6 Stuck in the Forehead Playing Darts With My Brother. Song: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”. Photo: Brothers.
This is another survival story. When we look back on our childhood, many of us wonder how we could have survived, and lived through some of the things that happened to us. These are some of the things that happened to me, and I’m glad I’m still here to tell about them.
Siblings are nice to have…as long as they don’t maim or kill you. Then, if you happen to survive, and if you are ONLY maimed, you’ll often forgive them, and still want to go right on trying, and playing. My brother and I were very competitive. I liked playing, but didn’t care as much about winning, as I did about playing. I could always look back and enjoy a game, even when I lost.
Our Dad was always very strict about enforcing his rules, and after dinners my big brother and I were required to go down to the basement where we would play games, and watch TV. And, we were told, “Do NOT disturb your parents under any circumstances, other than dire emergencies”. To make things more fun spending so much of our time in the basement together, we ended up getting a dart board for Christmas one winter, and played year round.
Remember how things back then were better quality, and made
to last? Our dart board lasted forever, it was
durably built, and the three green and three red plastic
darts screwed into very high quality polished sharp brass tips.
We started out playing darts with
“You throw three.”, “I throw three.”, “You throw three.”, “I throw three.”. We did this sometimes late into the nights. While I was five, and my brother was seven, he was much better at math while I was still trying to learn basic arithmetic. Some of my brother’s attempts at teaching me things ended up, instead, confusing me even more, especially when, sometimes, he intentionally tried to confuse me. However, I was at least capable of knowing whose turn it was while playing darts.
Often when he played with me, he would blurt out his irritating impression of the sound of Woody Woodpecker’s laugh, usually when he won as we played, or just when he knowingly threw out of turn (maybe he did that because he knew that I had an attention problem, and/or because he knew that he could easily take advantage of me after causing my head injuries, himself). In any case, he would put extra emphasis on either his wining, or his cheating, whenever he made his Woody Woodpecker tease-like laugh. There really wasn’t anything that I could do about it, then, or now. I learned I just had to put up with it (and I’m sure glad they hadn’t invented the much bigger “LAWN DARTS” game, yet!)
After a few more dart games, during one we were both keeping the scores on, my brother must have realized that I had gotten ahead, and was winning, because he said, “Uh uh, it’s MY turn, it’s MY turn”, and he started to throw twice, which was out of order. So, I ran up and stood with my head right in front of the dart board exclaiming, “No way, It’s MY turn”.
That’s when my brother said, “I’m going to count to three, and I swear, I’m going to throw, so you’d better move!” In response to that, I said, “I swear, I’m NOT going to move, (and proceeded to close my eyes) so you’d better not throw!” My brother countered with, “I double swear, I’m going to throw when I count three, so MOVE!” Since we never got past “quadruple swears” if I jumped straight to quadruple swear, and said, “I QUADRUPLE swear that I’m not moving”, and felt completely confident he would cave, and give me my proper turn. That’s when my brother emphatically, and authoritatively, in a final warning counted out loud, “ONE, TWO, THREE”, and the dart flew.
Bullseye. It hit me right between the eyes, landing square in the middle of my forehead. It stuck in, straight as an arrow, and would not budge. We were both shocked and surprised, and my brother made a well remembered verbal sound of a halted exclamation, with a sudden gasp of breath, exactly like the sound he made his whole life when he did something which he knew had caused the catastrophic results he intended. I went straight over to a little basement mirror on the wall to examine my injury, and to check to make sure that I was still alive. I’ll never forget his reaction then, nor now. I felt that it was impossible for me to pull that dart out of my forehead because it wouldn’t budge when I tried to. When I tried to wiggle it, it caused too much pain.
My next thought was that this was an emergency so I wouldn’t be breaking the rules, and that I needed to get upstairs, as quickly as possible, to show my parents the dart my brother threw at mw which stuck in my forehead. So I bolted up the stairs as quickly as I could. However, because of my immediate efforts at removing the dart, probably combined with my heart beating rapidly as I ran up those first few steep steps, I could suddenly see, while running up those stairs, that the dart was loosening itself. I cautiously slowed my pace while climbing those stairs as it lowered between my eyes. Soon it lowered so much that it was just resting on my nose, and barely hanging on by the thin layer of skin. Climbing those stairs suddenly turned into a delicate, important, and controlled operation, because this was now an entirely new predicament. It was going from my BROTHER being the one in trouble, to ME being in trouble, for appearing upstairs, interrupting my parents, with no dart stuck in my head, and thus no excuse for leaving the basement, and ME having to face the consequences of breaking the strictest of my dad’s highly iron clad rule for after dinner during the week. Then, just as I reached for the door, it happened. Unfortunately, or fortunately (whichever applies), the dart fell out as I reached to open the door at the top of the stairs…. but I survived. No matter whose turn it was, or who won that game, both my brother and I, went to bed that night totally relieved.
