Too Bad The “Peer Pressure” Lesson Wasn’t Until Second Grade
CONTENT WARNING: Injury (Child’s leg caught in bike wheel)
The summer after first grade, I spent my days with a family with a stay-at-home mom and her kids. (My mom, dad, and older siblings had jobs they had to attend to.) They lived about half a mile from my home. When my brother got off work, it was his job to pick me up and take me home.
One afternoon, [Brother] arrived not with his car but with his ten-speed bike. He explained that his car had quit working when he got home, so he figured we could just double up on his bike for the short trip. I warned him that we shouldn’t right double on his bike; bike safety had been drilled into us at school that year. He finally convinced me to sit side-saddle on the crossbar of the bike for the trip home.
Not ten yards down the street, disaster struck. My right foot hit the spokes of the front wheel. I got pulled off the bike as my lower leg got thoroughly entangled in the spokes. One of the first things I recall was seeing a telephone utility truck coming down the road right at me since I was now in the street instead of the shoulder of the road.
Thankfully, the truck wasn’t really that close and stopped in plenty of time. The driver got out and helped extricate my leg since he had plenty of tools. My leg was a bloody mess.
[Brother] went back to my babysitter’s house and explained what had just happened. She got her car and drove my brother and me to our family doctor to have my leg looked at.
And this is where Karma came into play. My mom’s job was at the reception desk of our family doctor. So, when we got to the doctor’s, in walked my mom’s oldest son carrying her youngest son. Her reaction?
Mom: “My baby!”
It turned out that my ankle was just bruised. I just couldn’t walk on it for a couple of days. All the blood was just from superficial scrapes.
I do have a distinctive scar on my right ankle. It’s been fifty years since that incident, but my brother still feels guilty when he sees the scar on my foot.
