These incidents occurred when I was about 5 or 6 years old. Dad was working at the Government Printing Office in Washington DC, and also driving a DC Transit Bus at night.
During the spring and summer it was very nice and my brother and I went around barefoot most of the time.
There were times when mom made us wear our sneakers, especially when we were playing around the wood pile, which consisted of old lumber, some of it with nails sticking out of them. I was running around chasing something, when I stepped on a board with a nail in it, and the nail went all of the way through the instep of my left foot with my shoe on. It missed the bone, but it sure hurt. Mom heard me yelling, and came running out and pulled my foot off of the nail, then wrapped it in a towel or something. She had to call a cab to come take us to the Doctors office because there was only one car. Dad had the car at work. When we got to the doctors’ office, it hurt even more because the doctor cleaned it out with alcohol before dressing it. Fortunately I didn’t need any stitches but I did have to have a tetanus shot. The tetanus shot was worse then the injury. I had to use crutches for a couple of weeks and I was never very good on them, which is just as well. In the course of time my foot healed. You can hardly see the scar anymore.
Later on in that same summer I was hurt again. I was always curious about how everything, and I mean everything worked. Mom had a new washing machine with a set of motorized wringer rollers on it. It was the cats meow. The washing machine was brand new, and the wringer rollers were made of a semi-soft white rubber that grabbed the clothes and pulled them through, no matter how thick they were. While mom was outside, I was feeling the wringer rollers moving after I had turned it on, suddenly my finger was pulled into the wringer where it literally pulled the skin off of my finger. It was my right index finger. I started screaming like a banshee. By the time my mom came in and hit the release, my finger bone was exposed. Mom grabbed my finger and pushed the skin back on, then wrapped me up in several rags because I was bleeding profusely. Again she had to get someone to drive us to the doctors office where I had something like 16 to 20 stitches put in to hold my finger together. I was in a cast for about 4 weeks, then when I got it off, I had to exercise my finger in order to get it working again. Boy did that hurt. I spent the better part of six months practicing exercises with my finger, in order to get full movement again. Mom didn’t spank me, but it wasn’t because she didn’t want to. She figured I learned my lesson, and boy did I.
"(C) Copyright by Victor Winebrenner"
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