Auden, my elfin three-year-old granddaughter, took a tumble the other day and despite landing on plush carpet fractured her left arm.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain said, and a poem in my family annals now includes these couplets: bed and sled, skating fall and basketball.
My daughter, long before she was Auden’s mommy, fell while roller-skating at slow speed and broke her left arm at age 10; a couple of years thereafter, my son, coincidentally also 10 at the time, broke his left arm playing basketball; and when I was 7, I too broke my left arm.
Four fractures, arms each, all in portside rhyme.
A brief trip down memory lane – rather, a sled ride down The Big Hill in my boyhood neighborhood in Ohio. Having reached the speed of a comet, I skidded off course through an icy turn…
CRASH!!!
…into a two-foot-high stout steel pole.
The pain screaming through my wrist and arm was nearly surpassed by the fear of my dad’s raised-voice scolding when he found out the Flexible Flyer I turned into bent steel and splintered wood – while also splintering my ulna and radius – had been “borrowed” from my friend’s big brother without asking.
At home, including at the table at dinner, I kept my winter coat on to cloak the swelling. Mom asked me to take it off. I kept it on. Dad insisted. Shedding the sleeve over my injured arm felt like peeling the skin off.
Mom, despite being a housewife not an orthopedist, without aid of an X-ray image instantly made an accurate diagnosis: “Oh, honey, you broke your arm!”
To which, family lore has it, I angrily huffed through tears: “I knew you’d say that!”
When I saw Auden seated at her kitchen table after bath time, refusing to put on a shirt because it hurt too much to move her arm, I quietly thought: “Oh, Audie, you broke your arm!” X-rays confirmed my silent diagnosis, albeit with twice the precision: it was fractured in two places.
Two hours in Urgent Care seemed like a week, but Auden waited patiently and bravely as we read books. When her name was finally called, she was greeted by doctors and technicians who not only provided expert medical treatment, they were experts at being friendly and warm and reassuring to a little girl in pain.
I won’t say Auden enjoyed getting X-rays taken (positioning her arm this way and that caused tears to flow anew) or getting a cast put on, but she did like staying up well past her bedtime.
She left Urgent Care with a smile having replaced her tears and with a “snazzy” – her newest word learned from her grandpa – fiberglass cast as colorful as a World Cup soccer jersey, a camouflage pattern of yellow, pink, blue, and green reaching from hand to shoulder.
Today’s casts are indeed snazzier than the plain white plaster ones of my youth, but the throwbacks had one advantage: friends and family could sign them whereas ink doesn’t take well to fiberglass.
It’s funny the small things we sometimes remember, even after half a century has slid by seemingly as fast as a sled down The Big Hill, and this remains indelible to me: my big brother Jimmy doodled a sledder on my cast and wrote: “Fast And Fearless!”
If I could I write on Auden’s slick cast without it smudging, I would quote from Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” when Helena says of her friend Hermia: “And though she be but little, she is fierce.”
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.