september 7 1985
- September 7th, 2010
- By JNez
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boy do i remember this day. in fact, i’ve been waiting all summer for today, september 7 2010…it’s been 25 years (!) since i took a tumble from one of our backyard trees and fractured my right wrist in two places.
oh the pain! but not at first. see one of my buds and i were playing daredevil and swinging from branch to branch on the trees in the backyard of our home court. i’m an army brat so part of my youth was spent on an army base: fort bragg, north carolina. in september 1985 i was 12 years old and entering 8th grade at albritton middle school. i was excited because this was a brand new school on the base: everyone wanted to go there but since it was zoned by address, everyone from my previous middle school wouldn’t be going. still, everyone in my neighborhood was going and we were all so stoked!
anyway…so my best friend…dan. daniel hubbard. he was a white boy lol who was down with the black kids in our court. actually, everyone got along. lol we had asians, blacks & caucasians from all over the states living on the army base. we all played together with absolutely no issues.
so yeah, it’s a saturday…early evening around 7 or so. dan and i were the only ones from our crew hanging out that particular time for some reason…we were bored and decided to play tarzan. we had swung and jumped from several branches in this tree already so we were fearless.
it was my turn…dan had already propelled himself nearly a foot ahead to the next branch and waited for me to catch up. i swung from the branch he’d just left on and prepared my body to swing to the next branch by catching it in mid-air. i’d done it before…
…but somehow i miscalculated and ended up on the ground. it was so immediate i didn’t really understand what had happened until i was picking myself up off the ground looking up into the tree at dan’s aghast expression. ‘dude, look at your arm!’ he shouted. i looked down at my right arm and saw that my wrist was totally misshapen. ‘omg’ i thought. ‘what the hell happened to my arm?’ up until that point i hadn’t felt any pain. but then, all at once, it came.
the agony. i rushed the few feet into the backdoor of my house and greeted my mom with my broken & contorted wrist in my hand. ‘oh my god!’ she echoed. ‘we have to go to the emergency room!’
mom didn’t drive then and dad wasn’t home so dan’s mom ended up driving us to the hospital, womack army hospital emergency room. it was there that they x-rayed & informed me of my broken wrist. i was not prepared for the pain when the doctor had to manipulate my wrist back into alignment before my arm was cast. i thought i was dying. i thought he was killing me…..lol i screamed so loud my mom had to cover her ears all the way down the hall in the waiting room.
it turned out that i needed 3 casts to heal the fracture. the first was an ace bandage wrapped in plaster that stayed on for one week. then on september 13, friday the 13th, i got fitted for a full arm length plaster cast. yep. past the elbow. oh my god it made my arm itch so severely…this was just as bad as the pain from healing! i needed 3 weeks in that cast before my arm was x-rayed again and fitted for a shorter cast. this cast was finally removed on halloween, october 31 1985 and i was pronounced healed.
lol what a peculiar event to remember so vividly, huh? well not necessarily..it was and remains the most traumatic emergency to happen to me. but what i really remember about this is…
…that i learned how to masturbate first with my left hand. lol yep. i was 12 in the fall of 1985 when i discovered self-pleasure & orgasm, quite by accident. subsequently, stroking myself was initiated with my left hand and not my dominant but at the time, useless right hand lol. even when my arm healed i continued to masturbate with my left hand before i introduced my right hand to the pleasure…
soooo…so many songs recall fall 1985 for me: alexander o’neal: if you were here tonight; kool & the gang: cherish; teena marie: out on a limb; doug e. fresh & slick rick: the show/la-di, da-di… i could go on and on. but my broken wrist & discovery of masturbation turned out not even to be the most significant events of fall 1985. that was to come after halloween when dad got discharged from the army after submitting weed positive urine…
…to be continued
the first year together with a new baby is a challenge. remember why you fell in love and keep thinking about how that love created your child together. together. so stay together. let’s make sure these two couples stay together folks….give them all the support they need 
what is this nuisance they call valentines day. lovers needed a holiday all to themselves i suppose. and now look what it’s become: another last minute rush for a gift. ridiculous. that’s not the way you show your boo you love them. however…gentlemen if you got a tax refund & don’t pickup anything you might be ignored for the next couple days lol.
