When I was 4 years old, my family lived on the 3rd floor of a 3-story walk-up apartment. Our family was still quite small back then... just my Mom and Dad, me, and my baby brother. Dad worked, Mom stayed home, and my brother... well... he was only a year old, so he didn't do much.
I, on the other hand, did lots. I played outside with my toy crane, using it's magnet to "discover" coins in the dirt. I let my imagination transform abandoned shopping carts into race cars, dump trucks, and rocket ships. Sometimes, I went to the corner store with my worldly-wise 6-year-old friends. And I stole drinks of water from the hose tap on the neighbor's house.
Sometimes, though, I'd have to play indoors. On those occasions, I'd really have to use my imagination to amuse myself. Sure, I had toys, but those got boring very fast. I needed more than what I could get from Fisher Price or Mattel. Besides, I had a little shadow that wanted to play, too, and the only game he was good at was "Will it Flush?" (not Mom's favorite). So, that's why I came up "Hands Out, Hands In" one fateful afternoon.
My brother and I were knelt side-by-side on my bed, facing the bedroom window. It was one of those old sash windows, the kind you lift to open and it stays open by magic (I'm guessing). Its wooden frame was coated with countless layers of kid-friendly lead-based paint, and there was no screen. It was only open enough for a small child to fit through, mind you, so nothing to worry about. Besides, Mom was always close by... usually in the kitchen, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and talking on the phone to one of her friends. You know, basic 1970's parenting.
The "how to's" of my new little game were fairly straightforward... I'd say, "Hands Out!", and we'd stick our hands out the window. Then, with a "Hands In!", we'd yank them back in again. What the objective of the game was, I couldn't tell you, aside from just having fun. At 4 years old, it isn't about winning or losing.
Or so I thought.
The first couple of "Hands Out!" and "Hands In!" saw 4 little hands thrust out into the open air and jerked back inside, accompanied by my brother's laughter. The third or fourth time, however, only 2 hands burst into the sunshine: Mine. I brought them back in, reminded my brother of the very complex rules of our game, and tried again.
"Hands Out!"
Nothing. He suddenly had zero interest putting his chubby little fingers anywhere near the window, regardless of my coaxing.
"There's nothing to be scared of," I chided him. "See?" And with that, I stuck my hands out one more time... only to have the magic give out and the window come crashing down.
There was no scream of pain.
Don't get me wrong... there was pain. Plenty of it. All 8 of my fingers were crushed awkwardly between the window and the sill, and I had no way to free them. But there was no scream. Had there been, I know my Mom would have come to see what sort of torture I was subjecting my brother to. She was always profiling like that (not necessarily without cause).
I finally managed to yell, "MOM!"
"Come here if you want to talk to me!" she yelled back from the kitchen.
"I CAN'T!!!"
Something in my voice must have registered, because that brought her running. She saw my plight, scrambled onto my bed, and tried to force the window back open. It wouldn't budge. No matter how hard she tried, that thing just wasn't going to let me go.
By now, there were definitely tears. Panic had joined the pain, and I thought I might be stuck like that forever. Or worse... maybe I was going to die! Not taken out with a razor blade in an apple, or kidnapped by a hobo, or any of the other likely ways for a kid to go in the 70's...
No. Death by window.
The next few minutes were unbearable, as my Mom had to go find help. I don't remember if it was the building superintendent or someone else, but after what seemed like hours, they were finally able to pry the window back open and release my battered hands. If I had thought I was in pain before, boy, was I in for a surprise!
The blood rushing back into my fingers felt like molten lava. The excruciating heat spread through each digit, every nerve screaming with the voices of a thousand tormented souls. I was bathed in pure, unrelenting agony.
Mercifully, a black hole exists in my memories between release from the window and the time that our family doctor arrived at the house. That's right... he came to our house. No long walk to his office. No waiting for Dad to come home and take me to a hospital. Just a call from Mom and there was a doctor on our doorstep.
It was a different time.
Somehow, I didn't break a single bone. There was a lot of swelling, though (soft tissue damage?), and the doctor's remedy for that was almost as bad as the injury itself. I'm told it only lasted an hour or so, and certainly not without a respite here and there, but it felt like eternity to me. In fact, it gave me the most vivid and enduring memory of the entire experience...
As I sat at the kitchen table, sobbing, with hands that were both burning and freezing thrust into a bag of ice cubes, I watched my Dad's flip-style digital clock count the minutes until this particular hell was over. Burned into my brain are those bright white, bisected digits on a field of black, held in place by a tiny metal tab... a tab that retracted at a glacial pace until, at long last, the much-anticipated "flip" revealed the next number. Again, and again, and again.
For those of you keeping track...
Final Score: Baby Brother: 1, Me: 0
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