Memoir Mondays, Chapter 1

My friends over at Two Writing Teachers are on another blogging adventure: this time, it is to consider memoir writing on Mondays. I will join as I can, but I thought I should start it out on the right foot. So here goes:

If I had a Hammer …

I never saw the hammer coming.

I heard a loud “thunk” and then everything faded to black. When I finally came to, I realized I was surrounded by a group of kids and my mother was running towards me (although that remains a bit fuzzy, too — it may be that I want to have my mother running towards me).

I put my hand to my head and felt it: sticky blood. The site of the blood stunned me. The hammer was on the ground next to me with a small clot of hair on the end and one of my neighborhood friends was saying over and over again: sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. The treehouse was just above me and as kids, it was a building always under construction and reconstruction. (How old was I when this happened? I must have been seven or eight years old, I think)

He had been up there, pounding in some nails for a new board or fixing up one of the steps in the tree, and I had been down below, goofing off, no doubt. He had accidentally let go of his hammer just as I was beneath him and gravity (that force of nature that stops for no one or no thing, and certainly, not my skull) brought the hammer crashing right down on my head.

Luckily, my head is hard (so the joke goes) and I did not suffer any real damage (he says, now wondering if that is even true). But boy, did I have a headache for some time and I was always a little bit wary of walking below the treehouse construction site after that. If I had had a hardhat, I would have worn it for the next year or so. I still wince when I think of the contact of the hammer on my head.

Moral of story: watch where you are walking and keep an eye to the sky when you hear the pounding.

Peace (in memoirs),
Kevin