August 27, 2005
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Brian Cronin
August 21, 2005
The Bones of Summer
By JENNIFER ALLEN
Los Angeles
AT the peak of summer, my oldest son broke his leg. He’s 8. In a full leg cast, he dragged himself around the house for weeks. The beauty of summer had lured him and then dared him to play his heart out. And he did: he leaped off our porch, hurdled a bed of roses and aimed his airborne body for a landing on our cushy California lawn. Instead, he fell on a rusty-nailed railroad tie.
With the snap of two bones, he instantly crossed over the threshold into a new kind of summer. He left behind those safe, sunny, spoon-fed days and entered a new realm altogether, one that will lead inevitably to more independence, greater maturity – and the promise of increasing danger.
My son is growing up on the same streets that my brothers and I played on as kids back in the 70′s. It was here, one summer evening when I was out skateboarding, that I saw a car hit my bike-riding brother. The beat-up Chevy knocked him right off his bike. He held his head with both hands and squatted down in a crouch. An old man got out of the car and asked, “Are you O.K., son? You O.K.?”
My brother shot up, and yelled, “Shut up!” before running down a nearby alley. He was gone for hours, returning home long past bedtime, glassy-eyed and probably with a minor concussion.
Those summers my greatest fear was that the sound of sirens meant that one of my three older surf-searching brothers had fallen down the cliffs that led to the bay below our home. Brush fires didn’t scare me. But the nerve-burning screams of a brother calling out for, “Mom!” never failed to unhinge me because I knew what would come next: The trip to the emergency room.
My mother would place me in the back of our car, alongside my sometimes crying, sometimes bleeding, sometimes vomiting brother, as she raced us along the windy cliff roads to the local hospital.
In the E.R., I learned that standing outside the gauze curtains did not necessarily spare me from hearing what was happening on the other side as the doctor fixed whatever was torn or cut, swollen or broken. At the end of one particularly brutal summer, the nurses seemed to know us all by name.
Our mother seldom left us alone. But when she did she didn’t hire a babysitter. Maybe she thought we would watch over one another, and in some ways, we did. I remember one night, sitting with our dog, on a lifesaver on the steps of the pool. My brothers were taking turns running and slipping and jumping onto a half-inflated canvas raft in the pool. Each time, their heels would land on the flimsy cushion and they’d fall backward, nearly slicing their skulls on the tile edges along the pool.
Soon, it became a competition to see who could surf smoothly from one side of the pool to the other, and then it became a shoving match (who could shove the other off the raft), and then it became a free-for-all.
It was then that our dog, the only voice of reason, barked. A hunting dog, she seemed always to be able to smell the increasing potential for unwanted blood. She barked some more.
Game over. Time for bed. We all raced into the house, each victor slamming the sliding glass door behind him on his way in – until one brother somersaulted through it. He made it through, fine. Not a scratch. But sprayed a lot of glass. The next minute, we were all working together, cleaning up the mess and writing a note in crayon to mom and dad – “Watch your step!” – before tucking our tired, chlorined heads into bed.
One summer bled into the next. With my brothers, I think the general rule was: Why wait for an injury when you can make one happen?
For instance: Why walk down the cliffs along the well-worn path to the beach below? How about making your own path down the crumbling cliffs? How about jumping down them, like a skier, but without any skis, dodging rocks and sage and weeds?
One morning, a brother boasted how the night before he’d survived falling down the entire stretch of the cliffs without sustaining a single severed anything. A few days later, he lay on the couch, with an ice pack on his jaw. It was early morning. He claimed it was a surfing accident, but I didn’t believe him. Knowing him, he had probably been fine-tuning his cliff-jumping skills. An X-ray soon revealed a broken jaw.
From then on, he was pure frustration. Nostrils flared; he seemed to labor to even breathe. And while my mother served him raw-egg smoothies, the rest of us enjoyed juicy steaks at the family dinner table. I couldn’t stop asking him, “Can I get you anything?” Part of me was trying to help, but another part was trying to see if I could actually understand a single word he was trying to say through his newly shifted metal-tied teeth. But before I could completely comprehend him, he was gone, off to Pennsylvania to endure, with his mouth still wired shut, the physical and emotional trials of summer football camp.
Yet another instance: Why drive to the beach, when you can skateboard your way down the single-lane, blind-curve, hairpin canyon road – shirtless, barefoot, a towel around your neck, your surfboard under your arm? I recall riding in the car with my mother and seeing my brother skating, swaying, taking up the entire width of the road. For a moment, I was entranced by his grace, and then I remembered the grotesque surfing injuries that preceded this moment of ease. Earlier that summer, his lower teeth had pierced through his bottom lip. More recently, coming up for air after a wipeout, his longboard landed on the bridge of his nose.
FOR that particular break, I watched the doctor tweezer several inches of spaghetti-thin bandages out of my brother’s nose. When my brother winced, the doctor handed him a tin pan to hold onto to catch the soggy, bloody fabric that had been keeping his nose from dripping these past few days of no-surf, no-waves boredom.
And now, as we sped past my brother skating along the road, it occurred to me that he was over it. And so was my mom. She knew he was a big boy, capable of managing his own board down the path to whatever future might lie ahead. My mom didn’t even slow down to see if he wanted a ride. She simply honked her horn. He vaguely acknowledged us, lifting his chin in the breeze, lost in his own back-in-the-groove trance.
And so, summers went on, until my brothers grew up, grew safer and eventually grew proud of their past adventures. Scars became stripes. Broken bones, badges.
I’ve seen this in my own son. He’s now bragging to his two little brothers, “I broke two bones, not one!” Suffering is short-lived. Second-guessing is for losers. He’s already discovered alternative uses for his crutches – as blocking dummies for one brother, as objects on a collision course for another.
But he’s discovered something else, too: accountability. “Mom, it’s all my fault, I should have looked where I was going,” he told me on the way back from our first journey to the E.R. together. His short, painful summer leap, it seems, took him to a new place, one that’s a little farther from childhood and a little closer to all-grown-up than he could have ever possibly imagined.
Jennifer Allen is the author of “Fifth Quarter: The Scrimmage of a Football Coach’s Daughter.”
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