A Head-on Collision on Memory Lane

 In which your humble narrator recounts one of the horrors of high school gym class.

Last night, I went over to a friend's house to deliver some cookies of thanks and some cookies of remorse. This particular friend, (Let's call him Chris, because that's his name) fixed my sister's computer many months ago in return for some cookies. Then she didn't make good on her cookie promise for a long time, so yesterday she came over and entertained the children while I made some snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies to repay her confectionery debt (after levying a heavy baker's tax on the finished products).Sister labeled them "cookies of thanks" for the original computer fix and "cookies of remorse" for taking seven months to get them to Chris.

So after delivering the cookies and seeing Chris' (and the affianced bride of Chris') new home we ended up talking about traumatic brain injuries which, of course, led to a discussion of high school gym class. At the Jesuitical boys' high school that I attended we had two required semesters of pain and humiliation gym. In my first year I got a concussion when someone stepped on my head while playing flag football. In my second year I had my nose broken by a volleyball. I should stress that the offending volleyball was not the one from the game in which I was playing. It was some other game's volleyball. I was engaging in my usual, half-assed participatory way in the game. I wasn't awful at volleyball like I was awful at running for a long time or swimming. But there's this sudden whoop from the other side of the gym and I stupidly looked toward the noise only to have a wildly served volleyball slam right into my nose. Here is a helpful graphic representation:

So I went to the nurse and she said of my blood streaked face and shirt, "Wow, that's gross," and gave me an ice pack. What was it with school nurses and ice packs? They're not actually a panacea for every illness and injury known to human kind. I skipped eighth period and laid around the nurse's office until it was time to go home. So I rode home all bloody on the bus and walked from my stop to my house and went in to clean up. This was the first time I'd seen myself in the mirror. And, boy, that was not right. El Schnoz now had a sort of twisty, ski-jump to the right thing going on. This was going to need to be set straight since I could see where the cartilage and bone were misaligned at the bridge.  No one was going to be home for several hours. Since these were the days before cell phones, calling the parents was a giant pain in the butt.

So I grabbed the tip of my nose and stared at my watery eyes in the mirror and pulled down... hard. The feeling of jagged cartilage sliding back into place over bone is something I cannot adequately describe. I don't think I've ever screamed aside from that afternoon.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't look like Owen Wilson.