Those are the Breaks
I played softball in the local community recreation league for 10 years. It was a very friendly league. No umpires, batters got 3 swings, coaches on first and third made the calls, etc. The team I played on was made up of a bunch of middle-aged teachers and friends. It was a fun league that had teams from high school/college-aged kids ranging in age from late teens to early 20s, to the ‘Boys of Summer’ team that was made up of men in their 50’s and 60’s for the most part. Age-wise we fell somewhere to the right of middle, nearer the oldest group.
Our team was called the Wizards. We decided that we needed t-shirts so we purchased these dark blue shirts with an image of a wizard on it. For a league that had no uniforms, it was pretty cool having the whole team show up in the same uniformed t-shirt.
My t-shirt only lasted for a few years though. In 1985, an incident happened before we even go to play our game. We got there early and were in the field warming-up. The other team hadn’t shown up yet (In fact, they never did, we won on forfeit). I was practicing at shortstop. Carl was behind the plate while batters were hitting practice grounders to all of the position players. After two plays to short where I made some pretty good catches, Carl screamed out, “Harvey, he’s an animal out there!”, pointing out to everyone that I was catching everything.
Big mistake. I, of course, took that to my head, so that when the next grounder was too far away from me to stop, I decided to try anyway and show-off my animal self; after all, I’d seen professional players dive for balls many times on TV making spectacular dives to catch balls. Something that professional players have that I didn’t have was ‘skill’. As I dove to catch the ball I put my right arm down to cushion the fall (my mitt being on my left hand). It was at that point that my collarbone went snap. I was 34 years old. This is the first bone that I had ever broken.
At this point I wasn’t sure if I broke anything; I did know that I was in a lot of pain. This was during the era when not everyone owned a cell phone. Luckily one of our player’s house was right next to the playing field. He went home to call for an ambulance, while the rest of the team tried to give me first aid, having realized that something was amiss. It wasn’t long before the fire department’s rescue vehicle turned up, my arm was immobilized and I was put into the ambulance. Dennis, the player who made the call, decided that he would ride with me in the ambulance. Mack decided that he would drive Dennis’s car and follow the ambulance to the hospital so that Dennis and I would have a ride home. This wasn’t totally altruistic on Mack’s part. He was pleased that this also got him out of having to go home early (since the game was canceled) and have to mow his lawn which is what his wife had requested of him that morning instead of playing softball.
I have always appreciated the fact that ambulances can go very fast, get to run lights, bypass slow vehicles, and generally seem to be good for people that are in need of medical attention. I should say that I had appreciated it until I was the one sitting in the ambulance with a broken collarbone and bouncing around with every rut in the road.
The time at the hospital, though long, was not very interesting. It was my right collarbone, so filling out paperwork was not high on my list of things I wanted to do (I’m right-handed). Remember that t-shirt that I was so proud of having. The only way that they could get to x-ray my arm and see where the damage was, was to cut off my t-shirt. So much for that shirt. It was pretty chilly in a hospital that was airconditioned with me having no shirt on.
Collarbones are interesting parts of our bodies in that they can’t be cast when broken. The doctor who attended me took one look at the x-ray, told me that I had broken my collarbone, told a nurse to put my arm in a sling and sent me home; he’d see me in a few weeks. Well, he sort of sent me home. He did say I could go home after the sling was put on, but there was still all that paperwork to fill out.
Since I lived by myself, it didn’t seem a wise idea to send me to my home, so instead, I went to a friend/colleague’s home (who was also on my team) where I would enjoy being catered to by him and his wife over the next few days, residing in their master dining room on a portable bed.
Now came the time where I had to decide who to tell about this injury. My mother lived about 75 miles away from me in the Bronx. She was 71 years old and lived by herself. She didn’t drive or have any means of transportation other than public transportation. She actually only relied on others to drive her places. I did not want her to worry. I normally didn’t visit her that often, though I did call her on the phone at least once a week. I decided I could get away with not telling her about the break, until my collarbone was healed (about 6 weeks later) and I visited her. My two sisters, I decided, I would tell, as long as they didn’t tell my mom. Who else I would tell and what I would tell was a different matter.
I arranged for a substitute teacher to be hired to work with me for a couple of days. 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 those two days I was well enough to solo for the entire day.
Everyone wanted to know what happened. Needless to say as a storyteller, I never gave the same story twice. My class never solved the mystery. Slowly I recovered.
It was two months before I actually told my mother what had happened. I noted the reason that I initially did not tell my mother about breaking my collarbone and why I had waited so long. The response she gave me was totally unexpected. Basically she sloughed it off and said, “Collarbone, that’s nothing, everyone breaks collarbones.”
All that time worrying about her worrying and it didn’t bother her in the least.
However, the most surprising part of my break disclosure to my mother came about 6 months later. My family was all together visiting her when she pulled me aside and told me that she was very angry with me. There was nothing that I could think of that I had done to incur this wrath, so I asked her, “What did I do?”
She told me that she was angry that I had waited so long to tell her about my broken collarbone. I’m not sure if she had been holding this in for 6 months, or it had just dawned on her. She said it was an issue of trust. If I couldn’t tell her about a simple break, what other things was I holding back from her?
Needless to say, I think I learned my lesson. When you try to protect others, sometimes you create bigger problems, by losing their trust and respect when they find out what you did.
I think about the incident now that I am in her shoes, as a parent. I try to be open with my son about things that are going on with me. But now that he is grown up, what will he do in similar circumstances should something happen to him? Will he try and protect me? I can’t see myself ever losing trust or respect for him, even if he does withhold or is hesitant to share information with me. He’s an adult and can make his own decisions; and as with my mother for me, my love for him is unconditional.
Those are the breaks.
