On tripping Heather G.

Malachi stubbed his toe playing basketball at the neighbors—which he’s allowed to do—but without shoes—which he’s not. No crying, just “Dad, can you get me a band-aid?” from the front door. He’s the fourth of five kids, seven years old, and waiting while I fetch bandages from the medicine closet in the hall outside our bedroom.

This constellation of bleeding, basketball, and band-aids fishes out a memory circa 1986 and leaves it flopping about there in my mind while I’m retreating to the closet. A basketball game got my class running about, and Heather and I tangled legs in the mayhem. “Mayhem,” parents know, is not an exaggeration. Witness elementary-age rec-league basketball, and you’ll see mayhem. Mobs of kids running after one with the ball because he’s the only one able to dribble. It is, by default, a shrieking, happy mayhem, and Heather and I were among those chasing the kid with the ball when either my left leg hit her right leg or hers hit mine. The inequity of the situation is that she went down, I didn’t. She skinned up her knees on concrete roughened from years lying open to the blistering Sarasota sun while I somehow escaped without a scratch. A faceless teacher whisked her away, and Heather returned with the bandaged knees. That’s the memory.

My mind has in an inexplicable way kept some details and let others fade into oblivion. I see the basketball goal we’re running toward, which is away from the school’s bus garage, and I’m aware of Heather on my left. I’m aware of a tangible exuberance of play. There’s the tangle, and with Heather’s fall tumbles all exuberance. The margins of that image—what happened before and after the tangle—is lost. The rest of the impression is smoothed into obscurity.

I’m now in the hallway where the medicine cabinet is. The left door squeaks when I grasp the painted brass knob and swing it open. Needs some WD40 on that knob, I think. The right door is quiet. Both are at shoulder level, so I close them after grabbing the band-aids, a couple of Q-tips, and peroxide. We don’t need to have anyone banging into these doors, I tell myself.

My walk to the front door has me wondering how I can effectively tell Malachi “I told you so” without saying “I told you so.” This is quite the conundrum for someone who gets paid to lecture. I’ve been teaching for seventeen years, and this moment is as inviting as any for me to disclose the nobility of parenting and parental reasoning to the poor ruffian who disregarded my sage counsel. But, he tends toward self-criticism, and as much as I enjoy giving a lecture on the virtues of wearing shoes while playing basketball, I don’t want to shame him. And so, I’m stuck somewhere between my professional and parental ethe.

I have a hunch that partly explains why this memory of tripping Heather has endured. Shame is quite the preservative, and I was mortified at having tripped the girl I had a crush on throughout the third grade. Which may also explain why I was running near her in the first place. Unfortunately for me, the third grade is not a time when boys are the brightest Romeos, or I would have known that my methods for getting her attention ran tragic risks. So, there I am, running next to Heather one moment and finding myself the cause of her pain the next. It was a lesson I tucked away: athletics and crushes don’t mix.

How the image endured is clear enough. What plagues me is why the memory hasn’t just gone away during the roughly thirty-five years since. In the same way that the body can preserve a memory in a scar, my mind seems to have preserved a scar in a memory. On the body, this can be a strip, a square, a blotch. A patch that is covered without concealing. Some we wear proudly. An eleven-year-old birthday party turns into a “Who’s got the coolest scar?” contest. Legit bragging rights, legit glory, legit cred. I wear one above my hairline from a crank on a small barge used by my relatives in Blountstown for dredging sand. The crank that operated a loading ramp that we were using as a diving board released, and when it snapped backward it smacked me in a karate chop of a whirl that sent rivulets of blood down over my eyes and nose. I wasn’t seriously hurt, but I remember thinking, My mom’s gonna have a conniption, while running up the grassy bank toward the brown, wood paneled house. I was also afraid my trouble-fraught distant cousin Billy would get blamed because he was on the scene, and I wanted to ensure all knew it was an accident. My hair keeps this scar out of sight and mind, which makes balding somewhat appealing—I’ll get to tell the story.

Other scars. One has persisted on my left shin since living in Bern Creek thirty years ago when I found I could jump over one of dad’s plastic, five-gallon buckets. It’s that time in boyhood when I began jumping to touch door frames, dreaming of one day finding myself on a breakaway dunk. Jumping forward over the bucket, however, only made me want to do the very logical next step of jumping backward over the bucket. Raise the bar of my budding athleticism a smidge. I did, but not without sliding the length of my shin down the edge of the bucket’s rim. I can still feel the burn from that noble idea and see the bucket sitting there as if to say, “Hey, stupid, why’d you do that?” But perhaps Heather’s knees did what my arm did for me. A bike accident on Bahia Vista on the east side of the Philippi Creek bridge left a string of blotches on my right arm from elbow to wrist for a while before my body managed to erase all evidence of my crash.

It’s cliché anymore to hear people talk of scars as “mementos of healing”—Facebook philosophizing posted in Lucinda font with some goofy set of directions to pass on to another five people to ensure you’ll have a good day. Kevin Kling manages to avoid cliché by calling a scar “a monument to a battle survived” in his poem “Tickled Pink.” The description reminds me of the opening lines to Herodotus’ Histories, which tells the stories behind the monuments of the fifth century BC world that Herodotus saw while traveling about the Mediterranean. His travels presented numerous retellings: golden tripods at Delphi from Croesus, a dolphin at Corinth for the poet Arion, the pyramids of Egypt. Ten books climax at the battle of Plataea—the ultimate monument—where the Greeks crush the Persian army and waltz into the age of Athenian empiricism that blesses us first with the tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the philosophers Plato and Aristotle later.

