Tom’s home was foreclosed: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of its vacancy was signed by the bank, the property management company, and the Utica police.

    Shortly thereafter Heather began noticing a cat. It was jet black, and was normally laying under the tree in the front yard or sitting on the porch. In the days that followed we speculated that, perhaps, this was just a neighborhood cat that Tom had been feeding and it was visiting the home from habit and hope**. The days turned into a week and still the cat watched us coming and going, a black silhouette with moon eyes shining from the porch every evening; the cat had been abandoned.

    The temporary cast placed upon Sam by the emergency room doctor started mid-thigh and proceeded awkwardly down her leg and ended only after passing the majority of her toes on its way to misery. Sam wailed through most of the night on Sunday morning* and suffered none-to-quietly through the indignities of having to make use of a small bathroom when you can’t bend at the knee.

    The permanent cast she received on Monday afternoon and apparently colored to match her toenails, is a much better fit in her busy lifestyle.

    Regardless of this improvement she stayed with Grandma the next day, resting while carving out Sam-shaped dent in Grampa’s La-Z-Boy. She wanted to go there again this morning, and was not too keen on the idea of going back to school be-crutched.

    Groaning from under her piled up comforter, she pulled her pillow over her head tightly. “I don’t wanna go…”

    ”You don’t have a choice, Sam,” I reached under the textiles and tussled her hair, “The doctor didn’t say you had to stay home, we don’t have a note, and you need to get back to class.”

    ”But my leg still hurts!”

    I yanked the comforter off the bed, and began tugging at the pillow. “Get up, get up, get up, get up, get up, get up-”
    ”STOP, DADDY!!” she interrupted, and struggled up onto her elbows, and surveyed her leg where it was carefully enshrined atop her penguin Pillow Pet, “I don’t think I should go.”

    Her bed, suspended five feet in the air, was separated from me by a small flight of stairs and it was upon these that I leaned, crossing my arms, and considered. Remembering my eldest daughter’s basic nature, I came up with a sure-fire idea. “Tell you what, Sam”

    ”What?”

    ”I’ll take you in early and walk around the halls with you. If you can’t handle it you don’t have to stay.” I knew that as soon as she was crutching around the school, getting attention from everyone and hamming it up, she’d have no interest in spending another day watching the news with Grandma.

    And I was right.

    Horsing around outside the restaurant, Samantha was running pell-mell at me when one of the boys fell in front of her.

    Sam kicked the boy in the head, fell in such a way as to punch me full-on in the nuts, and everyone lay in a heap moaning.

    After everyone else recovered and staggered to their feet, Sam remained in great pain. Her leg looked straight to me, but she wouldn’t put any weight on it and she sobbed in pain pitifully.

    X-Rays showed, however, a clean fracture straight across the tibia. Second broken bone in less than a year for our little maniac, and here we are waiting for the temporary cast. Our friend’s boy? Absolutely fine and with nary a headache.

    It wasn’t the first time she’s kicked a boy when he’s down, and probably won’t be the last. But hopefully this will be the most painful and every boy she kicks from this point out will get the worst of the affair.

    Later, as I regained some semblance of consciousness, I noticed I sported a rubber bracelet with the word “Flonase” scribbled across it. I wobbled my head around to face the nurse who was caring for me at that time.
    ”Did someone try to stick Flonase up my nose while I was under?”
    ”No!”
    ”Good. The bracelet worked.”

    Seriously, I can’t imagine a world where someone notices a congested man lying unconscious and decides they should get a quick spritz up the wazzoo for good measure, but then again I couldn’t imagine a world in which Jersey Shore is a viable entertainment option and reality astounds in many ways…

    Pictured above is yours truly, donning a fashionable “immobilizer,” which seems to be a cross between a sling and a straight jacket. It’s intended to prevent me from tossing and turning at night and disturbing the flesh of the dead which is still quite weak and not so good at its job of holding my shoulder together.
    I am also wearing a comfortable pair of Monty Python “Its Just a Flesh Wound” printed sweat-pants. I swear I have had them for years, but it still seems incredibly appropo, right?
    During the day I still wear the sling you see in my initial pre-op article below, which is much more comfortable and matches just about any style I would care to wear.

    Curious about the zombie flesh? Some kind soul left their mortal remains to a tissue bank when he or she passed from this mortal coil* and Dr. Straud, orthopedic surgeon at large, cut me open on Wednesday and used some of these cadaver ligaments to replace the ones I destroyed in my bicycle accident. Over time my body should use this processed tissue as a kind of trellis or arbor upon which to grow actual SafeT meat.
     Then, a swift few months of physical therapy later, I’ll be back to an approximation of my original capabilities.

    I’m still on the fence about sending in the anonymized thank-you card to the tissue bank for to be forwarded to the family of the departed. I’d hate to find out these ligaments were from a murderous psychopath and that I’ll soon find myself involuntarily shoulder-butting nuns and pretty young women** to death.

