Softball games were played on Sunday, therefore school was the next day. This being June, the part of the year that we try to cover 6 months of curriculum we haven’t covered in the 3 weeks we have left, I decided that I couldn’t miss it. I arranged for a substitute teacher to be hired to work with me. I came in and taught until I was too wiped out to teach (about 45 minutes), went to the principal’s office, where there was a futon that I could use and slept. When I woke up, I went back and taught again. After two days I was well enough to solo for the entire day.
Everyone wanted to know what happened
I was lucky to be in a school in which no one other than my co-teaching teammate (the person who’s house I stayed at for three days) knew the true story. Practicing my storytelling skills, I made up a different scenario each time someone asked me what had happened. I never told the truth. The interesting part was that everyone initially believed me, until they ran into someone else that I had told and shared notes.
Usually I would tell the same story if one person asked me and there was a group there. There was however one instance in the Nurse’s office, where a student asked me what happened, I gave him a story as an adult walked into the office and asked me the same question, and without taking a breath I spun around and told a totally different tale and left.
My sister, from New Jersey, and her family always visited me once a year in June to go strawberry picking at a local farm. They would come and visit me in my class, while I was teaching. I loved when she visited. I would always introduce her to my class and give the class an opportunity to ask her questions about what it was like growing up with me. In this instance when I gave the class the opportunity to ask questions, the first question raised by most of them was how did I really break my collarbone. I hadn’t told my sister that I had been making up tales, but without a second to think about it, she went into a tale about the break that also had nothing to do with reality. My class never solved the mystery.
Slowly I recovered. Prior to my injury I drove a stick shift car. Luckily the friend whose house I was staying at, borrowed his mother’s automatic car, that she wasn’t using and traded it with me until I could use my right arm again. Even then it was interesting watching me drive as I put my right hand at the bottom of the steering wheel and slowly crawled up the right side of the wheel until it was in the proper position.
It was two months before I actually told my mother what had happened. I thought I had everything covered, but as you will see, things didn’t exactly work out the way I expected them to.
continued on part 4 – http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=16
