After 76 years, I finally understand that myself as a spiritual creature depends entirely upon my flesh and blood brain, and the brain, like any other organ, liver, kidney, heart, etc., can fail. At first that scared the crap out of me, so to speak, because I suddenly realized how vulnerable I was, and then there are the number of times I have been hit on the head over the course of a lifetime, that have undoubtedly taken their toll on my flesh and blood brain. I still have a wonderful Harry-Potter type scar on my forehead from the last accident, so called, (my wife was involved), when I got hit by a car in our own driveway. Woke up in a pool of blood. I never really wanted to be able to say that. "Woke up in a pool of blood!" Or maybe I did, for it felt good saying it.
Then there was my rollerblade accident, this time in the street out front, just because I thought it would be FUN to coast rapidly downhill on the rollerblades, fast, and it was fun until I had to try to stop. I can still remember the blacktop coming up fast too.
The first scar-producing head shot was caused by the pretty little neighbor girl, Phyllis, who apparently pushed me down our cellar steps when we were very young. I bore that scar on the side of my head most of my life. It doesn't seem to be there any more. Hair wouldn't grow there. Now it won't grow anywhere on my head mostly except where I had the scar. I didn't hold the fall against the little girl, not being able to remember it, for one thing.
I think my favorite head-shot is the dachshund incident. My parents had a wild little red-haired dachshund named Greta. She would escape at times and I would have to chase her down the alley ways beside and behind our house in Tiffin, Ohio. I always caught her. I loved her desperately. My parents had to pen her in their kitchen when we all left because she wasn't to be trusted not to chew things or pee on the carpet. They put a screen across both entrances to the kitchen. Open the front door and straight down a short hall was the kitchen entrance with the screen. I came home from college each day, opened the front door, and there was the little red dachshund bouncing excitedly behind the screen, waiting for me to take it down and chase her around the house. This particular time I decided to surprise her by jumping the screen. Surprise indeed! Sailing over the screen, I hit my head on the very sharp archway above, and once again knocked myself out. I woke up in my first pool of blood, those pools so popular in mysteries and on TV shows. When I came to this time, the little dog was licking the blood off my head, quite concerned and anxious.
At that time I was a junior, I think, at Heidelberg College in Tiffin. My mother ran their switchboard for a few evening hours on weekdays. (She had been a telephone operator when she and my dad married in 1933.) I, however, was still bleeding profusely. Having a modicum of sense available, I called her. Fortunately the phone stand was also beside the entrance to the kitchen. My mom said she would call, ta dum, Phyllis's mother; they still lived behind us on Clay Street, and Phyllis's mother was an RN. Her name was Gervase. She came in the backdoor; it was that kind of neighborhood. Open access, good friends all around. Gervase looked at my head and decided I would be fine without stitches once she got the bleeding stopped, which she did. I seem to remember ice, but I am not sure. Greta didn't die from ingesting my blood, but her fate, to my mind, is really sad, because for the longest time I did not know what happened to her and didn't know that I didn't know. I absolutely forgot her. Or almost absolutely.
My mother got terribly ill my senior year in college, something called Landry's Paralysis. The sent her to Toledo, where the specialists finally diagnosed it, and my dad and I were much consumed with caring for my mother. He continued to work, I continued school and worked at the local JC Penney store for my fourth year. My mother came to the point of death, according to her doctors, and then miraculously began to get better. I graduated from Heidelberg, went to grad school at Ohio University, thanks to one of my pushy English teachers and Dean of the college, Frederick Lempke, bless him, who sent for application forms for admission and scholarships and ordered me to fill them out. I did, was accepted, helped financially, and earned two degrees there. In the course of all of that activity, I seem to have forgotten about Greta. I suppose I knew what happened to her at the time, but when I got in touch a few years ago with one of my childhood friends, Mike, now deceased, I had no idea about her fate. I asked Mike, the friend who didn't go to Heidelberg but went to work where my father worked, the Sterling Grinding Wheel plant, and lived down the street. Apparently my parents had given Greta to friends who lived in the country and she too went on to have a good life. At the time it wouldn't have occurred to me to take her. Graduate school. I have no idea why I don't know or remember her fate. There is just a blank regarding her in my mind, my flesh and blood-based mind. I hate that blank. My parents always had a dachshund, Greta being the last one, I guess, Rusty, also red, being the first. I realized long ago that home is where I learned to love them.
Well, the vulnerable flesh and blood based Mind. Besides all the other blows my head took while I was growing up, the only other one I remember was the fastball that got me in the side of the head. Apparently someone called me just as the pitcher threw it, and down I went. Obviously I got up then too. It occurs to me that Heaven for us must be grounded (no pun intended, well) in a "spiritual flesh" reality. We are who we are spiritually because of our vulnerable flesh and blood reality. So, there needs to be a resurrection of the body for us truly to be again, a divinizarían of the flesh, a term I just read, or so it seems to me. Christ came physically out of the tomb. New body, according to the Gospels, but different yet recognizable, divinized. Someone said, I also remember reading, that our scars will disseminate glory. I hope so, for I have acquired a bunch of them. The Greta head scar is still there too, and I hope she is too.