Grief
Some day between 1987 and 1988, I was riding my bicycle (with training wheels) down the driveway of my family’s home in Fussa, a city in western Tokyo, Japan. My knee was scarred that day and if I hold my knee up to a light I can still see the smooth, light-toned skin that remains of that faded scar. I remember falling off my bike because a white minivan had turned into our long driveway, speeding along and nearly striking me. Gravel had lodged in my knee. I watched blood soak through the white wash cloth my mom had wrapped my knee in, as she turned the ignition key in her burgundy right-side-drive Toyota and adjusted my seatbelt. After more than an hour wait in the emergency room, the nurses and doctor strapped my shoulders, wrists, and legs to a table, injected what I presume now to have been a syringe of local anesthetic into my knee, and dug out the gravel. The bandages they put on my knee must have been two-and-a-half inches thick. Later that day while we were at a small grocery shop near our home, she bought me a box of chocolate cookies that came with a plastic robot figure in the anime style. I will be 28 years old in 95 days.
(Source: stewart-little.com)
