My eldest daughter’s text message began, “He’s fine but …” As any parent and grandparent can tell you, “He’s fine” is cancelled by “but” and is the worst start to any communication from a child or grandchild. I was able to read the rest of the message before my held breath rendered me unconscious: “I’m taking Xa to the hospital. He got hit in the head with a branch and may need stitches.”
When I spoke to Lisa the next day, she told me, “I have to admit that I gave a little shriek when I saw Bing holding that bloody head.” (She is her father’s daughter, and “gave a little shriek” is not unusual phrasing for her.) Bing, my grandson’s father, thundered up the steps to their apartment clutching a bleeding and crying 10-year-old and his hysterical 5-year-old sister. “Go, go!” he barked. “Go see what happened!” I imagine that he immediately regretted that directive, which left him alone with two wailing little ones.
Five-year-old Imani’s version of events was this: a girl who “liked” my grandson was pounding a snow bank with a stick, then turned and pounded her brother in the head. Xavion dropped, Imani screamed and everyone flew away. When Lisa went to investigate the incident, she said that she knew where the beaning had occurred.
“I saw the stick,” she said. It was an island surrounded by abandoned scooters, bikes and balls. “The kids must have dropped everything,” and fled. “The log was as big as a baseball bat.” (“Stick” and “log” were used interchangeably, depending on the need for dramatic emphasis.) According to the “knocker” and her parents, the girl “threw the stick.” Oops.
In the emergency room, a nurse practitioner examined my grandson’s nugget and pointedly noted to my daughter, “This is going to need repair.” My snuffling grandson was holding out well until he heard what the repairs entailed: re-open the wound, which had partially scabbed over, clean it out and staple it closed. “He started to go to the bad place (screaming panic) and I told him that I could take him home and use duct tape, a stapler and hand sanitizer: your choice.” She pointed at herself as the nurse practitioner pointed at herself: Xavi chose the medical professional. “Your mom’s tough,” Beth Klingelhofer told my boy as she cleaned bark from the wound, saying that she wanted to make sure that no trees grew out of his head.
“Girls are bad news,” Lisa told her son. I’m not sure that he concurs, but I suspect that he will be more cautious. When I called to interview him, I asked him if he liked the girl who bonked him. “As a friend,” he said. He thinks that she hit him on purpose, but told me that she was in the group he played with on the day we spoke. He laughed when I asked him about the nurse practitioner that stapled his noggin, saying that parts of the experience were “pretty funny.” I asked him if he had any advice for other boys playing with other girls and he said, “never play with a stick and don’t get carried away.”
And so it goes: a nugget knock brings down my grandson, the blood makes my granddaughter scream and her mother shriek, and Beth cuts off the meat and staples the lid closed. And as Xavion would caution, “run away from a girl wielding a stick.” And yes: my daughter’s 10 year-old uses “wielding” in a sentence, even after he has been knocked in the nugget.