WEEKS AFTER THAT EVENT, my two friends and I decided to walk the two long miles through the woods to the museum. It's not that we wanted to visit the place with its prehistoric monsters, but more that we'd heard a rumor that the pottery shards we saw in the gulley by the woods came from discards originated at the museum. We decided to check the story out by following the shards upstream in the creek bed.
As we meandered along, the two miles became five. We'd veer off into the wrong direction at nearly every fork, and without fail, the trail we selected would give out after a few hundred yards, causing us to backtrack to the fork.
By the time we reached the museum, we were tuckered out. I was so tired, I didn't care about seeing the dinosaur bones or imagining when these creatures walked the same land.
While my two buddies were hunting around the museum and getting the evil-eye from uniformed personnel seasoned in railing-in deviant kids from nearby schools, I rested on a bench. Then a question of convenience popped into my mind: "How do we avoid the long walk home?"
I eyeballed the front desk and peered across the floor to search for a parent who knew us, but I saw no familiar faces. Dejected, I closed my eyes and wondered: "If only we could hitch hike. A quick trip home, and nobody needs to know."
For whatever 1960s parental reasons, getting caught hitchhiking was among the worst offenses imaginable. We never knew why, as this was long before there was any widespread awareness of criminal adult deviants preying on kids. For the plan to work, I needed to devise a way to prevent my mom from discovering this possible transgression.
"Let's go," I demanded after my friends checked for the fabled source of broken pottery but found nothing.
"Crap, I'm tired and don't feel like walking," one of them responded.
I laughed as if I had just invented the airplane. "Listen to me, guys. We are not walking home," I confided with an air of unusual authority. "We're hitchhiking."
Both friends paled at the mention. "What?"
"I've done it before," I lied. "Lots of times."
They challenged me on 'lots of times.' For a kid, that means you may have considered it more than once but never dared to actually take part. To my surprise, however, they nodded in agreement, so we walked back to the two-lane highway and started south toward our homes.
"Cripes," one friend complained, his thumb sticking out half-heartedly. "Nobody's going to pick up kids."
Right then, an aging, red Ford pickup going our direction slowed down. I peered inside. What seemed at the time to be three thirty-year-old women was no doubt three teenage girls. At that age, however, kid brains have strict classifications – babies, kids, teenagers, adult types, and old people. The three in the pickup appeared to be 'adult types.'
"You guys need a lift?" the blonde spoke, smiling from the window.
She was magnificent. I was smitten and tongue-tied. Luckily, my friends nodded their heads.
"Then hop in the back," she laughed. "The driver wants to know how far you're going."
"Two miles," I coughed out, feeling like a humble waif kneeling before a Swedish princess.
"Knock on the cab window when we're close, then we'll stop."
We had now executed our plan successfully and were basking in glorious defiance as we bounced along the old, bumpy pavement hobbled by potholes unrepaired from the previous winter's damage.
We were happy. Got away with this one, we did. Something to tell all our friends about, but never the parents, obviously. One more kidhood rite of passage. One more risk taken without dying or serious injury.
As we drew closer to my house, I knocked on the window.
"Stopping here?" my golden angel yelled from her passenger seat.
"Stop by the side street," I requested. The last thing I wanted was to crawl out of a pickup bed with my friends, right in front of our picture window looking out onto the highway that was slightly elevated above house grade.
The pickup slowed as it approached the stop sign at the corner. I was so concerned that our deed might be exposed, that my mother was intently staring out the window to see if her rarely-does-wrong son might be hiding in the truck, I immediately jumped up and onto the ledge of the pickup bed.
My plan was to use that small ledge as a liftoff pad where I could show the blonde angel my amazing, cat-like powers. I intended to prove that I could jump from a moving pickup bed, fly across the air for yards, and land on my feet while waving goodbye to her at the same time.
Problem was, my right foot understood the plan and my left foot didn't. It decided to stay behind, and my rubber soled-tennis shoe on that foot gripped like glue onto the rusty ledge. Instead of vaulting gracefully forward like a cat, I dropped like a two-by-four, straight to the ground from six feet up, my arms flailing outward in dubious glory.
In a snap, my forehead and the concrete met directly, unimpeded by arms, legs or other body parts. Forehead. Concrete. Six feet.
I recall lying there, face down, unable to move, with cymbals playing loudly in my ears. Before I knew it, I was rolled onto my back and my angel and her two friends were staring at me with 'Oh, my God!' expressions.
I was dazed and searched for my friends. They too were staring incredulously at the wound – a golf-ball sized forehead knot, erupting in ugliness and bleeding profusely. Quickly grasping the implications of being exposed for the hitchhiking indiscretion, my friends immediately did what any rational kid would do: they scurried home, never to tell their parents about the incident.
As they scampered away, I felt a major headache coming on. My angel grabbed my hand. With fear in her eyes, she coughed-out to her friends, 'I don't think it's that bad, do you? It's a knot, but I doubt his skull is cracked. Girls, do you think it's cracked?"
Geniuses they were apparently not, as they believed a cracked skull implied a visible crack. "No!" they replied in unison, backing away towards the still-running truck.
"Sorry, honey," my angel confessed, "we didn't think you'd get out until we stopped. Whatever got in your head to jump out while we were moving?" She was fast-worried talking at this juncture. "But I think you're good enough to walk home, honey, don't you?"
