No Skinned Knees?

Ace is a lifeguard this summer, and he hasn't had to save anyone all summer long.  And he has only dispensed three bandaids.  Which led him to ask me, "Why doesn't anyone have skinned knees like I did?"

Seriously, none of the kids at his pool have those nasty scabs that are brown and hard when they arrive at the pool, gooey white when they leave, like we did growing up.  Why is this?  Are moms so protective that no one is allowed to fall down anymore?  Or are kids afraid of being fussed at, so they don't even try to jump off their roofs with Batman capes tied around their necks?  Or are all of them inside playing video games for so many hours that there just isn't enough time to generate the boredom necessary for creative outdoor play and stupid dare-devilry and the inevitable skinned knees and broken bones that follow?

So, trotting down memory lane, Ace recalled all his scraped knees and other injuries and did an inventory of his scars.  The two broken arms don't count because they didn't leave scars.

There's the scar above his right ankle, left over from a Boy Scout campout, when they had picked up all the trash (Leave No Trace refers to campgrounds, not injuries) and his friend swung a bag of trash at him.  Just for fun.  The broken glass in the trashbag poked through and slit his ankle.  He left a trail of blood across south Georgia.  "Good times," says Ace reminiscing.

There were the fractured ribs and sprained shoulder from Boy Scouts, again, when he fell from a zip line (you know, a steel cable strung from one tree way up high to another tree way down the mountain ... hang on and fly over hill and dale).  Ace was the "tester", what an honor, and he did a fine job determining that the zip line wasn't fastened correctly when it snapped and he smashed into a big log shoulder-first.  "That one hurt," he says smiling a great big smile.

That was the same campout when the horse he was riding decided to gallop to Tennessee.  He was in Georgia at the time, and he took Ace on a long wild ride.  And later that day,  Ace was lighting a camp stove and for some reason it exploded in his face.  That one didn't leave a scar either, but it was worth noting.

Ace pointed out the area that used to be the gouge on his knee, from when he was at Camp Invention, and was taking apart a FAX machine to use its pieces to assemble a robot.  A jagged piece of plastic attacked his knee, and rather than going to the Emergency Room to stitch it up, we went to get ice cream.  That gouge left a big scar.  And it grew as he grew.  But then it was scraped off when he fell down at a soccer game years later.  The hard ground scraped the scar right off, and then the new wound never healed right because it was swim season and he kept getting it wet, and now it's just a brown mottled area on his knee.

His favorite injury didn't leave a scar, but it was the most painful.  And funny in a gross way.  He had a fingernail ripped right off ... torn slap off his finger leaving nothing but the raw red meat beneath.  He did this while riding down our driveway in an office chair.  Yes, a green tweed office chair on wheels, which we had moved out of my husband's office, and it was sitting there in our garage en route to who knows where, and Ace decided it would be fun to have Deuce push him on it like a baby buggy going down the driveway.  And somehow it tumped over, and Ace's hand got caught in there, and the chair ate his fingernail.  We did go to the Emergency Room for that one, and Ace screamed bloody murder when the nurse came at him with a needle to stick in the hamburger-like area previously known as his fingertip.  I can't recall why the nurse was doing that; it was too disturbing, and we were able to express our displeasure with her actions so effectively that she went away.   Bless her heart.  But imagine telling our friends how that all happened.  "Well, he was riding down the driveway in an office chair ...."   You might be a redneck if .............

Deuce's injuries weren't nearly so exciting, but he does hold the record for Biggest Scab in the Whole World.  Riding his bike home from school one day, he hit some loose gravel and skidded sideways, cruising through the culdesac on bare skin.  The front of his leg was gone.  "That was sick nasty," recalled Ace with a smile.  Thank you for reminding me.

And Deuce had the worst broken arm.  We do count this one because the bone was sticking out.  It happened when he was rollerblading.  The size of the vert ramp he fell on grows with each telling of this tale (it is now ginormous).  Mostly I recall that the Emergency Room was lined with boys with broken arms from roller blading and skateboarding and trampolining.  Oh yeah.  Good times.

Now Ace wonders why none of the boys at his pool have perennial bandaids on their knees.  None on their elbows either.  Only three stubbed toes all summer long.  And he thinks it's a shame that they aren't having the good times he and his brother had.  I wonder if their moms would agree.