Dirtball

I am five years old and my brothers and our neighborhood friends have come up with an idea for a game. We are going to run through the cornfield and play a game: “Dirtball.” Dirtball is simple. Dirtball is dangerous. These are the reasons we like it so much.

We are split up into two teams and told to run through the cornfield while everyone throws chunks of dirt in the air. Whoever gets hit with the dirtball first, that person's team loses.

We are running through the cornfield and I am lost. I have no idea where I am. My brothers are both on the other team. I was too afraid to throw a chunk of dirt into the air, but I held one, cupped between my right hand and mu stomach. I didn't want to drop it, but as I ran, pieces of dirt dropped to the ground.

I remember the chunk of dirt hitting me in the face square in the middle of my left eye. I remember screaming as I tried to figure out how to get out of the field. My brother, Ira, found me. He carried me to the green electric box where we always met for the day. My eyes were red from crying and the left side of my face was swollen. I could see, but everything I looked at with my left eye was yellow. My eye was throbbing, but I stopped crying because my brothers told me they would get mad at me if I didn’t calm down.

My father was home, and we had to come up with a story to tell him. He would have gotten very angry with us if we told him the truth. It was obvious I had to get to the hospital.

The story we told my father was this: We were playing football with a hard mini ball. David Barrow whipped the ball to me, I missed and it hit me in the eye. It was the best we could come up with. Given the fact that my eye continued to swell, it was the excuse our father accepted.

At the hospital, they quickly covered both my eyes with white circular gauze patches, admitted me to a room, and told my parents that I had broken a blood vessel. Only time would reveal the extent of the damage.

I sat in a hospital room for three days. I was basically forced to live like a blind person. I remember having to go to the bathroom really bad, but I didn't know how to get anyone's attention. My mom and dad were down in the cafeteria, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, planning for my stay. When a nurse came in to check on me, I told her I needed to go. She was happy because they needed a sample for the doctor. She guided me to the bathroom and pulled the patch off of my right eye so I could see what I was doing. They told me not to uncover either eye, so I got scared. But I had to go real bad. I filled the entire extra large measuring cup and then some. When the nurse came back into the room, she chuckled when she saw my sample. They didn't need that much, she told me, as she dumped most of it out.

She patched me back up and guided me to my bed. Blind again.

I heard muffled voices all around me. I heard nurses talking to doctors about other patients on our floor. I heard the nurses talking to my mother, telling them I was lucky I didn't lose my sight in that eye.

I heard the boy next to me get a present from his parents. He received a Stretch Armstrong doll, the very same doll I had wished for but never got.

I have a scar in the back of my left eye that prevents me from passing eye exams. A couple of years ago, my eye doctor suggested that I wear glasses versus contacts because if something ever were to make me lose the vision in my right eye, I would basically be blind. Vanity keeps me wishing I could get lasik or some type of corrective surgery. Sanity keeps me from making the wrong decision.