D6

Brent Mazerolle
Modern life

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

Suddenly, being the only guy I ever see wearing a bike helmet doesn't seem so geeky anymore.

My change of attitude is thanks to a trip I took last week -- over my handlebars.

I've made this trip before, two or three times over the course of my boyhood. This was my first truly nasty bicycle crash as an adult and I'm here to tell you it hurts much worse when you get older.

They say once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to apply to crashing your bike.

As a boy, any time I made a grievous error that sent me airborne, I took advantage of the lightning reflexes and flexibility of my youth. I remember scraping and tearing up my tender young flesh pretty badly a couple times, but all the damage remained superficial as I instinctively tucked into a bendy little ball and rolled with the punches of impact.

If you've ever watched a hermit crab retreat into his mobile home down at Parlee Beach, you have a pretty good image of how quick and dexterous was the boyhood Brent.

For an image of 40-plus Brent crashing into the ground, think sack of cement dropped from second floor window.

I was nothing but raw physics hitting the dirt the other night. I recall no freeze frame instants of preparing for impact, no instinctive bendiness, no real understanding I was even crashing. One instant I was cycling. The next I was on the ground with the wind and pretty much everything else knocked out of me.

People often describe such impacts by saying, "it felt like getting hit by a two-by-four." But that's too wussy to describe it. At least a two-by-four has some give. I got hit by a planet.

When you're a kid, you accept that getting out and enjoying life sometimes means having it bang you up a bit. When you're a 21st century adult spending too much time sitting on a couch, at a computer or behind the wheel of a car, your comfortable life somehow makes you forget all that.

As I lay on the ground the shock that I had even crashed and hurt myself almost outweighed the pain I felt in my head, ribs, wrists, shoulders. The shock completely beat out the nasty gash on my leg, which seemed a trifle compared to the marrow being wrenched from all the walls of all my bones.

And when I could breathe again, I admit that for a shameful moment I felt some Nancy Kerrigan style self pity. I don't ever remember feeling that "why me?" nonsense even once as a boy, but there it was last week.

In my defense I will however say the first "why me?" that popped to mind was, "why did this have to happen when I'm on vacation?" That was not such an issue when as a boy I had two months instead of two weeks off in summer.

At any rate, I quickly replaced self-pity with self-reproach.

"Why you? I'll tell you why you, Mazerolle. You're the idiot who chose to go for a bike ride at 11:30 at night when normal people are sleeping or watching TV or playing on-line poker with a bunch of guys in Asia. You're the genius who thought it would be a good idea in the dark to leave the street and take that path across that vacant lot, the one with the big honking pothole as it turned out. And don't even get me started on all the bad karma you've accumulated over the years, not to mention all the karma yet to come to a good-for-nothing bike bozo like you."

I can only begin to imagine what emotions people go through when they are really severely injured. I was lucky (self-reproach Brent would say luckier than I deserved) to escape any serious injury. After 10 seconds, my ribs fell back into place and I could breathe again. After 20 seconds it didn't hurt to breathe. The headache I got from smacking my forehead against the ground cleared up within an hour thanks to the efforts of my helmet, and by the next day only two sore wrists and a scabby shin remained.

Recently my son, contemplating one of his own boo-boos and yet again lamenting the fact he is the only kid in his class who has yet to lose a baby tooth, asked me, "Dad, is there a scab fairy?"

Now as a proud union member these past two decades, my first reaction was of course to say, "no, but in certain instances those words can go together."

But instead I gently explained the only dead-tissue fairy I knew of dealt solely in teeth, because frankly, putting those under your pillow at night is gross enough. Waiting for something as unpleasant sounding as the Scab Fairy to sneak into your bedroom pretty much beats the heck out of that whole Sandman story when I rank the disturbing stuff we tell our kids.

Speaking of kids, I experienced some unconditional love the other day when my five-year-old daughter suddenly leaned across the couch -- good safe places, those couches -- and kissed the really ugly scab that is now the dominant feature of my left shin. That's probably as close as I'll get to ever experiencing the magic of the Scab Fairy, but if she really does exist, let me just put a word in here.

Ms. Fairy? If it's not too much trouble, I could really use a new bike helmet and maybe a headlight for my handlebars.

n Brent Mazerolle is a Times & Transcript staff reporter when he is not home licking his wounds. His column appears on this page every Friday.