Spare Change

Blue Whiskers

Posted by Bryan

It's been a day.

Everything started out leisurely enough...sleeping in...but still waking before the family. Cotter heard me, so we came downstairs together and played a little PS2. Not much later, the family awakened.

Plans were made to take the children to swim lessons, which had been postponed earlier in the week due to a propensity of precipitation.

So after lunch, we headed over to the lessons. They started out well enough. Kaylyn went first, and Cotter and I immediately began playing the fun game where I'd throw him into and around the pool and he'd pretend to be frightened that I was actually trying to drown him.

Kelli tired of us playing that game, most likely because of the annoyed looks of all the other pool patrons. Yes, when it comes to public swimming facilities, I am *that guy.* So I granted my son a reprieve, went over to Kelsi at the pool's steps.

Kelsi was doing what she calls "her gymnastics." This consists of standing on the pool steps, holding on to the metal rail with one hand, and using the other to conduct sweeping gestures while standing on one foot, and then dramatically....the other. As I pulled her away, she made like Meryl Streep in Sophie's choice, agonizing over the pool rail she had to leave behind. I began pulling her around the pool encouraging her to "kick....kick.....kick!" Instead, she determined that her legs were best used as security devices to clamp around my ribs in vice-like fashion.

That's when it happened.

"Ow!"

From mid-pool, I looked over Kelsi's tiny shoulder to see Kelli running in the water over to Cotter who was holding on to the side of the pool wall. She got to him, scooped him in her arms, and quite calmly said, "Bryan, you need to come here."

Halfway there, she added, "it's bad."

She was right.

You see, Cotter had decided to jump into the pool. And because Cotter has taken six swimming lessons, he has acquired the skills to keep from drowning if he is afloat for less than eight seconds or remains within arm's length of an easily-grasped portion of solid ground. So, in Cotterlogic, it made perfect sense that to satiate the unyielding boyhood urge to jump jump jump into the water--yet not succumb to the unfortunate genetic insufficiency of not being born with gills--he determined that he would jump in backwards where he could grab onto the side as he went in, thus allowing him to have all the fun he desired and not fill his lungs with hydrogenated oxygen.

Not only was this the longest sentence of 2004, it was also the most poorly conceived plan of the summer to date (Farenheit 9/11 notwithstanding, of course).

He unfortunately did not catch the pool ledge with his strong little mits. Rather, the pool ledge caught him by the chin. And if you are interested in seeing the result of this meeting, then by analogy fill a plastic Ziploc sandwich bag with tomato sauce, go up to the top of the tallest building in your town, and drop it.

There was blood everywhere.

The split on Cotter's chin was roughly only an inch wide, but it was deep. If one wanted, or even if one didn't want but happened to be within a sightline, one could view a barely attached globule of subcutaneous fat. One could see that Cotter was handling things very well, but the blood was kind of freaking him out. For Cotter, freaking out means crying at such a volume that Tennessee, Alabama, The two Carolinas and Florida were put on alert.

I handed Kelsi off to Kelli and said, "he needs to go to the emergency room. Now."

She began the diligent work of gathering clothes and children. I boosted Cotter out of the water and put a clamped hand upon his chin, to stop the blood.

People came spilling into the pool area, much like blood was spilling from his face. I don't shake easily in these circumstances, and wasn't shaken over this. I was quite stirred over the influx of well-intentioned-but-poorly-educated samaritans who suddenly thought this was an episode of E.R. and they were starring in their Emmy moment.

One nice man said in a thick Eastern-European accent, "I was a vet." I didn't know if this meant he was a veteran or a veterinarian. At the moment, and no offense is intended, neither OTJ really provided comfort nor encouragement. That said, we were able to acquire a bandage large enough to keep Cotter's face together so he wouldn't resemble Arnold's Predator.

Cotter actually calmed down once we got into the Durango, and would only get upset as he kept repeating, "I don't want to get a shot."

We got him to the real ER as quickly as possible. Cotter and I went in, and Kelli went home for clothes. She dropped the girls off at our pastor's house to make her own travel easier. Kaylyn was so tender-hearted it was just incredible.

They saw to us quickly, and assigned us a room. The only other impending matter facing the ER staff was an anaphylactic reaction that was on its way, but the lady (the driver) was lost, and the husband (the victim) wasn't giving very good directions. They figured they had some time to deal with Cotter.

We turned on the television and found The Princess Bride on Bravo. This lightened the mood immensely. But before long, the doc came in and quickly broke the news that he'd need a shot. The split was too wide and too deep to anesthetize it topically.

It took two male nurses and myself to hold the boy down.

And the kindly doc didn't just give him one shot.

She gave him six.

In his open wound.

He didn't much care for that part of the procedure.

Once she was confident his face would be numb until 2013, the doc then tied seven internal sutures connecting the flayed fatty tissue back together. Then She wove six neat blue stitches pulling the wound closed in a crescent moon along the back front of his jawline.

Coincidentally, the stains upon his lips are not blood, as one might logically assume. Rather, the smudges are Dorito dust, which along with a 20-ounce bottle of Barq's rootbeer, were his reward for bravery.

For the next seven days, my son is the proud possessor of a dozen blue nylon whiskers. He proudly but gingerly strokes them from time to time, ready to tell the tale of how he grew them, already rueing the day that they'll be plucked from his healed chin.

And the gray hairs on my own head multiply.

June 26, 2004 11:36 PM