Peaks and Valleys

Gather round my children and I'll tell you the tale
of my life's greatest triumph and my life's greatest fail

Maybe it's the New Year getting me into a reflective mode, maybe I'm just running out of ideas, but I shall now share with you, the loyal reader, my greatest moment, and my moment of greatest defeat.

The Best

If you read my post about New Year's of Yore, you will perhaps recall that I spent the transition period from 2007 into 2008 in the city of Miami.

I was down there for the Virginia Tech-Kansas game, but I spent a few days there, with friends new and old, rocking out in Miami.

My greatest moment comes as your hero and his party are leaving a bar for the evening. I don't remember the bar name, but it was the place that I heard the Reggae cover of Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," so it did leave some sort of impression on me.

Anyways, as we are leaving the bar, several of us take a moment to enjoy some sweet nic-o-tine in a courtyard outside of the place.

Since New Year's was a few days before, there were still signs of the festivities on the courtyard. Several chairs were still attached to strings of balloons, though the balloons were slowly leaking their helium, and were resting on the ground.

Close to the group was a chain of about five baloons, lying on the ground wrapped around a chair, about eight feet from where we were standing.

It was a windy night (the week I was down there was the coldest week in Miami in the past 70 years, go figure) and the baloons were gently swaying on the ground.

We were bullshitting as we were talking, and someone threw their cigarettes butt near one of those balloons.

This evolved into a brief argument about whether or not any of us could throw their cigarette at a balloon, thereby popping it into a glorious helium explosion.

Several people were of the ilk that it would not be possible in this wind, and I argued that it could be done.

As other cigarettes slowly burned down, everyone who tried it failed. Our cries as each one missed attracted the attention of other smokers in the area, all who came to see what the ruckus was.

Most people agreed with my friends, saying that it could not be done, and so destiny called me. I was the last one to finish, so it was up to me.

Let me tell you something. Apart from a season of sitting on the bench playing JV baseball in high school, most of my organized sport playing days were before I was able to legally drive.

And when you're playing youth league basketball or soccer, there isn't much spotlight on you.

So this was my chance. A chance to shoot myself into the ranks of the immortals. At least, immortal to the drunks that had gathered around me this particular evening in Miami.

Someone offered to place a wager: if I hit the balloon, he would buy my first beer at the next bar, and if I missed, I would be buying the first beer.

I coolly eyed my surrounding, the way Clint Eastwood did as he was faced with a gang of banditos at the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars.

I toed the line that served as the border which I wasn't to step across. With a brief stretch of my left arm, I held the slowly burning cigarette in front of me, and then I let fly...

.....only to be greeted by a muffled pop as the thin latex skin was pierced by the ember of the cigarette.

The crowd went wild. At least, I like to think they did. Suddenly, it was as if I had just won the Super Bowl. People were high-fiving me, men were offering to name their first-borns after me, and the females were all offering themselves to me, pantsless in the cold evening.

I'm pretty sure I'm not exaggerating.

That first free beer had never tasted so good. Miami, she is now my mistress.

The Worst

I take you from the scene of my greatest triumph to the scene of my greatest failure.

I can consider myself lucky in one repspect. My victory was watched by several people, while the audience to my failure was much smaller.

I'll set the scene.

I am living in Blacksburg, and it is the Sunday of a Memorial Day weekend. I am substitute teaching at the time, so I was taking the opportunity to pick up some groceries for the week, and I headed to my local Food Lion.

I purchased my groceries, which included the first batch of summer brews, in this case it was some Blue Moon honey summer ale.

I wheel my shopping cart out into the parking lot, and that's where disaster struck.

Being that I am always filled with a childlike sense of wonderment, I decided to take a moment to go back to my childhood, and I stood on the bottom shelf of the shopping cart, intending to take a glorious ride to my car.

But gravity is an elusive goddess. During the course of my brief ride, my cart ran over a sewer grate in the parking lot, which upset the delicate balance of my position.

Suddenly the shopping cart was tilting backwards onto me. While I struggled valiantly to maintain control, it was to no avail.

The handle of the shopping cart dragged several feet across the pavement, and between said handle and said pavement were my hands, trapped by the position they were in during my ride.

After the slide, I lifted the cart up, and quickly scramled to my car, hoping that a scraped knee and a loss of pride was all the damage that had been done.

No such luck. As I push to may car, I get a glimpse of my hands.

The skin on the lower parts of my index, middle and ring finger on each hand was gone, and there was a dime-sized divot in the knuckle below the ring finger on my left hand.

The cuts were so deep on my index fingers, that I could see white at each of the middle knuckles.

Soon the blood started flowing. It soaked my grocery bags, and the shock of seeing it all caused me to drop several bags, breaking two bottles of the beer I had just purchased.

I was able to get the blood-soaked bags into my trunk, and I drove the mile-and-a-half to my place in shock.

After some quick bandaging, I decided the cuts were deep enough that I decided to drive myself to the hospital.

As I was waiting to have the wouded cleansed, I started getting peculiar looks from the people examining them.

You see, due to the odd position of my hands when it happened, the scrape marks were going to opposite way that you would expect if I had , say, punched through a glass window.

I had to explain my story to the doctors, the nurse, the security guard, all of whom responded with a laugh and a look that asked, "And you say you're 22?"

Needless to say, the injury served as the end to my brief teaching career. I couldn't go teach with three fingers on each hand bandaged like there was no tomorrow.

It also meant I couldn't take a shower. I tried, once, a few days after the accident, and it was the most painful experince of mhy life that didn't involve Rosie O'Donnell.

It also set back my basketball and guitar playing by several months, and it was almost a year before I could fully extent my left index finger again.

I still have the scar on my knuckle, and sometimes on a humid day, the middle knuckle of my index fingers stiffen up.

So there you have it. My greatest public triumph followed a mere four months later by bloodied groceries, and reverse scrapes on all of my fingers.

As far as the surviving bottles of Blue Moon, caked with so much of my undignified blood?

I saved them. I kept them on my desk, lest I forget, and everytime I felt an ache in my fingers, I looked at them and thought, "You could be sitting here with ten healthy fingers, remembering how great that lazy Sunday afternoon was, drinking honeyed ale and watching basketball."

But it wasn't to be.