A Pane in the Glass

Nothing slows a person down like breaking a bone, and breaking more than one should slow a person down even more.  Kinda like a message to ease back a bit.


Apparently, I didn't get the memo when I was a kid.  In the second grade, near the end of the school year, I broke both of my wrists.  That was an adventure in itself, and I won't go into details here.  The tale should be somewhere on the Internet, perhaps in this blog.


Anyway, suffice it to say that I was miserable for a few days, with both arms in casts.  I really didn't like the slings, but two were more comfortable that the single sling that held both arms in front of me and put me off balance when I walked, especially up stairs.


For awhile, the slings were necessary evils, because much to my chagrin, going without the slings would mean that gravity (that tricky beastie that got me into my predicament) would pull my arms down and as blood rushed to my hands, it would throb near the breaks and cause all kinds of nasty pain.  


The first day I could manage without slings was wonderful.  I had a bit more freedom of movement, the pain in my wrists was lessening, and I could actually accidentally bump my casts against things without recoiling in agony.


After a few days, though, I really really REALLY wanted more freedom.  I couldn't bring my thumb and fingers together to hold a pencil (I loved to draw), although I could manage a fork and a spoon with care.


But what I really wanted to do was play baseball.  It was my favorite game and at that period in history, it was America's Pastime.  Trying to get a glove on over my cast was out of the question.  Throwing a ball was more like throwing a shot put.  And as for batting...


I had a plan.  I wasn't supposed to be playing ball and of course the glove and throwing thing made it pretty obvious that the doctor and my mom were going to have their way.  On the other hand, I found that it I carefully banged the palm side of my cast against the concrete steps to the front porch, I could get to a point where my fingers could close and my thumb could become opposable again.


I could hold a stick and swing at pebbles that I talked my friends into tossing toward me.  Then, as the cast got looser (okay, "brokener" would be more accurate, if that were a word), I managed to carefully hold a bat.  I could swing it as long as I didn't try to roll my wrists (the mere thought of doing that still has me wincing in sympathy pain decades later- it was that bad).


The stage was set.  Backyard baseball was on.  My mom naturally assumed I was just hanging out with the kids in the neighborhood because she knew the glove and throwing thing weren't gonna happen, and that trying to swing a bat was even more far-fetched.
Things were going well for awhile.  I could tap the ball even if I couldn't play in the field.  I was more like a pinch hitter than anything else, and it worked great until one fateful day.


We were in my back yard, and I came up to the plate.  I must have eaten my Wheaties that morning (I probably really had - it was my favorite cereal), because one pitch was right in my wheelhouse and I swung and connected.  The ball rocketed past everybody, through the open garage door, and with a mighty crash, through a pane in the glass window in the back of the garage.


Everybody scattered.  Pretty standard procedure for kids when a window got broken.  I stuck around, partly because I was so proud that I crushed that ball and partly because, well, I had nowhere to run because it happened at my house.


My mom came outside, probably because of the lack of noise more than anything else.  Parents seemed to get nervous when kids stopped making noise in my neighborhood.


"What happened?" she asked.


"We were, uh, playing baseball and the window in the garage broke," I said.  An honest answer, despite the lack of details.


"Who broke the window?" she asked.


"The baseball broke the window," I responded, squirming a little. "We were all out here when it happened."


Apparently, that was not quite the answer she was looking for.


"WHO," she began, "hit or threw the ball that went into the garage and broke the window?"


My mom knew that I hated to rat out my friends, and she knew that I knew that lying was not a viable option (my dad would be home and had a way of getting to the bottom of things), I was in a real pickle.  She probably figured that telling the truth would win out over loyalty to my friends.  What she wasn't ready for was me actually telling the truth.


"I did it," I said.


"You don't need to cover for your friends," she coaxed. "It wasn't Wesley, was it?"


Wesley was a bit of a bully.  I couldn't blame him for being a bully.  He had four sisters and no brothers so we all felt sorry for him.


"Honest, Mom," I said. "I did it."


She decided that I needed to cool off a bit in my room until my dad got home.  What she didn't know was that my story wasn't going to change.  It really was my fault.


That evening, when my dad got home, he asked how the window got broken.  I knew better than to blame the baseball and went straight to the truth.


"I did it, Dad," I said.


"How in the world...?" he began.  But then he stopped.  He was a kid once, and even at my tender age of 8, I already knew of some of his own misadventures.


I showed him my cast, where I had managed to make my hands useful, and explained that I managed to hold onto the bat and smacked the ball that broke the window.


He managed to hide a smile from my mom, and asked me what I planned to do about the broken window.


I offered to pay for it out of my allowance, of course.


That weekend, I not only got to pay for a new pane of glass, but I got a lesson on how to measure the frame, to fit the new piece of glass into place, and to use putty and a putty knife because if I could hold onto a bat I could certainly hold onto a putty knife.