{"id":1005,"date":"2017-05-22T00:02:57","date_gmt":"2017-05-22T00:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/?p=1005"},"modified":"2019-06-27T07:54:15","modified_gmt":"2019-06-27T07:54:15","slug":"blood-memories-and-time-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/blood-memories-and-time-travel\/","title":{"rendered":"Blood, Memories and Time Travel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

At six and four, Buddy and Sis are old enough now to enjoy the occasional overnight visit at my house.\u00a0 These visits linger in memory with certain central \u201cthemes\u201d.\u00a0 Oh, yes, I might think, looking back, that\u2019s the time we made peanut butter cookies the first time.\u00a0 Or, that was the time Buddy first dove under water at the pool, I might say, answering a friend who inquired how I entertained the children over the weekend.<\/p>\n

A recent visit, on the other end of the spectrum, gets indexed for history under Injury, Pain, and Bloodshed.<\/p>\n

A nervous Nellie by nature, I prattle precautions at the children constantly.\u00a0 They appear predestined to demonstrate the futility of such intentions.\u00a0 A child\u2019s natural instinct to over-extend, to probe, to try\u2014these two seem endowed with extra helpings of all those, and the inevitable aftermath will be the order of the days.\u00a0 I may as well buckle in and muscle up for it.\u00a0 Perhaps EMT training for grandparents is out there somewhere; at this rate, I\u2019ll be able to teach it myself, before long.<\/p>\n

The recent Festival of Agony opened with Sis.\u00a0 Unable to contain her standard exuberance while she waited to roll the cookie dough into oven-sized morsels, she commenced to wiggle her bottom vigorously, a sort of Cookie Dance, throwing her weight from port to starboard and back.\u00a0 This motion destabilized the stool that elevated her position at the kitchen counter, sending the stool sailing out from under while gravity dropped her straight down and caught her chin a hard lick on the edge of the granite countertop.\u00a0 I watched this unfold from behind, too far away, of course, to intervene in time.\u00a0 Amazingly, given the decibel level of the shrieking that followed, no teeth were displaced, no lip split, and the allure of the cookie dough took precedence over the pain with alacrity.<\/p>\n

About half an hour later, the oven performing its office on the cookies and the aroma filling the house with a false sense of security, Buddy rounded the end of the dining room table in sock feet while in rapid pursuit of his sister.\u00a0 When he lost his balance on the curve, he executed a Major League-style slide into a chair leg that forced two of his toes to merge right, and the other three to merge left.\u00a0 Owwwww rose in my throat, at the same time it emerged from Buddy\u2019s mouth. We examined the tender redness carefully, with an offer quickly made to ice the area against certain bruising.\u00a0 Apparently the pursuit of justice may demand certain sacrifice, as he declined the ice, shook his foot hard a few times and rose to resume chase.<\/p>\n

\"\"The evening\u2019s Injury Trifecta played itself out near dusk, when the day\u2019s rain finally subsided and a fresh-air strategy was pursued with an eye toward burning energy before bedtime. \u00a0We took the dog out for a walk, and a kindly neighbor stopped to meet the children and exchange pleasantries.\u00a0 When she complimented Sis\u2019 eye-catching pink rain boots, Sis attempted to demonstrate, Gene Kelly-style, a few dance steps in a puddle.\u00a0 Sadly, these boots were not made for dancing.\u00a0 She caught one foot behind the other and took a rapid swan dive face down on the rough aggregate sidewalk.<\/p>\n

This time I knew we were for it, and I dove down to scoop up the screaming child with my heart in my throat.\u00a0 She clung to me with unusual ferocity.\u00a0 Let me see, I said over and over, let me see your face, but she wouldn\u2019t raise her head from my chest while she screamed.<\/p>\n

As I returned her grip for reassurance and lowered her feet down onto a nearby bench, hoping to wrest her loose and survey the damage, I was suddenly transported away to another time and place, as though I had stepped into a time machine.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Thirty years earlier, in our tiny stone house on a shady street in Lexington, Kentucky, Sis\u2019 mom took her first face-down swan drive on the hardwood floor of the little ranch\u2019s narrow, central hallway.\u00a0 I saw her so clearly there\u2014she had a short, bowl-style haircut and was wearing a blue print smock with a white Peter Pan collar and red corduroy pants.\u00a0 The ensemble was completed with the little white leather laced booties that were obligatory for toddlers in those days, and my daughter came running for something, catching a toe somehow in those stiff little shoes.\u00a0 She sprung back to her feet with a shriek, blood spurting from her lower lip, and before I could gather my wits I shouted frantically for my husband.\u00a0 I distinctly remember reaching for my own lip, as though it must surely be bleeding simultaneously, so painful was the reaction of a young mother to the child\u2019s first little accident.\u00a0 She\u2019s fine, she\u2019s fine, her father said calmly, here\u2019s a cold wash cloth, she\u2019s fine.\u00a0 But facial cuts are always so bloody, often so much worse in appearance that in fact, that the maternal instinct can hardly avoid overdrive.\u00a0 Then, or now.\u00a0 Hence the sharp, cinematically accurate memory of that little scene.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, present time drew me back when another concerned neighbor approached with a peppy little dog.\u00a0 Sis continued to cling like a poultice and my nurturing was insufficient to loosen her vice grip, but the sight of the curious little dog did the trick, and she stepped back to reach down for a pat.\u00a0 A first view of her pearl-skinned face revealed a cut lip, along with scrapes to the chin and cheek in several spots that left bloodstains all over my sweatshirt.\u00a0 But the pressure of her face buried in my shoulder had served to stop most of the dripping blood by the time she let go and stooped down.\"\"<\/p>\n

And so, the dog having administered distraction and the spell of tragedy broken, the evening wore on to its conclusion.\u00a0 When I was her age, perennially feeling (unjustifiably) ignored in a large family, I would have milked such injuries for all I could get, but Sis had little to say about the episode later.\u00a0 I dreaded having to explain to her parents, though, of course, they deal with this all the time.\u00a0 When my son-in-law appeared to retrieve the children the next morning, the first thing he said to Sis was, \u201cWhat happened to your face?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI falled down,\u201d she said with an easy shrug, indicating it was really nothing.\u00a0 And illustrating another timeless truth:\u00a0 the children always recover long before the adults.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At six and four, Buddy and Sis are old enough now to enjoy the occasional overnight visit at my house.\u00a0 These visits linger in memory with certain central \u201cthemes\u201d.\u00a0 Oh, yes, I might think, looking back, that\u2019s the time we made peanut butter cookies the first time.\u00a0 Or, that was the time Buddy first dove […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-grandkids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}