~S from across the street

So, as a follow-up to the aforementioned broken arm story...  Imagine the scene:  a narrow, residential street lined with homes of about 1100 square feet.  It was early June just outside of Washington, D.C., and the summer was just warming up.  We'd just gotten home from a T-Ball game - it was 6-ish in the evening and I'd just gotten the T-Ball fundraiser.  I was determined to make good on my responsibility immediately, so I went across the street to get my first sponsor.

I rang the doorbell...  no response.  I could hear the neighbor in the house, vacuuming. Naturally, I rang again.  Still no answer...  So I went down the steps, turned around, and peered through the large glass window on the front of the house.  I could see him in there, tried to get his attention, but he couldn't see me.  So I started backing up...  slowly... still looking through the window... further... almost there...


My mom said she not only heard my screaming from across the street, but could SEE that my arm was broken.  It was in an S shape - a multiple compound fracture of the right arm. Not so common in kids, but quite impressive nonetheless.  Naturally, the drive to the hospital was more traumatic than the break itself, with each little bump in the road feeling like a railroad spike being twisted in my forearm.

I had to be placed under general anesthesia so they could set my arm, and I was in a plaster cast from knuckles to armpit for more than six weeks.  Being a righty, T-Ball was over before it really even began.  It's a shame, because I was good.  I was already being scouted by the Majors (tongue planted firmly in cheek here).

It started off as a pretty boring summer, laid up with an elevated arm, with a (doctor-forbidden) hanger at the ready to scratch inside the cast.  There were only 4 or 5 TV stations back then and no such thing as home video, so I read everything I could get my hands on.  But after a while, that wasn't doing it for me.  I'd started to feel an obnoxious little tickle in my brain that couldn't be scratched by any amount of literary masterpieces.  There was self-expression buried in there, and it had to be excavated.  IMMEDIATELY.

Being a righty, handwriting was out of the question. As the creative juices started to spill forth, I did the next best thing:  I pecked away at my mom's manual typewriter with my left hand.  And a writer was born....