The year was 1952 and I had survived a hit-and-run just months before. I say it was hit-and-run because although I remember laying in the ditch at the side of the road and feeling that chill you feel as you wake up. And George Smith running across the road to pick me up and carry me home. I remember asking about my bicycle. I was assured that I didn't need to worry.I remember that my cousin Ross and I had wanted to shoot targets that day using the archery set I got as a Christmas present. We had been told "No." As I lay on the sofa my dad commented to my mom that I was lucky that I rode my bike instead. Thinking, I suppose, that I might have been killed by an arrow. This way I had only been rundown by a car.
I remember going to Dr. Wheelwright's office on the corner of Main and Monroe in Milwaukie. It was on the second floor and the window faced the barber shop with a red white and blue barber pole. My left hand and wrist felt weak and ached worse than anything I had ever experienced. My wrist had a huge "purply-red" mound on the palm side - I was assured that would go away. I remember the fiberglass cast - I was too small for a plaster cast - and how cool it felt when the doctor painted the resin on.
I remember that it took what seemed forever for my bike to be fixed. It hung for the longest time in the basement. The fork crushed into a crazy shape and the wheel looked like something from a Salvador Dali painting.
I remember my arm itching as it healed and being told not to scratch. And after the cast came off having to wear a leather strap around my wrist that made it hurt. When I tried to loosen the strap I would be told by the nearest adult to "leave it alone." Even Sister Carlson, my Sunday School teacher, would stop her lesson to remind me that I was to "leave it alone."
But I do not remember anyone coming to ask about me. No one came hat-in-hand, humble and contritious to inquire, confess, or condole. And it never occurred to to me ask about it.
I guess I just felt lucky to be alive and convinced I was indestructible.
2 comments:
you have a really good memory! i guess back then people didn't call the news for a hit and run.
good story. (well not good that you were hurt, but good in an interesting descriptive sort of way.)
I've been thinking about your comment - "I guess back then people didn't call the news for a hit and run."
I guess the assumption is always that what is commonplace today was "then" as well. We accept television as the ubiquitous thing that is now. And "television news" to be an universal norm. Back then not all our neighbors had telephones much less televisions. KPTV, channel 27, signed on the air September 20, 1952, as Oregon's first television station, as well as the world's first commercial TV station on the UHF band. The first television broadcast I saw was a year later as a 12" black and white blur. We would sit staring at an image of lines and shades of gray surrounding a Indian head, waiting for Howdy Doody. After the half hour show I had to go home. Too much television would ruin my eyes.
And the news - in the newspaper and on the radio - was reserved for important things. Things like the war in Korea.
That's how I remember it.
Not much room for a kid in a ditch somewhere off in the distant truck gardens southeast of Portland, Oregon.
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