    Interesting fact! SafeTinspector gets very cranky on Percocet. I’m pretty bad company on the stuff. On the other hand, it effectively quashed my libido, so Heather ended up considering it a mixed bag and, on the whole, pronounced it a plus.***

    Lastly, its a good thing I don’t have much hair, because I’m washing my head in the sink and taking baths to get clean. This is on account of these bandages are not to be removed by anyone except Herr Doktor Straud, and I won’t be seeing him until Thursday, a week and a day after the operation. TO add embarrassment to the list of unpleasantness I’ve suffered, I’ve had to have Heather help me clean and dry certain areas. Exactly how do one-armed people apply deoderant to their armpit if they’re single?

    And, lemme tell you, there are some things under that bandage that dearly beg to be scratched but are doomed to itch in excruciating silence until that blessed day.

    I popped it back mostly in place myself while waiting for the x-ray to be interpreted at the ER, and the picture you see here was the appearance of my shoulder the day after the accident. The discoloration running down my arm eventually turned into a beautiful blotchy, purple mess. (not pictured)
    Keep in mind I didn’t actually hurt my arm; the apparent bruising is actually the blood from the injury migrating away from the damaged tissue…probably because there’s not enough room up there.

    I visited my orthopedic doctor the very next day.

For the most part, I was startled at how old everyone looks, and I can only assume I looked startlingly old to them as well; though I just think of myself as looking like ‘me’.

There were lots of lumpier faces, balding heads and beer guts on the men. Most women were wider in the hips and had some crows feet on their faces.

Several of the ladies (and I’ll not name names) looked more attractive now than in high school but, AFAIK, none of the men fared as well. I think that’s more a testament to the God-awful clothes and hairstyles women wore in the late eighties than anything else.
In any case, I tried mingling, with middling success. I’d strike up a conversation, which almost always started with, “I’m Joe Whited and you are…?”, moved through the “where do you live?” and “what do you do?” stages, on to the “any children?” side-shot and tapered off with the awkward denouement, “yeah.. well…”

The group was small, but that fits the size of our class, really. (~80 graduates) And when we adjourned to the “rock” room @ ~22:00, Derek Jenza queued up an earsplitting assortment of period tunes the likes of which I’d grown tired of when still a virgin. This would be more tolerable had it not been mind-numbingly loud. I tired of trying to read lips and Heather and I beat a hasty retreat shortly thereafter.

I left regretting not the reunion, as it was inevitable and missing it would have left a nagging doubt in my mind forevermore, but I’m certainly reassured that my dogged resistance to looking back has been the correct path all along.
I thank the organizers, the ringleaders of which seemed to be Jessica Fritz-Echols, Sula and Derek Jenza. The latter seemed far more gregarious than I remembered him being, but it may be that the gloom-tinted glasses I wore in high school prevented me from seeing it. Class acts, all of them.

    Soon after that was a bike ride with my girls (and a tag-along friend of Sam’s) followed by a lunch-time trip to an arcade where an audience of strangers who didn’t know any better applauded my ITG play. Sam then shared a game of DDR with me and played many ticket games. She ultimately chose to bank her tickets in the form of a hand-written IOU rather than cash them in for the junk under the counter. She says the tickets were more valuable than the prizes because she can remember the fun better that way. Huh! She’s growing up faster than the grass in my back yard.

    Lastly, we ate a dinner of steak with my step-dad and now I’m home for the evening
.
    It wasn’t perfect; a paper wasp stung Heather and I seem to have lightly sprained my thumb. But these annoyances merely prove that today wasn’t a dream, and I can honestly say this was the best Father’s day I’ve ever had… though I’ve only had nine of them.

    Hope it was a great one for everyone else out there, and g’night.

    The disappointment of the Jersey-bound family was extreme. They threatened lawsuits, which we laughed off. They attempted an occult summoning, but our many wards and talismans thwarted their so-called wizard.

    Ultimately they settled on paying for Heather’s airfare. Samantha had been looking forward to the trip more than anyone else, as she missed her second-cousins a lot, so I agreed to pay her way, while Riley and myself remained in Michigan in order to defend our house from looters.

    Mere hours after her arrival in the Garden State I received a text message stating that Samantha had fallen out of a bunk-bed, had hurt her arm, and was to be dropped off at a godless NJ emergency room by a party bus on its way to inebriate the entire family.

    X-rays revealed a broken elbow, and while the trip still involved some amount of fun for all involved, it will forever be remembered as the time that New Jersey broke Samantha.

    So its been a week, and while Sam has been fairly sanguine about the ordeal–at least as sanguine as an ADHD addled 8-year old can ever be–she is still suffering from aches and itches in equal measure.

    And since the whole enterprise had such a miserable ending I can’t even parlay the fact that I didn’t get to go into any sort of credit towards gaining some momentary personal freedom this weekend. *sigh*