Lost Toenail
It was the sixties. I was probably nine or ten, and liked being a daredevil. As kids we used to climb way up in trees to make tree houses out of scavenged pieces of wood. We were in an area where new houses were being built, and stray lumber was all over the neighborhood. They were never really completed, but it was fun to see if you could carry a big piece of wood up the tree and not fall. It’s amazing none of us ever fell and broke our necks.
I’m speaking about a time 40 years ago when kids got to run around the neighborhood without a parent hovering close by. We would play baseball for hours and never see a parent. My friend Sonny Carter and I would wander the fields turning over old pieces of wood to catch mice with our bare hands. If you want to try this highly satisfying adventure, remember to push your knuckles over their neck so they can’t bite your fingers. We never hurt the mice, but it was fun to see if we could catch them.
I also remember catching drones with our bare hands. Drones don’t have stingers, since their job is to keep the hive cool by beating their wings. There was a camper parked in Mark Tuttle’s driveway and we decided it would be a good idea to catch the drones, roll the window to the camper open a bit and trap the bees behind the glass and between the screen. For some reason, this was fun, and amazingly, no one got stung.
I was also one of the first adopters of the new skateboard technologies of the sixties. How I never got a broken arm is another miracle. We’re not talking neoprene wheels like the boards have today. The wheels were seriously Fred Flintstone rock-like wheels. When you hit a small pebble with these rock wheels, the board stopped immediately and you went flying. We thought it was fun.
I played Little League, so when we weren’t playing a game with another team or making our own game in the neighborhood, we practiced in the back yard.
Unfortunately, little brothers like to hang around their older brothers, and Patrick Tuttle was behind me one time when I was taking a heroic swing with a baseball bat. I broke his nose. I felt terrible, but nobody blamed me for the injury, even though it was my fault. We were boys, and this was what boys did back in the sixties.
We even thought it was cool when a giant rat was found in one of the garages in the neighborhood. None of us had ever seen a real live rat – sure we had seen mice, but this was a rat! I don’t really remember seeing it, but we spent an afternoon waiting for the adult who was trying to kill it with a bat to bring us out the evidence. I think they let us watch as the dead rat was carried to the garbage.
A side note will give you an idea how suspect boys with imagination can be. I had been practicing magic tricks in my front yard, waving my magic wand mysteriously as Debbie Radmall rode by on her bicycle. Evil boys from the sixties obviously have magic powers, because as she rode by her back tire popped with a loud bang. She glared at me, looked at her flat tire, gave me another dirty look and walked her bike home without a word. I know she thought I had given her a flat tire, but I knew I hadn’t. There was no way to convince her otherwise, so I didn’t try.
So when another chance to impress the ladies of the neighborhood came along, it was hard to resist. I was riding my stylish stingray bicycle, but I had forgotten to wear my shoes. It’s easy to ride without shoes, since the pokey ten speed pedals were a couple of years in my future. But the road doesn’t care if you aren’t wearing shoes, because as I sped up to an impressive speed and zoomed by the local females, I put my foot a little bit too low on the pedal. A sickening scrape and immediate pain told me this was not to be a day of astounding bicycle gymnastics. I put on my best game face and road back to the house grimacing.
The toe pounded furiously, and after a couple of days, blood was building up behind the toenail and my dad thought a good way to relieve the pain would be to heat a needle and push it through the toenail. The blood did come rushing out and it did relieve the pain.
The toenail fell off a week later.
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