It’s been a tough week. We got 4 inches of snow Sunday night and Monday morning, which is a lot here in the South, so they called off school, and by Wednesday, Things 1 and 2 were getting a little stir crazy. They’d gone sledding, and we’d all gone out to eat and gone to Target, but still.
So, Wednesday night, Thing 2 decides to spin around and around in the living room as fast as possible. Sweetie and I turned our backs for a moment and heard a “thunk” and then a wail.
(Before I get into the gory details, let me say Thing 2, who just turned 5, is fine, really.)
So, we heard this “thunk,” and then a wail, and Thing 1, (the 10-year-old) said her brother had made himself dizzy and fallen over and bonked his head on the entertainment center.
I go over, and I’m checking him over, and I’m feeling for a bump on his head, and his hair’s wet. I look, and there’s blood.
I mouth the word “blood” to Sweetie, so she won’t freak out when she sees it, and I carry Thing 2 upstairs to the bathroom to get a better look.
He’s got a small cut, maybe half an inch. It isn’t gushing, but it’s bleeding a little, so I hold a wet towel against it while Sweetie checks the first-aid books. It doesn’t sound like we need to rush him to the ER, but I wanted a second opinion, so I asked Sweetie to take a look.
Thing 2 screams, “Noooooo! I don’t want anybody to see it!”
So, I doctor the wound as best I can, and I say, “Well, at least you’ve got a good story to tell ’em at school tomorrow.”
“NO!” he said. “Don’t tell anybody!”
“You embarrassed that you spun around so fast that you fell over and bonked your head?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I don’t blame you,” I said.
Last night, I gave him his bath and rinsed his hair without shampoo and combed it. He thought I was combing his hair just to comb it, but, of course, I was parting it around the boo-boo so I could get a better look.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” I said, even though it was something. “You want to see it?”
He ran over to the mirror and checked it out — and then used his fingers to comb over it.
“Can you see it?” he said.
“Nah,” I said.
“I don’t want anybody to see it,” he said.
“OK,” I said, and I instantly pictured him when he’s older, much older, and begins to worry about losing his hair.
Today is the 33rd anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. He was 42 then, so that means he would have been 75 today — the same age as the Dalai Lama and Woody Allen. That’s hard to imagine.
Somewhere in Peter Guralnick’s 2 volume biography of Elvis (if you haven’t, read it), he points out that Elvis was a sponge when it came to music. Elvis listened to everything — R&B, bluegrass, country, gospel — and processed it, synthesized it. He took all these musical strands and wove them into something else, something new.
In the 1960s, he made a string of dumb movies and went Vegas, and in the ’70s, well, we all know about Elvis in the ’70s, but by then, he’d already changed the world by changing the music.
Todd Pack 