Short reflections as a birthday approaches

 

Short Reflections as a birthday approaches

A recent conversation with a friend of mine joked about how we survived the dangerous playground equipment of our childhood. In the 1970s and before these merry-go-rounds were common on school yard playgrounds. You don’t see them much anymore.

Yesterday while driving to the grocery store I realized that I pass by this one quite frequently. It’s still there and still in use. Not at a school but at a small community store. It got me to to thinking about how we never really know what is going to be important later on in life. Memories from our childhood stick with us longer than we would ever expect. 

Perhaps memories from that guy we dated in high school and would like to forget have stayed with us longer than we would like them to as well. It surprises me when I look back on my life what I have managed to remember and what I have to be reminded of. I have a birthday coming up in a few days and that often puts me in a reflective mood. Many of my ex-boyfriends have witnessed this process in years past, in my teen years and early 20's especially perhaps. March brings spring and birthdays and a sense of winter ending. It means moving forward and it also gives me pause to look back.

 So that merry-go-round from the playground at my school in second grade is probably long gone now. The school building itself is gone although I guess the baseball field may still remain. The scar I gave myself on that thing one day at recess I still have these many years later. It’s my front teeth. Yes it’s true I never had braces even though I needed them. Beyond that there are memories though in my two upper front teeth. One of them is chipped. That’s from the merry-go-round. One day at recess I was on the merry-go-round safely inside the bars. A frisbee went past, close by, and I forgot where I was and tried to catch it. Hard black pavement was around the merry-go-round and when I tripped over the bar and landed on the ground I broke my tooth. My mother didn’t come to get me at school and I had to ride the bus back to the bus stop and then walk home before she took me to the dentist. The dentist thought it would look more natural if he didn’t fill it in all of the way. So there’s some filler, or there was, just so I didn’t cut myself on the sharp edge but the chip remains to this day.

Somehow I had a way of hurting my face. That same school year I got a fat lip when a heavy door, a fire door, was released by the kid in front of me and I failed to catch it with my hands. No permanent damage on that one.

Some people ask me about the gap between my teeth. The gap between my teeth is because my frenulum was removed a couple of years before I fell on my face. That was done because my mother thought it should happen. While I was healing from the procedure I took another hit to my face when my foster brother and I were playing outside. He hit me with a stick and knocked my stitches out. I remember bleeding for a long time after that and having to go to the hospital. I’m not sure if the gap would have been smaller if that hadn’t happened. I will never really know why my mom wanted that procedure done in the first place. I was only about six years old at the time. My memory is more of the stitches being knocked out than the original procedure. By the time I was old enough for braces, it was the 1980s, my mother was divorced again for the final time. She didn’t have the money for braces and my father’s insurance didn’t cover it. It just wasn’t an option. I knew it then. It wasn’t a matter if I needed them or not. It wasn’t something that could happen.

I’ll close this off with a final thought. I never know what someone’s story is. I don’t know what they are carrying today, or what they survived yesterday or twenty years ago. I try to be kind. I don’t always succeed. I’m human. I’m broken. I’m not perfect.