My Only Broken Bone
I was in sixth grade. In my school district, this was the first year of junior high school. My school was Memorial Junior High (not Memorial Middle School. When did all junior highs start to get called middle schools? And why?) We had a big cafeteria and a courtyard where kids would hang out after wolfing down their lunches. In the center of the courtyard was a large rectangular garden, set off from the walkways that surrounded it with a short brick wall, about two or three feet high. As memory serves, it was just about the right height for a junior high kid to sit on.
One day after lunch, I was fooling around with the boys. We were playing an impromptu game of tag, chasing each other around this large rectangular garden. At one point, I lost my balance and had to sit down heavily on the brick wall. I braced myself by putting down my hands to break my fall. It didn’t hurt at the moment, but I quickly concluded something was wrong.
They called my mom and we went to the hospital. I got an xray and my right wrist had been fractured. In a way, I was excited. I would get a cast and people could sign it! (My personal idea of what was cool was at a 11 year-old level.) Unfortunately, because it was a minor fracture, he built a plaster splint that was wrapped with stretchy bandage. No one would be autographing my cast.
Back in school, I was mostly not disabled, but I couldn’t finish my art class, so I spent six weeks or so cooling my heels. When I finally got my cast off, I was determined to catch up. My teacher suggested that I could catch up on the current project (we were doing watercolors of animals in a jungle) by using just one color. I used blue to paint a giraffe in a jungle, adjusting values instead of colors. It was the first of a lifetime of wash paintings I have done since then.
Worst of all, I was off the football team for the rest of the season. My coach was a hilarious old cajun named Mr. Gammil. Coach Gammil. He had a fearsome reputation with our competitors because he liked to yell. He would yell that he was “going back to de house,” if he felt we weren’t giving it all. He seemed tough, but we loved him. He had played for LSU and once managed to score a goal for the other team (he somehow got turned around on the field). He loved telling us boys that story. I really wasn’t looking forward to telling him I would have to be benched because of my broken wrist. (It wouldn’t be the last time I disappointed a football coach).
I met with Coach Gammil at the practice field. I pointed to my cast and broke the bad news. “Boyd!” he exclaimed, amused. “What have told you about playing tag?!”
Coach Gammil is the man on the Right. I am number 63. This photo was taken the year before I broke my wrist when I was still at Frostwood Elementary. For some reason, we kept playing for the tigers when we were in 6th grade. Then in 7th, we could join the official Memorial Junior High football team, the Eagles.
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