This all reminds me that I took a Herodotus course at the College of Charleston that was monumental for me. I had discovered my love for koine—aka New Testament—Greek at Gardner-Webb University, but koine is simpler than classical, and being admitted to Dr. Zeiner-Carmichael’s class meant that I had managed not only to retain but also improve my Greek. She had chosen the standard Herodotus Greek reader edited by Amy Barbour, and my high school English teacher’s budget pushed me to find a cheaper, used text. These were online ordering’s early days, and the result was a hard-back copy with pages I could immediately tell were brown from age. Its original owner had signed and dated the inside cover: “Isabella Wilmer Athey, November 1929, Northampton.” I knew this was the first month of the Great Depression. The treasure I found in this tidbit of information was that Northampton, Massachusetts is the site of Smith College, one of the elite “Seven Sisters” colleges for women, the same school where Professor Amy Barbour—the editor for the Greek text I held in my hands—taught from 1901 to 1937. I like to think Professor Barbour touched the very pages of my Selections from Herodotus with her index finger while Isabella read about the clever Egyptian thief who created a secret entrance to the treasury.

By now, I’m holding Malachi’s foot in my left hand and dabbing at the toe with a Q-tip in my right. He didn’t want me touching it but then relented when I warned him about dirt under the skin. He squirms. I talk with him about the need to be careful, that playing basketball without shoes is careless and can hurt you. It’s the compromise between teaching and parenting I choose. He nods in agreement, and I tell myself to shut up.

The combination of remembering Heather’s accident and sitting on the front step with Malachi has me wondering about the difference between careless and carefree. We’re quick to condemn the former and savor the latter, and my internal bias likes that distinction because it lets me scold Malachi as careless but comfort myself for being carefree. But is that really a correct distinction? Aristotle says cowardice—not carefreeness—is the opposite of carelessness with the goal being the virtue of courage. Cowardice, he reasons, is too concerned with danger and doesn’t do the right thing at the right time for the right reason to the right extent because fear of danger impedes action. Carelessness, on the other hand, fails to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason to the right extent but for the opposite reason: not considering sufficiently the danger of the situation. Courage is the golden mean, the wisdom enabling one to do the right thing at the right time . . . blah, blah, blah. The point is that Cowardice – Courage – Carelessness provides a spectral image of how both cowardice and carelessness miss the mark. Carefreeness, then—if I’m being honest with myself—is just carelessness before an accident, which means that me running too closely to Heather differs little from Malachi playing basketball shoeless.

Unfortunately—but not surprisingly—my ego’s not done defending me from the eternal courtroom of my mind, and he’s now shouting that “accidents happen” and “Malachi was simply being disobedient.” Oh, yes, the disobedient card played by the ego, the loving parent. Egos are asses, and mine is no exception. Hearing its pompous preaching while I’m holding Malachi’s foot and seeing his trust in me to handle his pain without shaming him gives me enough to mentally shut the door on the blustering idiot who is, of course, partly right but totally wrong. Yes, accidents happen, and they’re one of the best teachers we have. Tripping Heather didn’t keep me from playing basketball forever and not even from that particular basketball court. I would play on the same spot years later when I had made basketball a significant part of my reputation. Basketball was an avenue I hoped would take me somewhere. Where? I’m unsure, but basketball got me the affirmation from others I desperately wanted during my vulnerable youth. At some point, I exchanged it for other pursuits. Outside of the game when Heather fell, I don’t ever remember playing basketball just for fun. Fun takes time, and there’s simply too much my ego has orchestrated for me to do in the name of “success.” Personality guides, my therapist, and a tiny eek! of a voice in my head that I’ve not been able to identify yet routinely tell me to play. “It’ll be good for your soul,” they all say.

Malachi’s toe is bandaged. There’s no real harm, it seems, from the concrete or my scolding. He limps to the garage, puts on his shoes, and returns to play. I can watch that kid for hours. His boyishness fascinates me. No agenda. No axe to grind. No work. At least, that’s what it looks like. He’s still small, and the effort required to shoot a basketball on a regulation goal looks Herculean. With each layup, his hair falls into his eyes, but he moves it with a sideways toss of his head, the way I’d like to think he handled my mini-lecture. He’s still in touch with something I abandoned long ago, before I became skeptical and then cynical of play. Watching him creates a dull ache just beneath my sternum.

I know why Heather’s accident persists.

If Aristotle is correct in thinking that courage is the means to avoiding cowardice or carelessness, I think I know what I should be courageous to do. Courage implies action, even if it’s internal, like taking a different perspective. I felt joy just before Heather fell—the grown-up or spiritual name for “exuberance”—and joy, I’ve found, takes courage, especially when circumstances can be so powerful. The whims and moods of people, the unpredictability of the weather, and my own clumsiness happen without notice or apology, and my joy vanishes easily. Too easily, Epictetus would say. I’ve learned to soften the effect of circumstances by tamping down joy to joyish. There’s less to lose with exuberance muzzled by an expectation of disaster. To be joyful—to continue drawing internal strength from the well of spiritual fullness in spite of all the reasons Life provides not to—demands courage, and I’m now also wondering if play might be the spiritual exercise that could teach me to be joyful when life is bitterly unpredictable. It’s the same type of catalyst that Kristen Neff believes mindfulness provides during moments when we need to exercise self-compassion. An exercise that develops a particular muscle.

I close the box on the band-aids and shuffle back to the hall closet. The doors are standing open, and I sigh. I really didn’t forget to close them, right? The image of the recess returns. This time, the sun is a little hotter, the concrete rougher, Heather’s abrasions redder. I can smell nearby pines. The basketball goal is a distant tower, and a bead of sweat trickles down my right temple. My mind has done its thing and sharpened the fading lines like a tattoo artist touching up old ink. But along with restamping the image, I’ve remembered a time that included joy and play, and I’m hoping that in my second half of life, which some might call “second childhood,” my soul can re-imagine a life vibrant with joy and play.