Helmet in the spine - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 10/18/2011 2:00 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
I loved football as a kid. I still do. From 1966 to 1970 us neighborhood kids (our neighborhood was a farm community) played in the sandlots, mostly in the farm fields and especially at the Lima Center Grade School lot. We played tackle with no equipment. It was the era of the first Super Bowls. And, we lived in Wisconsin - The home of those Green Bay Packers of the first two aforementioned special games.
In high school I joined the team, going through the progression from freshman to Senior - the Whitewater Whippets (a dog like a Greyhound). In my freshman year I had all the basics - bad sandlot habits included. Football would be the only sport I would excel at. Eventually, I would go on to be an All-Conference Defensive End my senior year in a league of 12 teams - the Southern Lakes Conference. As a senior I played for the regional coach-legend, Jim Crummy. It would be his last season of coaching in the Fall of 1973.
But, it all could have come to a bitter end early in my freshman season. A tough kid named Kenny and who would never advance to the subsequent years' teams, played football like he lived in the streets - like a thug. One practice I was playing linebacker on defense. During a play, from no where came Kenny who had put his head down and smashed his helmet at full speed sprint into my spin. For a moment I was stunned. The young freshmen team coaches did not see the illegal and stupid block, they only saw me leaning over in pain. They yelled at me to quit slacking off and get back in the practice. Kenny just jogged nonchalantly back to the huddle.
Eighteen years later while a landscape supervisor in Dallas, Texas, spinal pain would often show its ugly head on really hot and really cold days. In never used it as an excuse to get off work. But I did have a first name relationship with a chiropractor for a while in the 1990s; and, I took had been taking acetaminophen and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications by the handful for years - at least until it was determined they interfered with my genetic heart and blood condition.
For some reason in the last few years the intermittent pain has gone away. It probably gave up trying to compete with all the other defects that dog a person who turns well over 50. That day, now over 40 years ago, ol' street-mean Kenny could have put me in a wheel chair. Every once in a while when there is a twinge of agony in the place on my spine where Ol' Kenny pulverized me, I think of him. I later found out that at a very young age he had a child - around the year we must have been juniors in high school - I hope the kid made it to middle age. I would actually pick said kid up as a school bus driver after I got home from the Army and took that thankless type of job due to a still ever stagnant economy in 1977. I hope the kid made it considering Ol' Kenny boy, well he did things his way....
....fate kept "his way - Kenny's way," from putting me in a wheel chair for life.
Note: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
