childhood unconsciousness

everyone has their backlog of stories. i sure do. i really respect a person who has the confidence to be able to tell a story or two on themselves. a little humility and self-deprecating humor goes a long way with me.

so, in that spirit, i’ll occasionally tell a story or two on myself on here. that way when the probably inevitable senility sets in (both my mom and my dad have alzheimers. poor kirk.) i’ll be able to read these stories (assuming i still can) and say, “my, what an interesting life this fellow had.”

don’t be offended. you gotta laugh. what else can you do?

so, there are a series of stories from my childhood. all are funny now, though they weren’t at the time. all are on my greatest-story-hit-parade.

all of them end with me unconscious. which, if you know me, explains a lot.

the first story happened when i was three years old or so. my favorite tv show, which i watched religiously on my grandmother’s zenith each weekday morning, was “romper room”. with miss june. and at the end, miss june got out her magic mirror. and she chanted “magic mirror, tell me today. did all my friends have fun at play?” and she would gaze into ther magic mirror and do a shout-out to kids at home. well, it wasn’t called a shout-out then, but she would basically just say random first names–“i see sally, i see billy, i see susie.” you get the idea.

each day i watched and waited, hoping that miss june would see jamie. jamie was not a very common name, so i had a long wait. but, one fateful day, my turn came. miss june saw jamie.

now, keep in mind, i was three years old. i thought tv was a place you could go, and that all the people on tv lived in the tv. and i got so excited upon hearing my name that i ran across the room and jumped headfirst into the tv. thinking i’d be in romper room.

knocking me unconscious.

my grandmother found me out like a light in front of the tv, but i wasn’t out for long, she told me later. maybe thirty seconds. needless to say, i was still in my grandmother’s florida room in front of the zenith, and miss june was never the wiser.

my next memory along these lines is of rowena cherryhomes. rowena cherryhomes was my girlfriend for a while in sixth grade, which meant not a lot except that we hung out together after school. i ate dinner at her house once. her mom gave me a pork chop and everyone else was eating sandwiches or something, and i remember feeling really bad about that, because i didn’t really like pork chops to start with, and this one was cooked to within an inch of its life, except that it had been dead a while. i remember also that rowena had breasts in sixth grade, not that i cared about them one iota.

anyway, she was my girlfriend. and tammy langer was some other guy’s girlfriend and had been since first grade, and she was the prettiest girl in school, and she lived a few blocks away from me. she suddenly broke up with him–big sixth grade scandal. i immediately asked her to be my girlfriend, and she said yes.

one problem. i didn’t break up with rowena cherryhomes. these matters had a protocol, one which i’d clearly broken. especially according to roy cherryhomes.

roy cherryhomes was rowena’s older brother. eighth grade, and big for eighth grade. i was walking tammy langer home, and roy cherryhomes met me and proceeded to beat the shit out of me.

so roy had me in a headlock, and was punching the side of my head at will, when along comes rowena, drinking a pepsi. she sees me, screams “i’ll teach you to two-time me!” and bashes the pepsi bottle over my head, full strength.

knocking me unconscious.

i awoke later, alone. tammy langer had fled the scene at the first sign of trouble, teaching me my first but not my last lesson in the vagaries of love. roy and rowena had fled the scene as well. i was basically ok, except for the blood.

i should have gone for roy instead of rowena anyway. he was much much cuter.

my final story involves tools and construction. i was maybe eleven or twelve, and my mom asked me to take the back door off the hinges and paint it. the door had a closing mechanism on it, one of those silver metallic pressurized thingys with a sliding bar that pulled the door shut, like you see a lot on screen doors, except it hadn’t worked in years because the pressurized thingy was no longer pressurized.

so step one of taking the door down was to take this thingy off. and step one of taking the thingy off was to pull this cotter pin that held the sliding bar to the door frame in a bracket.

which i did. pulled the pin.

kind of like a hand grenade. the no longer pressurized thingy had plenty of pressure, just not enough to close the door. it did, however, have enough pressure to swing with great force back in an arc in the opposite direction along its pivot point.

with my head in the way. it whacked me across the forehead.

knocking me unconscious.

did i mention i was standing on a chair? so i have the lovely sensation of being whacked across the head by a thingy with newly-discovered pressure, falling backwards off the chair, and thinking all the way down to the floor “i’m losing consciousness.”

and then my head hit the floor, and my loss of consciousness was confirmed.

i don’t know if all of these combined events were a contributing factor.

a contributing factor to what, you ask? how should i know? i was knocked unconscious a lot as a kid.

that’s my excuse.