Hopalong...

I’ve written about my childhood before, and it’s caused some tension in the family. Some have accused me of highlighting the bad stuff to make it look like I didn’t have any fun when I was a kid. I did have fun, but as anyone that has older siblings can verify, you are sometimes subjected to things that border on cruel and unusual punishment.

I can laugh about these things now, but at the time, they didn’t seem so funny. So when I write about these things, I’m not trying to throw a pity party, I am merely conveying how bad I had it when I was beaten on by my older siblings. I mean, I am just trying to say that I may have been subjected to some bad things, but it doesn’t mean that I want sympathy now or that I hold it against the people involved.

With that said, here’s a story about how my oldest brother almost crippled me for life... :)

My older brothers weren’t the most predictable siblings to get along with. For 10 good times with them, there were the times that weren’t so good.

For example, you’d just be standing there and then, for no good reason, they would slug you in the shoulder. Hard. It would sometimes get to the point where they wouldn’t even hit you. They would slug you as if they were going to hit, but hold it back so that you’d flinch. I think that was more enjoyable for them.

You never knew when the next hit was going to occur, but it would inevitably come. I’ve written before about how my older brother, Paul, asked me to put my nose to the screen door. When I said no because he’d hit me, he said he’d pay me five dollars if he did. So I put my nose to the screen door and was promptly punched. Some blood and crying (both from me) later, I was five dollars richer after my Mom made him pay me.

Another incident occurred the summer of 1980 I believe, and I was just a innocent young boy when I was injured by my brother, Joe.

Every weekend of the summer, we would pile into the van and head to Clarks, Nebraska for a weekend at a place called Bucktail Lake. It was right next to the Platte River. We had a trailer that was yards away from the river, so we had some nice scenery and access to the river. The river access was nice when it was low because you could go out and explore. When it was high, you stuck to the lake in front of our trailer, which was Bucktail.

There were about 40 trailers at the time. My Uncle Bill had a trailer about a dozen trailers down from us. We would walk over there to see what our cousins were up to. Or we’d just swim there for something different to do. Like a lot of trailers there, Uncle Bill had a dock in front sitting in the water. Docks were nice because you could jump off of them when you were swimming.
I was standing on my Uncle Bill’s dock one day that summer when my brother Joe came up behind me. Without a word, he picked me up and threw me off of the dock. I don’t know why he did it and if you asked him now, he’d say that he doesn’t remember doing this, but I remember.
I hit the water and felt a pain. I swam towards the shore, but something felt wrong. When I kicked, it didn’t feel right. I got to the shore and started to walk up. I gasped, fell down and screamed. My left foot was on fire.

Joe, being the helpful brother that he was at the time, tried to pull me out of the water, but I screamed again when my foot hit the ground. I sat down on the shore and held it.

He said, “You’re okay!” in that tone that parents say when their kid is exaggerating a trauma. As a parent, I’ve found myself saying this to my daughter on more than one occasion.

I cried, “I broke my foot!”

I have never broken a bone in my body, but I’d seen enough kids with casts on at school to know what it means to break a foot. Clearly, my foot didn’t feel the greatest. I looked at the evidence, although at the time, probably not this rationally. My foot hurt. It hurt even more to stand on it. I couldn’t walk on it. Plus, it seemed to be growing in size as I was looking at it. It was no longer slender. It had grown a big lump across the top. It throbbed.

Joe still tried to insist that it was fine, but I protested that it was not fine. To his credit, he could have left me there, but he believed me and carried me all the way back to our trailer.
I was taken to the hospital by my Mom once it was determined that my foot was possibly broken. The Homan family and some of the residents of Bucktail Lake have had a few visits to the hospital. There was the time when my brother Joe injured his leg trying to jump all the way down a sand hill and into the water. He only made it to the shore. Then there was the time when my brother Paul burned his arm by picking up a homemade M80, which blew up right before he picked it up.

A quick story about that. Bill and I had heard about making an M80 by combining a ladyfinger firecracker and another firework. Bill and I had tried it by lighting it in our driveway. Sure enough, it was a ear-splitting explosion. We told Paul about it. He lit it. Nothing happened. I was on my way to go pick it up to see if it had maybe gone out, but Paul stopped me. He then went over himself to pick it up. So on one hand, he was smart to stop me from doing something stupid, but then proceeded to do the stupid thing himself.

Now that I think about it, it’s a wonder that we didn’t injure ourselves more at Bucktail Lake. We would often run around with just shorts and no shoes on 3-wheeled ATVs or Motorcycles, which resulted in more burns on hot exhaust than I’d like to remember. Or we’d swim in the very deep lake with just a life belt to keep us afloat. Nowadays, 3-wheeled ATVs are banned because they were dangerous and kids are practically required to wear life jackets when swimming.

But back to my injury...

When we got to the hospital, the doctor of course pushed and poked at it with me wincing all the time. The x-ray had some bad news for me, though. It wasn’t broken. The problem was that the bones in my left foot had separated, so they rolled some tape around my foot, told me to stay off of it for three weeks and sent me on my way.

I protested this.

“Do I get crutches?” I asked.

I had seen kids at school who had broken a leg with crutches. Surely I could get some crutches, too? If I can’t walk, how would I get around?

It was explained to me that they thought that I might hurt myself more by giving me crutches if I was to slip and fall. It was true that I was and still am uncoordinated, but I wasn’t sure how they knew that.

It was suggested that I either crawl or hop on the other foot.

I did both, but it wasn’t without a lot of mocking on the part of my older brothers.

I even had a nickname, Crip, which was short for cripple.

“Hey Crip,” my brother, Paul, would say to me all the time.

If I had to get anywhere in the house I’d have to put one arm on a wall to guide me and just hop along. Getting upstairs was an adventure at first, but I got quite good at hopping upstairs one stair at a time without stopping.

One good and bad thing was that I was allowed to rest for three weeks. The good news was that I could sit around and watch television or read all day long, which I did. The bad news was that I had to sit around and watch television or read all day long.

I remember watching the movie with Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. This movie was someone’s bright idea to have the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, both the biggest artists at the time, to do a whole movie based on songs from the Beatles. I loved the movie. In my defense, I was a kid and now that I have one of my own, I can confirm that kid’s have lousy tastes in movies.

After a few days of seeing it every time it came on HBO, I got kind of tired of it.

I loved going to the library, but seeing as how I couldn’t walk, that was out the window.

I started to worry that I was never going to leave the house again.

On top of that, showering and bathing became a huge hassle. Seeing as how I had bandages around my foot, either I had to take a bath with my foot hanging over the side or I could take the tape off and try to retape it every time. Showering was out because I couldn’t exactly stand on one foot in a slippery shower.

I didn’t think my foot was ever going to heal, but finally I was able to put pressure on it. The only lasting effects is that my left foot has a slightly pronounced hump to it, so when I tie my shoes, the left one bulges out slightly.

Even with incidents like this, I look back fondly at the days at Bucktail Lake. Granted, there were bad things about it like no cable tv, no shelter from storms, sweating at night in the trailer when it was hot or shivering in the trailer when it was cold, sunburns from being in the sun all day, rashes from crawling on inner tubes, stepping on stickers, getting pierced by fish fins, getting hooked by fish hooks, bitten by fish, sleepless nights when it was storming, bad dreams about storms and various other things.

Although getting injured does tarnish good memories, it was nice to have a place to be able to explore, to swim, to ride ATVs and to just have fun.