I'm A Stitch

There is a picture of me from the Seventies one day that was in the seventies.

I’m about 4 years old and as cute as can be in a tiny yellow party outfit. Tiny yellow shirt, tiny yellow shorts, teensy white socks and little yellow Keds. I was adorable with bushy eyebrows and a gap-toothed grimace. A cousin, Jeanette, is also in the snapshot towering over me. I’m holding an orange lollipop and crying. Her outfit isn’t as cute and she was teasing me. The photo illustrates this.

Aunt Rosalie’s house. At one point my grandfather, Douglas the second lived there, then my uncle-in-law,
Vaughn, I guess. But Aunt Rosalie took it over and re-everything’d the place and there I was, on summer vacation, in Paterson, New Jersey, sobbing.

Aunt Rosalie covered the furniture in plastic with plastic-lined walkways throughout the house. Rosalie was rich, strict and loud so everything had to be just so. She did a gorgeous job restoring the place to its shiny original perfection and I remember thinking the house was grand because it had a finished attic and basement. Each floor was shiny and varnished and while we kids already knew, we were told ahead of arrival to watch it. So we took off our shoes.

Hidden passageways and secret staircases within this vast playground of a house made it ideal for 'hide & seek'. One staircase went from the attic to the kitchen, on the ground floor. Another from the mezzanine to the foyer was steep and if you weren’t careful you could fall down and bust your head open at a bottom door which was always left closed. We were like wild animals, running up and down those stairs and me and my cousins Kevin, Kyle and Uncle Michael were enjoying a ruthless game of 'You're It'.

It was a humid Saturday afternoon and every relative I'd ever known was at Aunt Rosalie’s place, drinkin’, smokin’, laughin’, cookin’ and carrying on. The smell of ribs, links, barbeque chicken and burgers was intoxicating but our focus was on sugar, specifically candy and desserts. Ornery children were always hyped up on candy. Now ‘n’ Laters, Sweet Tarts, Twizzlers, Jolly Ranchers, Rollos- this was the currency of first graders and we were flush!

I don’t recall how it all happened exactly, playing tag that afternoon, on what would otherwise have been a prison sentence. By then, Mom had moved us to California and this was one of the last occasions I'd visit to the East Coast again before my  late teens. I wasn’t the most gregarious of kids but I was having the most fun I had had since our arrival finally playing with other kids my age.

Our homebase was the entrance door which was actually two doors. The outside door was part glass and
aluminum and on the inside a screened door. I was clocking about sixty miles an hour barreling down the plastic-coated but carpeted front stairs. Simultaneously, a cousin- was it Kevin?- emerged stealthily to add me to his list of detainees, rightfully winning the game. On my way to the door, I slipped on the slick parquet floor and went flying like Superman through the screen door and then the glass door, causing a terrible crash. I hadn’t made it entirely through the threshold of the door and was caught in it before the crush of family came to see what all the commotion was about. My cousins, the first on the scene, stood  motionless, suspended in time, unable to believe the spectacle. They knew I was in trouble. I was semi-conscious.

I remember laying on the freshly painted grey porch looking up at the blurry face of my Aunt Lulu. I smiled at her and her face was reassuring. I looked around me but could only really see my arm, a sea of flesh and blood. It looked like grits and ketchup. Later I would sustain 72 stitches, on my right arm, forehead and on my knee.

I remember being taken to Barnard Hospital the same hospital I was born a few years earlier, in a Country Squire station wagon and that’s all. Swollen and looking like Frankenstein, I awoke to pale yellow powdered scrambled eggs, applesauce, toast, juice, and the Jetsons on the overhead television. Groggy and disoriented, I was told of what had happened, that nothing was broken and soon I’d be returning home.