighted by how stuck it got. A little thrill of fear excited me as I pulled hard to pry it off.

But it wasn’t enough.

There was still air in there. I could only be satisfied by getting all the air out and achieving maximum suction.

New strategy.

By inverting the half-ball, then allowing it to flip back into place as I guided it flat against my forehead, I could achieve an awful lot of suction. It took me only a few tries before I reached maximum suction.

“How did you know it was maximum suction?” You ask.

I know it was maximum suction because I couldn’t get it off.

I’m being completely, literally honest here; I could not dislodge that thing from the perfect curvature of the exact middle of my forehead. I couldn’t get my fingernails under the edge of it, and I certainly couldn’t grip it and pull it off.

I was embarrassed, but I knew I needed help.

I summoned Sister.

Excellent peripheral vision as she has, Sister was probably watching my scientific experimentation all the way along. That’s what makes her such a great friend; she just sort of let’s you alone with your self-destructive behaviour, but is always there to help when you call for it.

Anyway, she immediately came to my assistance, but I am not joking when I say that thing was stuck.

Even with her longer fingernails and her ability to hold my head in place as she pulled at the rubber ball, she could not get it off.

“Oy!” She said, which is how she rolls her eyes with her words, “That’s really stuck. I’ll have to take the tape off; why would you tape it??!”

Outwardly, I cringed because a rubber ball was suctioning a large bruise onto my forehead.

Inwardly, I cringed because Sister was picking the tape off the hole in the half-ball and she didn’t yet know there was tape in the inside.

The tape ripped off.

The ball gave no sign of loosening.

Sister frowned.

“DID YOU TAPE THE INSIDE, TOO??”

The capital letters indicate shouting, and the shouting indicated to Brother that he might find some camaraderie in his own school-shirking ways by coming over to his sisters’ desks.

He made his way over.

“She taped the air hole shut!” Sister explained to him, “The outside and the inside!” Sister seemed to be affronted that her ingenuity was out-matched by my thoroughly-planned stupidity.

Eager to help, Brother grabbed a nearby pencil.

“We need to pry it off,” he said.

He went in pretty confidently, but I didn’t put up with him digging an HB no. 2 into my forehead for long before I demanded a different option. Brother and Sister stepped back, shrugging. They didn’t have any other plans.

Fortunately for me, I had started breaking out in a nervous sweat as soon as my first few pulls didn’t get the ball off my head. By the time Brother and Sister had stepped back from their attempts to free me, my sweat had already started to loosen the grip.

Within a few more moments of consternation, I was able to slide the ball to location of less ideal curvature and pull the thing off.

But I couldn’t sweat away the large, purple circle that had formed.

“Oh boy,” Sister said with her signature mix of very-amused-with-a-pinch-of-sympathy.

She brushed my forehead lightly with her fingertips to feel the raised lump in the center.

“What, did it leave a mark??” I asked.

“Yep,” Sister replied, then she and Brother went back to their schoolwork as I ran up the stairs to find a mirror.

Our parents were most amused to discover what I had done to earn the large, purple bruise.

Then they were most amused to amuse other people with the story, even years later.

What an amusing family I have.

Since I’ve familiarized you with the special curvature that my forehead possesses, it is now time to let Sister into the limelight with the old family story of “Running Through the Corn”. My forehead plays a significant role in this, but Sister really stole the spotlight...

This was back in the late ‘90’s, for sure; I don’t think I was even in school yet. Our family was all in the garden; Mom and Dad working on harvesting vegetables while the four kids putzed around. As a rule, we were pretty good at amusing ourselves. Excellent putzers.

Once, when we were stranded out in a field for hours while Mom and Dad did machine repairs, us three younger kids made up a game called “Oops, Wrong Way” (our oldest brother was not simple enough to enjoy it). The rules were unbelievably straightforward. We had a big round bale at our disposal, so the three of us marched around it in whichever direction we chose. When we inevitably ran into a sibling, we’d cry, “Oops, wrong way!” and march off in the other direction. It was particularly delightful when the three of us would run into each other at the same spot and get all balled up, rapidly switching directions and shouting “Oops, wrong way! Oops, wrong way! Oops, wrong way!”

We would nearly fall down with laughter.

This game was invented a long time after the “Running Through the Corn” incident. Perhaps it was inspired.

Like I was saying, we were easily amused kids, and Brother and Sister had discovered a fun new game in the garden called “Running Through the Corn”. The garden is fifty feet long or so, and there were three rows of corn planted roughly the length of it. The three rows made an excellent race track, and Brother and Sister were having a great time whipping through it, with the blades slapping them in their faces, the sun having a blinding, epileptic effect as it blinked through the stalks.

There were gales of laughter coming from the corn.

And I wanted in.

Unfortunately, I didn’t stop to consider that there might be some order to the joyful chaos. My toddler brain only registered two things.

Running: check.

Laughing: check.

In I went.

