Near Death and Daddyhood

1. Ten months old.

Two identical doors were nestled just next to each other in our kitchen. One opened up to our pantry while the other lead to our basement, a ten-step plummet onto a cold concrete floor.

Mom plopped me into my walker—one of those plastic saddled donuts on wheels, designed to teach kids how to waddle along on their own two feet—occupying my time by butting into the kitchen cabinets while she washed the dishes.

When I battle-rammed the basement door, I took all ten of those wooden steps still strapped to my walker, a newborn Thelma and Louise, tumbling head over heels before cracking my cranium against the concrete below.

As mom scooped me up, she used her left hand to cradle my body, the length of her forearm lining my backbone, while cupping my pulpy skull in the palm of her right. She ran out of the house, straight into the street, stopping the first car that drove up by presenting them this fissured infant, begging the man behind the wheel to take us to the nearest hospital.

2. Three years old.

I’m jack-rabbiting through the crowd at the county fair, bobbing and weaving within this pedestrian thicket. Mom can’t keep up, calling out for me to stop, slow down—but I’m not listening, already lost to her.

Up ahead is this young couple on a date, just teenagers holding hands, walking my way. I try cutting through the middle of them, only to get clothes-lined, hooking my chin with their joint fist and back-flipping.

I land directly on my head, again, smacking asphalt at the exact same spot as I had when I was a baby, only two years and however-many-months back, cracking open my cranium all over.

Both occasions had me wearing a plastic satellite dish wrapped around my neck like some vet’s collar that keeps a dog from scratching at a healing wound.

Now there’s a crater in my skull from both fractures, a solidified ditch that starts at the parietal bone, running all the way down to the occipital.

You can still trace the indentation with your finger.

3. Four years old.

There’s a root beer lollipop in my mouth that this dachshund is dying to bite.

It doesn’t help matters that I keep thrusting my face straight into its snout, poking the poor pup with the lollipop’s stick—or that we’re both sitting on the bow of a motor boat, drifting down the Roanoke River with the engine in neutral.

I lean into that dachshund’s face, taunting it to try and bite—only it snaps this time, really snaps, those mouse-trap jaws nipping the stick in between my lips. I jerk my neck back quick, sending the rest of me overboard, right into the drink.

As I sank, tangling up into crystalwort, I distinctly remember the flavor of root beer on my tongue.

That lollipop was still in my mouth all the way down.

4. Five years old.

Grandma’s wearing a mumu to a neighbor’s barbecue.

There’s a pool in their backyard that nobody’s swimming in, so I take it upon myself to get this party started and jump in.

I remember grandma standing at the pool’s lip just before she leapt, her body warping and distorting along the water’s surface as I drowned.

When she carried me out of the pool, cradling me in her arms, I noticed how her mumu clung tightly to her body. Floral print skin.

5. Eleven years old.

I crawled out from the ocean on my hands and knees like some primordial fish ready to shake off its own tail and wriggle up onto its newly evolved feet.

Only my chest cavity kept clamped. My lungs were refusing to inflate.

That wave had balled itself up into a fist around my boogie board and pounded me against the sand. I landed flat on my chest, the impact flushing the air clear out from my lungs.

The ocean was punishing me for boogie-boarding by myself.

All those familial admonishments about riptides and undertows had gone in one ear and right out the other—and here I was, learning my lesson the hard way.

It took a slap on the back from an uncle to reverse the polarity on my lungs, pumping the water out and bringing the air back in.

6. Fourteen years old.

It’s the end of eighth grade. Middle school is hereby officially over.

Tim Showalter is throwing a rager at his neighborhood civic association and anybody who’s anybody is now crammed into the pool.

Somehow, I’ve found myself on Mark Kaiser’s shoulders, announcing to the graduating class of Robious Middle that I was about to perform a backflip right then and there in front of everyone. The execution was near-perfect, spinning end-over-end before diving face-first into the shallow water.

What I hadn’t calculated was the distance from the peek of Mark’s shoulders to the pool’s bottom, only a measly three feet below, my face instantly kissing the concrete basin at everyone’s heels—including Lindsay English, who I’d been crushing on hardcore all year long.

I could hear my neck crack, tamping my spine in this 24-vertebrae pileup. The water clouded up into a chlorine pink all around my face.

When I resurfaced, a bit dazed, Lindsay and her swarm of swimming girlfriends started shrieking, pointing at the gash in my forehead, my nose, my chin—this singular strip of peeled back tissue lining the entire length of my face.

It took the whole summer for those scabs to clear up.

7. I know I should be dead by now. Could’ve been six times over, easily.

Not to mention all the bike-jousting collisions. The pencil impalements. The tree-branch dive-bombings.

How did I even make it this far?

So, as I’m writing this, it’s the night before my wife and I find out if you’re going to be a boy or a girl—and I have absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to protect you from the million-and-one near death experiences waiting for you around every corner. I don’t even know how I survived them myself.

I’m maudlin enough to chalk this all up to some higher power sparing me every broken bone and close-call decapitation. Or maybe I just have super powers.

But I’ve never felt this lucky to be alive—because now I get to meet you.

Then it’s your turn to survive childhood.

April 28, 2012

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