A traumatic incident during a Girl Scout meeting
by Laurie Esposito Harley
| I was thinking about
facial hair. I'm not talking about mustaches, beards, and the like - at
least not in your typical sense. I am referring to the little black hairs
that consistently sprout from my chin. Yes, I am a woman, and no, I don't
have a full-grown ZZ Top-style beard. Just one little black hair that regularly
appears in the same place on my chin. I swear that this single hair is there
to remind and re-remind me of Girl Scouts. If
I were one of those people who remembered years and dates, I would probably
start out this story with “The year was nineteen blahty blah…”
But as I mentioned, I’m a woman. And most women I know don’t
attach a date to events in their memory. They remember the purse they
had at the time or possibly the shoes they were wearing. |
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Anyway, I was young and in Girl Scouts. We were having some sort of get-together at my troop leader’s house, although, as I recall, all of us kids were in the basement and all the adults were upstairs. It must have been Christmas time, because I had received this beautiful new purse. It was blue and gold with a long, knitted shoulder strap. I loved it immediately and kept it on my shoulder as I played with the other girls. We began a game of chase, unsupervised on the concrete basement floor, past the cleaning supplies and tool boxes and back into the furnished part of the basement – around in a circle. Someone was bound to get hurt, and that someone was me. I tripped hard, but managed to break my fall with my chin. I quickly stood up and staggered to the couch, pretending that I wasn’t about to bawl, but just needed a rest from the game. I would have been fine had Casey not pointed out that there was blood involved. Then everyone noticed it and began to point out that it had dripped on the floor, my cute pink sneakers and *gasp* my brand new blue and gold purse with the knitted shoulder strap!!! The tears fell. Luckily, the troop leader’s husband ushered me upstairs and applied a butterfly bandage to the gash in my chin. Now, I don’t know what a butterfly bandage is, but I do know that it stopped the bleeding. My folks were called and I went home. I soon found out that while the butterfly bandage appeared to stop the bleeding, it wasn’t good enough. Or something. My father generously removed the bandage from my chin, releasing a fresh supply of both blood and pain. He then applied a thorough dressing of bath towels that I held to my chin as we drove to the hospital for stitches. My purse wouldn’t come
clean and was ruined. So to this day at the spot of those stitches I have
a little black reminder that emerges from my chin – like a butterfly
from its cocoon. Only not as pretty. Thankfully, a single pluck of the
tweezers is the only surgery needed these days.
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| *** Author’s Note: I have no idea what my shoes looked like or the purse. I think it was brown and light brown and I was secretly upset that I didn’t get a Barbie. | |