Starting to get a glimmer of what was going on, I was far more worried about looking as stupid as I actually was to this beautiful woman. "Uh, I guess I'm okay," I stuttered. "My house is close by."
She nodded her head and backed off. "Well, you just sit there for a minute on the sidewalk until you feel well enough to go home. Hope you have some bandages there." Ever conscious of parental scolding, meaning from her parents, she added, "I wouldn't tell your mom or dad what happened, though. Just tell them you fell while walking on the sidewalk. Okay, honey?"
I nodded, glad that I was her 'honey,' if only for a moment. Then I watched as my angel hopped into the truck with her friends and sped off, the occupants hoping nobody else had witnessed what happened.
Within minutes and to my good fortune, a friendly neighbor lady saw me sitting dazed on the sidewalk and bleeding from the forehead. She stopped her car immediately.
"Greg, are you okay? I'll walk you home, if you can make it."
"I think I can walk," I mumbled, trying to not vomit, "but what about your car?"
If there's one thing I could change about myself, it would be this hypersensitivity about what other people think. Here I was with a huge knot on my head and blood dripping in my eyes, and I was worried about where her car was parked on the occasionally used feeder street to our neighborhood.
She carefully placed her arm beneath mine and walked me home. My mother was peeling potatoes at the sink, peering out the kitchen window when she saw us at the porch.
Then came that motherly hell-scream.
Next thing I knew, the neighbor was gone and I was stumbling onto a kitchen table chair. In those days, your kitchen and dining room were one merged entity, and there was only one uncluttered horizontal surface in the entire house – the kitchen table. It was where you had your meals, did school work, and built model planes and puzzles. Family rooms, game rooms and play rooms were not in our lexicon.
Mom didn't need to say anything, but she was clearly worried. I had never seen her in such a state. "Can you talk?" she asked.
I nodded. "Can I see it?" I asked innocently.
"No. No. It won't help to see it," she said with the fear of God in her eyes. "You'll have this bump for quite a while, though. How do you feel?"
"Head hurts. Pretty bad."
Then came the inevitable.
"How did this happen?"
Even in my semiconscious state, I was not stupid enough to divulge the truth. "Tripped."
"Tripped? How could you trip and get a lump that size? It looks like you fell straight on your head from a tremendous height."
I had this vision again of my mother staring out the living room picture window, waiting for my friends and me to pass by after illegally hitchhiking in the bed of that red pickup with the three girls in it. So I deflected to an atypical response, though one quite real.
"I'm sick to my stomach, Mom. Feel like throwing up."
I hated throwing up. Whenever I felt like upchucking, I'd use my full body strength and willpower to push it down. I'd much rather have that burning hot fluid forced out the down tube versus erupting from the up tube. At least the down tube doesn't scare you into thinking you'll drown in your own vomit.
After birthing so many kids, that woman was a ravaged war veteran of vomit and knew exactly what to do. She scrambled to the under-sink cabinet, extracted a half-filled trash can of potato peelings, and placed it within puking range of my pounding head.
I couldn't look at it. Whatever happens to your body when ready to explode in vomit, the last thing you care to gaze upon is potato peels.
In the current days of moderately educated parents and parenting, any kid with such a significant head injury would immediately be taken to the emergency room, examined by a physician, tested for concussion, and x-rayed for fractures. But not in the 1960s.
We weren't dirt poor, but we were far from wealthy. Every consideration in our lives was first placed in the rainbow colors of 'What will this mishap cost?' Light orange? Don't even think about it. Give the kid some ice cream. Dark orange? Let's see what it looks like in a few days. Red? Flip a coin, maybe even call the doctor. But still, that costs money. Best to just put the kid in front of the TV, place a worn washcloth filled with ice cubes on his head, and change the channel when he requests.
Placate him a bit. If he starts going into spasms or vomiting uncontrollably, then consider changing the color to ruby red. That color implied the craziest and last of all care options – a visit to the Emergency Room.
Just don't go there too early or too quickly. Kids are resilient. They snap back quickly. Even ones who fall headfirst six feet onto the concrete, with blonde angels at the wheel of the getaway vehicle.
I survived the mishap uncomfortably for a week, and my forehead lump was still very apparent months later in August when school started. My older sister used it as her primary tease point: 'Hey Neanderthal head. Look at that brow, that ridge. My brother, the missing link.'
She and my younger sister had greatly assisted in solidifying my cave man appearance, having pulled a blanket out from under my feet some months before the hitchhiking mishap. That, too, resulted in a huge knot on the other side of my brow.
"I was only trying the same trick I saw the magician do on TV," my older sister complained as Mom sent her to her room. "If he could pull the tablecloth out with dishes and glasses on top, I thought we could do it with a person on a blanket." And in all kid innocence and logic, that rationale made perfect sense.
The latest knot became my coming-of-age badge at school. "Hitchhiked from the museum," I'd tell my friends, especially the girls. "Jumped from a moving truck. Foot got stuck on a barbell in the bed. I didn't go to the hospital, but should have. Toughed it out. My parents never discovered the truth, and I'm not about to tell them now."
Most of that story was true, for a change, and it scored major kid points which was all that mattered back then.