A 9 year olds memory

I love reading biographies. I just finished reading Patti Smith's autobiography "Just Kids" and it was fantastic. Even more fantastic is how she remembered all those details of her life. Could it be that she didn't do drugs? I don't do drugs and I still can't remember what happened yesterday. I've been trying to think of particular things that happened in my childhood that I could include in my memior but nothing comes to mind so maybe I will embellish somethings when push comes to shove. By then every memory will be so outlandish you'd think it was from a J.R.R. Tolkien novel.

"And it was on my 5th birthday that my great great great Uncle Billy Bob presented me with the ring of destiny and told me I had to go on a quest of 5,000 miles. Only then would there be world peace and people would stop eloping with goats."



There are certain things that I remember as a child that later on my mom told me are way off. For instance, when I was one years old, my mother brother and I got into a major car accident on the highway. Everytime I pictured it, I remembered us driving through the woods, a man stepping out with a gun and shooting us. When I told my mom about this, she told me that we were hit by a drunk driver. (That whole thing is a story for a different day.) I don't know where I came up with this. Perhaps I remember seeing the trees on the side of the road and the EMTs? Maybe it was a dream I had afterward. It's funny what we remember and you have to wonder how much is true in biographies when people write about their childhood.

I remember something particular that happened the summer before I went into the fifth grade. My brother, who was eleven at the time, and I had decided to ride our bicycles to my grandmother's house. She had moved to Middletown from Nanuet not long before and so now she was in riding distance from our house. We had a vague idea of how to get there, having been there so many times by car. We must've been more than half way there and neither of us remembered the rest of the route so he opted to stop for directions. (Something he never did EVER again after that.) We were coming over the top of a small hill and he was ahead of me. That's where I blacked out. The next thing I knew I was being rushed into the house of a strange woman. Her son was in the living room watching television and she was yelling to him "get towels, GET TOWELS." Meanwhile blood is gushing out of my mouth. Someone must have called my mom because she was there not too long after in our blue Chevy Astro Van and I was being escorted to the hospital. I remember the doctors scraping gravel out of my mouth and sewing me up with stitches. I had to get over 20 stitches on the inside of my lip and above my top lip where my booger catcher was.



I screamed and cried for my step dad and it's strange but I remember thinking, "He works in a hospital so he can help me" even though he worked security there and wasn't a doctor. But after they numbed my mouth and it didn't hurt anymore, I cracked jokes with the male nurse and tried to ease the situation. I, even to this day can't stand bad times and am always trying to lighten the mood. Later on my brother said that as I was coming down the hill, I ran right into his handlebars and flipped over them, skidding my mouth along the gravel. Luckily I lost no teeth but had fish lips for a week. I ate pudding and mash potatoes for a week and lost my thumb sucking habit. I felt like a rock star that I got 20 stitches and a busted lip. Hey, for a nine year old that's HUGE!