zoomaru

Childhood accidents. We all have our stories. some are true. some aren't. I'm missing the tip of the ring finger on my right hand. It's an unusual booboo to be sporting around. It's a great way to catch people off guard. Most people don't notice until I've pointed it out to them, and then they're either surprised or a little freaked out.

Sometimes I'm amazed how a cashier in a junk shop might notice it during our 10 minute transaction, when coworkers have gone months and months without noticing. but regardless of how someone finds out about it they always want to know how it happened.

I'm a fairly truthful person day to day, but I feel mischievious now and again. I had three people looking at me, mouths agape, when they heard that I had mistaken a cigar trimmer for one of those magic guillotine tricks and managed to *gasp* cut my very own finger off! egads!

I admitted to these coworkers that this story wasn't true, and proceeded to tell them that ACTUALLY i had gone with my father on a deer hunting expedition (completely ludicrous idea, by the way. I'm a huge sissy when it comes to dead stuff but these people were convinced of my southerness and seemed to think the following completely believable) anyway... i was helping clean the carcass and the bowie knife slipped.... again *GASP* horrible! yeah. that would suck.

By the time I got to my true story, these folks weren't believing me so very much. and the true story is a bit odd too, i suppose. I was two years old, and my mom had taken me to the little playground near our apartment. I was going down the slide, my mother was holding my left hand, my right, now short-shrifted hand was sliding down the side of the slide.

do you remember the old days of swing sets? metal. rusty metal. lots of it. held together with screws. and often installed over concrete. now in these days of litigiousness and plastics, a kid would have to swing upsidedown with a butcher knife and a chainsaw to get hurt. I'm impressed with the new fangled swingsets, but they're just not as death-defying as they were in my day.

anyways... this slide had little holes along the side so it could be attached to a swingset on either side, my little two-year-old ring finger slid into the hole. metal met flesh. yuck. I think I actually remember being at the doctor's soaking my hand in ice water. I've had this memory so many times now that I'm not really sure if it's a memory any more, or just a memory of a memory, if you know what i mean.

I used to be terribly self-concious of my "deformity" but by the time I graduated college, I was mining it for comedy purposes. Do you know what's really ironic (and I really hope I am properly recognizing this as irony rather than coincidence--DAMN YOU ALANIS MORISSETTE) what's really ironic is that extra fingers run in my family. yep. my mom was born with an extra finger on each hand, my half sister had one extra finger and when my daughter was born, we were actually kinda eager to have an extra finger. no such luck. a day late and a finger short....