When I was twelve years old I played Maccabi softball. I was one of two girls on the boys team and the tournament was held in Chicago. I stayed with a host family, who I hardly remember, except that they lived in the same neighborhood as Michael Jordan. Yes, we stalked his house.
My sister (the other girl on the team!) stayed in the house where Risky Business was filmed. Just knowing that Tom Cruise danced in his underwear in the same house she slept in was way cooler than being near Michael Jordan. No offense, Mike. Most of the world wanted to be like you.
Anyway, the room I stayed in, in this mostly unmemorable home, had beds in an L shape. Between them was a table. This was the exact configuration both my bedroom and my sons' bedroom would have in the future despite the rest of this story.
So, I was soundly sleeping in this suburban Chicago home when my alarm went off so I could catch the bus to that days games. I got out of bed, went to the bathroom to wash my face, and nearly scared the shit out of myself when I looked in the mirror. I had an eye, swollen shut, the color of prunes and raisins. I was not sure how it happened nor why I looked like I had stepped into a boxing ring. After further examination, it became clear to me that while I slept I banged my eye on the edge of the table. At this point in my life I had slept through alarm clocks, my brother's rock-n-roll music, even a hotel fire alarm (which was, thankfully, a false alarm) but I would have thought a bruising thump to my eye would have woken me. Unless, of course, it knocked me out. Which was possible. I never have been quite the same since.
My sister nearly had a heart attack when she saw me and got her big sister panties in a bunch concerned someone hurt me. I told her the other guy was laying in a ditch somewhere and there was no need to worry. We went on with the day, the week, the tournament, as if all was normal. The purple in my eye only clashed a bit with the royal blue and yellow uniforms.
Fast forward 24 years. Chase and Ryder's bedroom, as I mentioned, has this exact configuration. Each day as they act like the very boys that they are and insist on jumping from bed to bed to bean bag, getting their little brother involved, as part of their bedtime ritual I wonder to myself if heads can actually bounce off of that table.
No, they can't as it turns out. But, I did not learn this from any unnecessary rough-housing or overly rambunctious boy exercising. I learned this, as fate would have it, exactly the way I had learned it over two decades ago. While sleeping soundly in his bed, grinding his teeth and snoring away, Ryder managed to bang his eye directly on the tables edge. He is very much my son. Unlike me, however, he did not sleep through this accident, instead he awoke with tears and screams and only a few drips of blood.
The picture above is his eye the next day, as I was dropping him off to school. Luckily, he did no damage to the eye itself, nor his vision, and the shiner never did get too much worse than pictured. He did, however, live a few days totally able to fool everyone into thinking that he wore eye make up. Perhaps some just thought this was part of his "rocking" style.
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