no.51 - The Sound of Injury

Yesterday, at the playground, I watched a toddler wander too close to a swing as it reached the opposite apex of it's trajectory. A moment later the boy was hit, full force in the head, and knocked flat to the ground.

Both the mother pushing the swing and I were half a second from preventing this, but each of us was too late. The boy sprawled out and immediately began to cry. I was glad of this, because silence would have been far more troubling.

The sound of the impact was terrible, the kind that Hollywood never gets right in it's over eager need to make every punch, kick and smack sound like a world-ending explosion. The wet, muted sound of a real hit is far worse, pointing to how fragile and mortal we are — soft skin and muscle around breakable bones. It does not take an explosion to injure or ruin us. Often it is far less.

The boy was fine, wailing at the shock, but otherwise unharmed. The nanny responsible for his care apologized to the mother pushing the swing. The mother was visibly shaken. The nanny assured her the boy was fine, that she had been a pediatrician in Romania and that the toddler was alert and responsive. Regardless of her comforts, my heart was pounding and it took me nearly as long to recover as it did for the toddler.

It was in this same park that my daughter, at two, shattered her elbow last year, requiring two pins and surgery. Even now I can hear the sound of the impact of her arm as she fell, the monkey bar ringing out like a low, un-tuned bell. Her elbow hardly made a sound at all. I don't know if this memory is accurate, or reconstructed, but I am sure that it is true.