Sticks & Stones

Notes of Concern...
.....Jack Blair


STICKS & STONES



When I was a youngster and we were taunted by others we would say “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me!”

That was then.

This is now.

The words “coffee table” cause fear to run right up my spine. Those words bring memories of hurt and agony and fear. Then they combine with embarrassment, the kind that starts out slowly and just creeps through my entire being.

Recently, while vacationing and staying in a friend’s guest room I heard the bathroom “calling” me. This is not really “hearing” as much as “feeling” as my ears don’t work very well, and they certainly do not at night when the hearing aids are on the nightstand.

I answer the call. I climbed out of bed and headed toward the little night light my host had been kind enough to leave on over the sink.  Straight ahead, toward the light. No problem.

Then it was time for the return trip.

In this instance, you should feel free to think of the word “trip” as both a noun and a verb.  We all like to make the most use of words, right?

It only occurred to me afterward, a long time afterward because not much occurred to me during, that my body heading away from the light blocked the light from showing me the true path back to bed. Essentially, I was walking into a very black cave of a room.

That is when, with my body in full forward movement, a coffee table jumped out and hit me at knee level. I fell head first into the coffee table. My head was certainly “first” because it smacked the end of the table cutting my face in three places and doing a version of the Tango on my left eye.

The force of the fall caused me then to roll off the coffee table and onto the floor, banging up my right shoulder and rib cage.

Things get a little foggy here.

I am wondering how I could have not wakened my wife with my fall.
My wife says she asked me if I had fallen. She says I responded yes.

I have no recollection of that conversation.

I am thinking, boy, she sure is hard asleep.

She says she asked me if I would like her to help me get up.

She says I said, "Leave me alone!”

I have no recollection of that conversation.

She says that ticked her off, and she just went back to sleep to let me deal with my own problem, the ingrate that I had seemed.

I steamed that I could be dying there on the floor and was getting no help from my wife.

I am pretty sure I stayed down for the count, but I did finally awaken and pull myself up to a standing position. I went back toward the light, the bathroom, and my face was covered with blood.

Now I was really not having good thoughts about my wife.

As is usually the case, it was much less bad than it looked. Blood had made streams from my three cuts, and my face looked like a school map showing all the major rivers, but in red. I washed off my face, determined I had just three small cuts, and went back to bed...giving the coffee table wide berth. I hugged the walls of that bedroom the way our dogs hugged the outside walls of the house after we put in the electric fence!

I remember my last thought before falling asleep: who puts a coffee table at the end of a bed?

The next morning my face and left eye socket looked like the painting Monet did of the colorful flowers in Giverny, France. In fact, my face and eye looked like the palette he probably used, the one with all those little dabs of color into which he could dip his brush.

In the light of day I got a good look at that coffee table, you know, the one at the foot of the bed, the one down low where it can get a good contact with a guy’s knees in the dark, the one that had a clean enough surface to allow a fellow to slide right off onto the floor.

Not a scratch! Nada. None.

You would never have known we even had an encounter.

Days of icing my eye finally brought the swelling down.
Days of icing my shoulder finally lessened the pain.
It took more days for me to be able to breathe deeply without getting a pain in my chest.

Since this happened on the first night of our vacation, I had many opportunities to expand and broaden the story I told as I was asked by everyone I met, “What happened to you?”

This was another teaching opportunity.

So I took it.

I told everyone not to put a coffee table at the end of their bed.

Coffee tables go in front of sofas.

One sits behind a coffee table and drinks a cup of coffee and chooses little snacky things.

Coffee tables do not hid around in darkened rooms waiting to preparing to dish out to humans a lot of hurt.

Sticks and stones may break my bones...but believe me coffee tables are something else to watch out for.

And while words will never hurt me, I am still not buying my wife’s version of events.