It was a pretty magical racetrack. The stalks on either side guided me down the middle, but I really couldn’t see much with the blades whipping at my face and the sun flashing at my eyeballs. I had to look down as I ran, to protect my eyes and stay on track. My ears were filled with the rustling of cornstalks, and I expected to hear another racer passing me on the neighbouring corn row.

I did not expect the neighbouring racer to, in fact, be running in the same corn row.

Neither did the neighbouring racer.

Sister and I collaborated to create the grandest collision of toddler flesh that I have ever known. I was very young when this happened, but I remember it well; it was quite the impact.

Oops, wrong way.

I wonder if Mom and Dad saw it coming and their shouts to stop were just “Meep! Meep!” sounds in the background of our great adventures. I never used to wonder this, but now that I’ve seen my nephews at play...

Anyway, Mom and Dad seemed to be there fairly instantly after the impact. If the SMACK! of us hitting didn’t call them over, the screams of agony certainly did.

We were each picked up and embraced; they asked if we were okay, dried our tears, etc.

And then Sister stole the show.

Her eye began to puff, swell, and turn a magnificent shade of purple.

Turns out, the curvature of my forehead, so conducive to suctioning a half-ball to, was also the exact right size to fit just so into Sister’s eye socket.

The impact was generally winding, but my forehead had met with such a cushioned surface that I walked away with not a bruise on me.

Sister had a black eye.

I know it hurt her a lot more than me, because I remember her crying a lot longer, and I remember being disappointed we couldn’t keep running through the corn. I hadn’t even had a chance to really get into it, you know.

By the time Sister stopped crying, her eye had already begun to look pretty different, so when Dad took her to the mirror to see it, she wept some more.

To this day, she will feel around her eye until she finds the tiny, irregular bump beneath it. Then she will say accusingly, “You did this to me. I have a bone chip here from you!”

I don’t even know if that’s what that little bump is; heck, she could have always had it and she only noticed after she got a black eye.

In any case, I have no time to contemplate her tiny, sad violin noises, because I have a large, sad violin noise to make.

It is the story of my own black eye.

This one is not a trip down memory lane. This is just a short walk down to a couple of weeks ago.

Dad and I were doing chores, and I was running around to open gates and cut strings off of bales for him as he drove the tractor.

When opening panels, especially in the winter, it’s important to make sure the end that has to pivot is not stuck or frozen into the ground. If the pivoting end is free, one can simply grab the swinging end with one arm and walk it out. Sometimes, one has to grab the panel in the middle and lift the whole thing to swing it effectively.

That is what I should have done with the panel I was trying to swing in haste as Dad drove up with the tractor. Instead, feeling harried, I did kind of a mix of the two. I grabbed it mostly on the swinging end, but with both arms in front of me, so my face was never far from it. It’s kind of a confusing image if you’re not a gate-man as I have been from my youth.

Don’t get mired down in the details. The important thing is, I had just turned my head to look at the pivoting end of the panel, to make sure it was turning freely, when the bottom of the swinging end met a dead stop at a large, frozen lump of cow poop. Since my face was only inches from the cold, hard metal anyway, it didn’t have far to go to meet with it. On top of my own hurried momentum carrying me toward it, the top of the panel also sprang back at me.

The panel and I met in the middle much as Sister and I had done more than twenty years ago in the corn. But this time the curvature of my forehead was no good to me. This time it was my eye that paid the price.

Part of the thin piece of iron that makes up the pin of the panel’s latch is what made the most contact. It connected with my right eyebrow in a crippling fashion.

That was the part that ultimately hurt the most, but there was much pain and confusion involved. Metal flew toward my face, my glasses were mushed into my eye socket, then sent flying, I took my own toque off as my hands flew up to try to catch my glasses, Dad was still coming with the tractor.

My first thoughts as my spectacles were mushed into me went to a friend of mine who had somehow fallen against a hopper-bottom bin and crunched her glasses into her face also. She had managed to break her lenses in such a way that one of them slipped up underneath her eyebrow. I did not want that.

I felt around the spot where the pain was originating, and my hand was coming back clean. No blood, no problem. I went back to being dramatic and held my eye in pain.

I really wasn’t going for drama to impress an unimpressed Dad or some cows; it honestly just hurt an awful lot, and I had to really concentrate to keep myself from crying as much as Sister had all those years ago.

In the end, Dad had to stop and wait a few seconds as I recovered myself. I needed to writhe in pain for a bit before I could get back on the horse and open the panel the rest of the way. My glasses had managed to cling on by an ear; they were bent badly out of shape, but I was relieved to see the lenses were fine, except for the one having an impression of my eyeball smeared onto it. I was able to just bend the frames back into shape and they were good to go.

As we finished chores, I watched my right brow slowly droop more and more into my field of vision, and as the week wore on, I got to watch the swelling leave and the colours change all around my eye. It was pretty magical. I had a new eye shadow pallet every day.

Now, whenever I have to open that gate, I feel my right eyebrow for the spot that’s still a tiny bit tender if I press really hard, and I say to the panel, “You did this to me. I might have a bone chip here from you!”