On a Hot Summer Night

   When I was a kid, my dad worked for the Parks and Recreation Dept. in Oklahoma City.  In the summer, he often worked at the softball parks, keeping stats and calling scores in to the newspaper.  Sometimes he would take me with him.  I would usually get bored up in the press box, and wander off to play with friends whose dads played softball in one of the many city leagues.
   One hot and sweaty night, when I still wearing casts on both arms (mentioned elsewhere on this blog), we were in one of the warmup areas playing paper cup baseball, where a paper cup was filled with little rocks and squashed into a rough baseballish shape.  I was using one of my casts as a bat (handy, huh?), and we were having fun until for some silly reason, we decide to quit and started pinging each other with the little rocks.  I imagine the largest rocks that we were throwing at each other were probably fingernail sized.  When you got hit, it stung a little, but didn't cause any real damage.
   It was getting close to the end of one of the softball games, so I decided to check in with my dad to let him know that I hadn't wandered off.  Besides, I was thirsty and I hoped I could con him into buying me a root beer at the concession stand.
   I was walking toward the concession/press box area when I heard women in the stands starting to scream.  They were asking if somebody was all right, so I looked out onto the field to see who got hurt.  Weird.  The game was going on normally.  Then I realized they were screaming and looking at me!
   What the...?  Then I looked down.  About one-third of my white t-shirt was red.  Omigosh!  That was MY blood!  My imagination went wild and the little sting from getting hit with a pebble had turned into a gaping head wound, gushing blood out all over my shirt.  For all I knew, my brain was going to fall out of the back of my head!
   Now I started screaming and running and darted up the steps into the pressbox where all the guys were engrossed in a game of dominoes (they really did work - they would often get through a few rounds between innings).  I was in tears, positive that I would soon die.  My dad wasn't there - most likely he'd gone to the other nearby diamonds to get scores.
  They calmed me down and took me down to the concession stand where I got fussed over by one of the ladies working that night.  I got ice for my head (which, once I calmed down, had gone back to the little sting), and a root beer, which I didn't have to pay for. 
    On the way home that night my dad said to me, "You know your mother is going to kill us, right?"
    I said, "Maybe I can take my shirt off and throw it in the garbage when we get home.  If she's asleep, she'll never know."
   Although I don't remember if I really did throw the shirt away, I do know that my dad and I survived.

   Did you know that head wounds bleed a lot?  I do.  I found out the hard way.