7-C “My 1st Bike Ride” (Continued) Song: Greatest Love of All. Photo: Movie Projector.

Story: What I Saw (continued):

I was awakened out of my sleepy “other-worldly” state when I heard the sound of crunching pebbles from the tires of the only car that had ever driven by during the whole time that I was stuck helplessly bleeding from my stomach from being impaled on a telephone pole spike. What luck that the driver was a nurse who worked at the Westchester Hospital. And, she was, miraculously, one of the full time emergency room night staff on her way home from work. I never even knew that she was our neighbor who lived just two doors above us around from the very top of our hill.

She lifted me off that telephone pole spike, put me into the front seat of her car, and asked me where I lived. I pointed up toward the top of the hill, and she told me to try to stay awake, and to hold my stomach as she drove up the street to where she saw my brother still standing in the driveway. When she asked him if I lived there, my brother only started walking awkwardly backwards toward the closed garage door looking scared to death while shaking his head “no” as he backed away.

What luck to have an emergency room nurse living so close by, and just happening to be there before I fell asleep, and would have likely died from what the doctor told us would have been from loss of blood. She actually stitched me up in her house with household needle and thread, and I still have the scar from her “custom stitches” to show for it. I remember waking up in the hospital hearing the doctor explaining to my big brother that I was very lucky to have survived, and then I remember that It was after dark in the hospital lot when we all got into our station wagon for a ride back home.

That whole experience, and seeing a praying nun (and others), plus the fact that I liked “Sunday school” even better than “School school” made me look forward to attending church for all of my life, and I eventually sang in church choirs wherever, and whenever, I could.

I soon had another bike accident bashing my mouth into my handlebars when turning my front wheel at the bottom of a neighbor’s driveway where it met the street which was filled with thick gravel which made everyone think

that I had lost both of my front teeth among the tons of recently dumped little polished white pebbles, many of which looked exactly like little teeth. I promised my best friend who lived very close by to where my accident happened, if he could find my two front teeth, I’d split the payment I’d be receiving from the tooth fairy (which was TWO quarters for putting TWO teeth under my pillow). My promise got around the neighborhood, because kids were ringing our doorbell vying for their half of the reward showing little white pebbles from the gravel which they thought (were hoping) were my teeth. However, the x-rays showed that my two front teeth had been smashed deep up into my gums, and when they removed them, I didn’t get to retrieve them from the hospital, so I had nothing to show for the “tooth fairy”, and had no payment to share with anybody.