Why I'm Like I Am

THUMP! Even I heard the sickening sound of the baseball smashing into my head just above my left temple. Seems our mind detaches a bit from our body at times like these, perhaps to distance from the pain. So there I was having an out-of-body experience, thinking “I gotta get up to show Dad that I’m ok”, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. I couldn’t move at all. Then my dad, the assistant coach, and several players loomed over me, all asking at once if I was ok. Course, I couldn’t move, and I found I couldn’t talk either. This scared me immensely. Just then my brain dropped back into my body, pain shot through me, and I could move and speak again. This “paralysis” lasted only about ten seconds, but I remember the feeling to this day, about twenty years later. However, I’m a little fuzzy on the rest of the details afterwards. I think I sat out of the rest of practice that day – that would certainly seem to make sense, but then again I always tried to be tough, so who knows. By the next morning, I had a fierce headache that made me wonder who’d snuck into my bedroom the night before and smacked me on the head with a hammer, and my neck was so sore that I couldn’t turn my head more than an inch in either direction without feeling that my head was ripping from my neck. My friends found this very funny, especially when they’d walk up behind me in the halls at school and yell “Todd!” at the top of their lungs, causing me to involuntarily try to whip my head around and see who was yelling and why. “AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!” I’d scream as I collapsed and curled into the fetal position on the ground rocking back and forth (slight exaggeration for effect) while they laughed uproariously. This went on for about two weeks until the pain subsided. But in the end I suffered no lasting ill effects – at least that’s what the leprechauns that live in my sock drawer tell me.