... that I’m dreading swallowing but I know I have to and I know there’s a blessing to be found in it … I just have to look.Looking backwards sometimes helps me with these things.
In the summer of 1963, right before my birthday, my Dad had a near- fatal accidentat work. He was guiding a truck as it backed up into a trailer hitch and in some bizarre turn of events, the details of which were never explained to me in a way I could fully comprehend them, his head got caught between the truck and I don’t know what and his skull was fractured. According to my Mom the doctor said his head was “squished like a cantaloupe in a vice” (great bedside manner huh?). Not realizing the extent of his injuries, my Dad walked away, got in his car and drove home so he could “lie down”. My Mom always relayed the next part of the story as “he walked in the front door with blood trickling out of his ears and pupils the size of pinpoints”. I don’t remember that event but I do remember wondering what a pinpoint was. It’s comical what a kid’s mind will stick on. I remember writing my Dad a plethora of get well letters over the course of his long hospital stay and ruthlessly devouring my Grandmother’s entire box of pretty pink stationary in the process. I remember trying to sit still and be good for seemingly endless hours in the hospital lobby while my Mom visited my Dad and I remember silently and vehemently hating all the nurses because THEY wouldn’t allow anyone under 14 into ICU … even ME ... how could they not see I was special? I vividly recall the day my Dad was finally discharged. I was wearing a navy blue sleeveless dress with a big, stiff sailor’s collar and I proudly rode on my Dad’s lap in his wheelchair all the way to the car. I know I was mentally wagging my tongue at all those mean old nurses. Some things never change … although the wagging tongue has been forever replaced with my middle digit.
As a result of that injury my Dad was put into a rehabilitation program that gave him an opportunity to go to college. He did four years in two and his graduation put our little family on a new and better road and changed the outcome of all our lives.
Blessing disguised as a bitter pill.
Once in a while there’s gonna’ be a bitter pill you've gotta' step up to and just swallow … and not to let it choke you to death!
Finding out I can't march DCA will not choke me to death ...
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