My father told me, when he was an old man, that when I was about six I begged him for a bicycle. He couldn't afford it, and he didn't get me one. I do remember having a bike a few years later, and I do not recall any grief over not having one earlier. But he said I asked him again and again, and telling it, his eyes filled with tears, and his voice choked, and he said, "I should have got you the bicycle. I'm sorry I didn't. You were only a child for such a little while."
And I was back-pedaling how to console him. I told him not to think anything of it. I probably asked for lots of things, a dog, a horse (that's what I do remember wanting, the dog and the horse), and that no kid gets everything they ask for, and besides, I don't even remember it. His grief was greater than mine could ever have been over the darned bicycle. I didn't want my dear father to feel bad because I didn't get a bicycle the moment I wanted it.
He did provide me with roller skates. I’d had a red wagon that said SPEEDY on the side. And for a while I had a pogo stick.
The pogo stick was the best toy I ever had. I let the other kids play with it too, on the new sidewalk in front of our house in the new tract in Southern California. Judy across the street got pretty good at, but most of the kids never learned to keep their balance for more than two or three hops. I could go forever. I wasn't very good at counting yet, so I must have been in about first grade. I remember getting up to 910 several times. I'm pretty sure I thought that 200 was the number that came after 109, so it might have actually been a little less than 910.
I wasn't allowed to go out in the street, but I used to jump on my pogo stick in the driveway, and sometimes I went up and down the long block on it. Once I hopped all the way around the whole block, without ever stopping, except for maybe one or two stumbles, which didn't really count as I got right back on. Of course I was not supposed to go out of sight of the house, but I didn't get caught, and I was very proud of going clear around the block. I had not been really sure, when I started, if that would actually bring me back to my own house, but it did. Columbus could not have been more relieved, when he proved you wouldn't sail off the edge of the sea.
One day my toes slipped backwards off the foot bar, and the top of the pogo stick came up and smacked the underside of my chin with a loud crack. I put my hand to my chin and looked at the blood.
Wow! This was serious. I ran into the house to show my grandmother and to get a band-aid. Aunt Esther was visiting that day, and she screamed out loud and fell backward onto the sofa. My grandmother took me into the bathroom so I wouldn't bleed all over the carpet and looked at my chin. My lower lip was all bloody, and when I pulled it up, I saw my bottom teeth through two holes. I had bitten entirely through my lip with my lowers, and my chin had a dangling flap where the top of the pogo stick had struck it.
It was the most exciting day of my life. My father was phoned to come home from the barber's with his hair half cut, and I rode in the back of the car with my head in Aunt Esther's lap, well padded with towels, to the doctor's office, where I was laid on a hard white table and had 19 stitches put into my chin. Afterwards my lip swelled up until it stuck straight out. I learned the word Ubangi, which was an African tribe in which the people put hoops in their lower lips to make them protrude, and my father said I was his little Ubangi.
I missed several days of school, and when I went back I stood up in front of the class at Sharing Time and told them all about my experience. I couldn't pronounce F or P because my top teeth didn't meet my lower lip, so I substituted H or S, and said my heet had hallen oss, that's what haddened. I wanted to sound wise and grown up, so I gave all my fellow students a solemn warning to be very careful if they jumped on a pogo stick, and Miss Sherrick said thank you that was very good.
One day I asked my grandmother whatever became of my pogo stick. I wanted to play with it, but she was evasive, and my father said he didn't know where it was, so I never saw it again. I still have the scar though. I've always been rather, well, not exactly proud of it, but it’s part of who I am.
When I was in college, my father told me that if that scar bothered me, I could have it fixed. He would pay for plastic surgery. I said, what scar? I didn't even know what he was talking about.
"On your chin. From the pogo stick," he said, and I laughed out loud. Then I could see I'd hurt his feelings, and he explained that he didn't want that scar to hold me back in any way. They could do plastic surgery and smooth that off as if it never happened.
He must have been concerned all the years that I was growing up that I was marred and scarred, and he wanted to make it right. I'm not sure he even believed me when I assured him it had never given me a moment's grief after the stitches came out.