As a kid, getting run over by a car was best thing to ever happen to me

A few years ago I was talking with my mom about my earliest recollections, which were too early to be true. (You naysayers can opt out right here because, as a lady friend told me, "You have the best 'remembery' of anyone I know. But nobody believes you.")

We were talking about a little sled my dad made (when I was six months old) out of a Watkins vanilla case. It was wooden and had rabbitted corners. For you kids, that's a corner made kind of like when you fold your hands. The wood was cut in such a way no nails were needed on the fitted corners.

The sled was small, had added runners and was only big enough to hold a six-month-old kid with a prodigious memory, and I was pulled to church in it on wintry Sundays. When I was through with it, it was still in great shape, had less than 10 miles on it, had no door dings and it probably fetched at least six-bits at a yard sale.

Two years after that, I was run over by a car and I remembered it so well, I can still see my dad on the front porch wearing black slacks and a white dress shirt with the sleeves turned up. He used the porch steps as starting blocks as he dashed to where I was — mercifully behind, not under — the car in fairly deep pea gravel. He picked me up and, along with mom, who gladly gave up the wheel, drove me to the doctor where I was fitted with a cast that went from my waist to the ankle on the left. The right leg was open.

That whole deal scored me a little red wagon, and better still, obligated my sister to pull me around Wishek, North Dakota where, at every turn, I was greeted with sympathetic largesse involving toys galore and every gustatory delight the squarehead cooks in the neighborhood had to offer.

I was in Fat City because the pain was minimal within days of the incident, which my mother, the perp, never spoke of ever again, and I was able to commandeer rides all over the place.

Shortly after that, I contracted chicken pox. I was told to never scratch no matter how badly it itched because the pox spots would leave a scar. I ended up with only one pock by my left eyebrow, but that has a happy ending. I was installing a chandelier, dropped it on my face and cut the scar in two. Now I can't even tell where it was.

Incidentally, it was during the throes of the chicken pox when I had my only genuine hallucination. My baby bed was by my mother's old Singer sewing machine, and when the fever was fully maxed out, I literally saw "actual flames" shooting out of the keyholes in the drawers.

About 15 years later, a neighbor kid, who also had chicken pox as a child but didn't listen to his parental admonitions, scratched a couple dozen poxes open, and tried to con us into believing those scars all over his chubby body were from where he was shot by his sister when she went after him with a BB gun.

Boys will lie about anything if it means protecting the macho image they are trying to create. It would have been a much easier lie to believe if he didn't lisp.

It's like a guy wanting desperately to look macho in a bar when he is drinking a Mai Tai through a straw without wrecking the little paper umbrella. Let's face it, that ain't exactly what you call a straight shot of tough guy rotgut.

We left Wishek on my fifth birthday. It had snowed so heavily that by the first of November, the people who helped us move actually had to carve steps in the snow bank surrounding the front of the house.

I remember the effort expended to carry that heavy couch over the slippery slope, but being a German-speaking squarehead, I honestly can't tell you one word about their conversation. I know the words were occasionally loud and always timed perfectly with a face-down fall in the snow.

Funny how some accidents actually decrease vocabularies as they cause some folks to revert to those halcyon days as a sixth grader, when words of drastic emphasis first became instantly automatic but were wonderfully verboten.

The guys would warn me, in German, "Lissen, don't YOU talk like that! It ain't nice!"

Bob Bader is a Lodi chiropractor. You can reach him at drrobertbader@sbcglobal.net