The Making of a Man-Part 2
Around the time of the sandpile incident my parents were in the middle of a divorce. Roughly a year later, custody of my two sisters (one older, one younger), and my two brothers (also one older, one younger), as well as custody of yours truly, was given to my mother. However, my father was given visitation rights. As a boy, I was ecstatic at the prospect of seeing my father.
I can remember the excitement when my mother would tell us that it was my father’s visitation day. Mom would spend the time to get all of us children prepared for his visit, even though she knew that the chances were slim that he would show up. Usually there would be a phone call with some excuse or another, or he would just fail to show up. Then, after waiting for what seemed like an eternity, our mother would break the news to us and find some activity to occupy our minds until we found our own diversion.
When he did bother to appear it was normally an exercise in futility anyway since he was either busy with one of his girlfriends or predisposed in some other activity which didn’t involve a tribe of children. Eventually, the inevitable would occur. Pop quiz: What do you get when you leave a pack of children unsupervised for longer than thirty minutes? Answer: Noise and destruction. At least when we were at my father’s bachelor pad. Then, just as quick as we had come, we were scooped up, loaded back into the car, and dropped off back home. Short and sweet. I can’t recall any of the few visits we had with our father being longer than an hour, including the transportation to and from our house.
At any rate, there was one visitation day which sticks out in my mind. I was seven at the time. It was a bright sunny morning, a special morning, because it was the day that my father was going to pick up just one of his children. That one child was me. We were going fishing, and I couldn’t have been more excited. I felt incredibly important that my dad would pick me, out of all the children, to take with him. This time I knew in my heart that he would show up. No doubt.
Even though my mother did not share my optimism, she did everything in her power to make sure that it would be a special day for me. On the off chance that my father showed up, my mom had gone out and bought me an entire little fishing ensemble. A pole, a tackle box, bobbers, lures, the whole nine yards. I was on top of the world.
I don’t recall what time he was supposed to pick me up, but I do remember waiting and waiting. Kids are such durable creatures. I had not even the slightest suspicion that he might not come to get me. My mom, on the other hand, realized it shortly after there was no car in the driveway at the appointed time, and no phone call. As morning began to creep into afternoon, she finally told me I could go outside to play with my fishing gear. I could take everything but the hooks and sharp stuff. That was fine by me. Like most children, my attention became completely concentrated on the event at hand. The thoughts of dear old dad failing to arrive became lost in the excitement of the moment.
I took my pole and little tackle box to the backyard. I wanted to practice casting my new fishing pole. I opened my tackle box and grabbed a big, heavy, lead sinker and tied it to the end of my line. I swung back and let it fly. It went far, but I wanted it to go farther. So, I swung the rod over my head backwards and ripped it forwards as fast and as hard as I could. Man, that sinker flew! I repeated it again and again. I tried whipping it a little harder each time.
It had rained pretty hard the previous night, so the ground was a bit soft. My shoes were damp from the dew in the grass. Up until this point it hadn’t posed any problems. However, about the third or fourth cast, the sinker flew farther than any cast before it. It flew so far that all the line on the reel was used. As the lead weight pulled out the last of the line, the knot holding the line to the reel stopped the sinker from any further forward movement, slamming it into the soft earth with a solid thud.
I started trying to reel the line back in, but the sinker was buried deeply in the soft ground. I gave a little tug to free the sinker from the grass, but it held fast. I started to pull, harder and harder, to free the sinker but it wouldn’t move. I pulled up and backward as hard as I could until my spine couldn’t bend backwards any further. I had the reel and the handle of the fishing pole gripped tightly against my chest, making the rod curve into a shape resembling the letter “C”. I pulled with all my might and thought, surely, the line would break at any moment.
Then, suddenly, the sinker popped loose from the soil. With the massive tension I had on the pole, and with the elasticity of the monofilament line, the sinker sped back towards me, (at what I can only assume was close to light speed) and hit me square in the center of my left pupil. The doctor said I hadn’t even had time to close the lid. It had flown faster than the blink reflex.
I dropped my pole and slapped both of my hands over my eye and let out a howl as I ran for the house. My mom had heard and was already on her way out of the front door. As we met, she crouched down and peeled my hands away from my eye and I saw her face go pale. She scooped me up, ran with me inside, and immediately called the hospital.
I think I recall going to the emergency room by ambulance. A lot of things that took place immediately afterward are a blur, but by the time the doctor was examining my damaged eyeball I had already stopped crying. I remember some pain, but it wasn’t excruciating. The scariest part was hearing the doctors talking to my mom about my eye and what to probably expect in terms of an outcome. I heard that there was a good chance I would lose my sight in that eye.
I spent the next few weeks in the hospital. I had to keep patches over both of my eyes due to something about how the strain on my one good eye would be too much and would cause damage from trying to compensate for the injured eye, or something to that effect. Which turned out to be entirely true because after the injury healed, my injured eye went from being totally blind to having sight, (albeit very poor sight) while my healthy eye went from perfect sight to also having very poor sight. They sort of “evened out”. Weird, I know. So, I went without being able to see the entire time I was in the hospital due to the patches I had to have over my eyes constantly. It was a very scary and lonely time. My mom had four other children to take care of so she couldn’t stay at the hospital with me the entire time. But whenever she wasn’t working, or needed at home, she was with me. She really went above and beyond to comfort her son. I couldn’t ask for a better mother. (Here’s to you Mom! Love ya!)
A couple things to bear in mind; we were a very poor family, supported only by my mother. In addition, she had no driver’s license. She couldn’t afford a car even if she had had one, so she took a bus everywhere. This was in the 1970’s so things were very different than they are now. There were many other factors at play during this time that also complicated things, but just imagine the dynamics of the situation and you can probably appreciate how dedicated and determined a mother can be.
The biggest downside was that I had to wear glasses for the rest of my life. Big, thick, welfare glasses just so I could see. My vision was very poor after that injury. It still is. Being an adolescent with “coke bottle” glasses can be tough at times.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, my father never even came to see me in the hospital. I started to wonder if, perhaps, he wasn’t such a good guy after all.
A related bit of trauma occurred just six months later when I had the misfortune of breaking my glasses. This was at a time when it took six to eight weeks to get a replacement pair. So, I had to walk to and from school, as well as having everything at school read to me. At first, I was unable to locate may friends on the playground because I couldn’t see them, and I had a very difficult time seeing anything farther than a few feet from in front of my face. Walking around in a world where everything is just shadows and blurry shapes is quite scary for a child. I felt incredibly vulnerable and very alone.
You can probably imagine how this went over with the other kids at school. Being different usually means being a target, and I was an easy one. It was a time that is burned into my memory. It was a time where fear and anger dominated my days completely.
I don’t say this for the sake of pity, I’m merely stating that it was a transformative time for me. More to the point, these stories of my youth are for background purposes. By the time this journey is done, it is my hope that something will have been learned about what makes a man. This includes all the experiences which make up who we are, no matter how “abnormal” we, or our behaviors, might seem.
This experience really drove home the alienation I was experiencing from the sand pile incident. It was a deeper level of isolation. Vulnerability was becoming a theme. A pattern was beginning to develop.
On a brighter note, I did develop an uncanny ability to distinguish voices and even recognize peoples’ blurry shapes by the way they moved. However, those were the only positive things I can recall about the period after I returned to the normal world outside the hospital. I abhorred existing that way and was extremely glad when my new glasses finally arrived.
In case anyone is wondering, the strain from my good eye compensating for my bad eye made my eyesight become practically the same in them both. My vision leveled off at around 20/750 in good eye and 20/700 in my injured eye. (Compared to perfect vision which is 20/20.)
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