Hmph.  Well, guess I haven't been on here for a while.  Yeah, for anyone who still faithfully checks this thing and cares about whether I post or not (which basically boils down to my mom,) let me level with ya.  You've probably already been able to tell that I've kind of lost interest in this little site of mine, seeing's how I haven't added a single thing to it since Daylight Savings time.  My Page of Miscellany served me well for a year and a half or so and jump-started my creativity, but lately I just don't care anymore whether I add anything new here or not.  And, judging by my feedback and comments for the past several posts, neither does anyone else, really.  Oh, it doesn't bother me, mind you; I understand.  The whole xanga thing, in general, has sort of lost its luster, and most people who haven't been checking my site have also not been checking their own, either.

     So, all that to say that it's only fair of me to warn you that I'm not sure how often I'll really be updating this thing in the future, or how often it will be worth your while to check it.  That's not to say that I won't do it, (though it's not out of the question); I just don't know.  I haven't sworn off writing altogether, though; in fact, by "jump-starting my creativity," as I said before, this site inspired me to move on to bigger, more ambitious things.  I've just moved on from the old digital stomping grounds, as it were; and it remains to be seen how often I'll look back.

   With that said, there are still a few loose ends I'd still like to tie up on here.  I've just come off of an entire semester of student teaching, with an entire semester's worth of memories and lessons and thoughts.  That's not one of the loose ends I was talking about, though, because we established before that I don't care.  This semester of teaching, however, did remind me of something else, as did the opportunity I have over the remainder of this break to go in and substitute-teach at my old elementary school for a few days.  Yes, being at the front of a school classroom, and revisiting the educational building of my youth, reminded me of something I should have done a long time ago.  And that is...

     Posting the conclusion to that old detective story I put up way back on my birthday!  Yayy!  I've actually been meaning to get Part 2 on here for several months now, but that's how little I cared.  However, for your reading pleasure, today is finally the day that the matter of "The Nasty Substitute" is resolved.

     Just by way of information, this was the final detective story I wrote in my prolific sixth-grade year; written, as I remember, to satisfy a "descriptive" writing assignment.  I had begun the story in our short-story unit and had broken it off for "being too long" (at three pages,) so, ever watchful for a chance to complete the tale, I adapted it to fulfilling the requirements for our "description" unit so I'd have an excuse to read it in front of our English class.  (This is also the reason that this half of the story has several instances of unnecessary adjectives, in case you're wondering.)  As always, it doesn't make sense and is error-laden and its logic would fall apart if somebody breathed on it, but of course you expect that by now.  (Odd that I would be singing the praises of a teacher who has a science report due on the second week of school, for instance.)  All I'll say before our feature presentation is that, if you can't remember what happened in the previous installment, have no fear.  Since the two halves of the story also had quite a bit of time between them back when I first wrote it, I included a helpful summary of Part I at the beginning of this one, for the benefit of my class, and it's yours to read now, too.  (Plus, you can always go back to the post from June 14th and refresh your memory.)

   I’m sure every one of you remembers where I left off in my story.  But just in case, I will explain the characters.

Aaron M. Gottier- The main character is a detective and a new kid in school.

Referred to in the story as:  Me, I

Watsin A. Name- Aaron’s friend who isn’t too smart.  Loves Shakespeare plays.  Has glasses, buck teeth, black hair, and is toothpick-thin.

Referred to as:  Watsin

Mrs. Yug-doog- Aaron’s favorite teacher who makes even the first two weeks of school interesting.  She’s Japanese and is skinny and dark-skinned.

Referred to as: Mrs. Yug-doog

Floda Reltih- The nastiest substitute teacher you could ever imagine.  She is

heavyset and has an eyepatch.  Her black-gray hair is in a beehive hairdo like

Marge Simpson.

Referred to as:  Mrs. Reltih

   The story so far:

   When I came to school, Mrs. Yug-Doog wasn’t there.  I find out that Mrs. Reltih was to be our teacher.  She handed out demerits like cigars after a birth.  I found out that Mrs. Yug-doog was sick and that she left her pill prescription in her son’s (Dik-doog’s) backpack.  That’s where I left off.

The Nasty Substitute Part II

or

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover

by Aaron M. Gottier

   I knew where the prescription was, but now I had to get it.  I reached for the hall pass and quickly scurried out the door.  I sneaked around, peeking nervously around corners and hurrying across hallways.  The only thing missing from the scene was the theme song from Mission Impossible.  I peeked around a corner and gasped.  A teacher was quickly coming down that hallway!  I looked around desperately for a hiding place.  The only thing I saw that would work was a particularly wide orange fifth grade locker.  It was probably a factory defect.  I opened it, tossed all the things out of it, and stepped in.  I shut the door not a moment to soon!  I could hear the teacher’s footsteps pass in front of the locker.  I heard her annoying, whining voice say,

   “My, my.  What a mess.”  (A door creaked open)  “Whoever has locker 47,

your stuff is all over the floor.  Come put it into your locker.”  I shuddered.  Her voice sounded like a siren!  I heard her walk away.  Then I heard footsteps pounding in my direction.  I heard someone mumbling angrily as they opened the locker.  I then stared into the pitch white face of a startled girl.  With a scream, she fainted.

   “Well, nice to see you, too!” I said as I stepped out and headed for the first

grade lockers.  I reached them and found Dik-doog’s.  I threw it open and

fumbled around in his backpack.  There it was!  The prescription!  Now if I could give it to Mrs. Yug-doog somehow today or tomorrow morning, she could come back to school tomorrow!  I turned around and bumped into the fat stomach of the principal, Mr. Bunksquee.  I gasped and quickly stuffed the prescription into my pocket.  He questioned me in his whiny voice.

   “Just what are we doing looking through little kids’ backpacks?  You know the school rules.  Respect other people’s property.  You have a demerit!”

   “But I already got four demerits from Mrs. Reltih!  Now I have a detention!”

   “So be it!” snapped Mr. Bunksquee.  He led me to the sixth grade room.  He was just about to open the door when he saw a horrible sight through the door window.  Mrs. Reltih was yelling something at a kid.  She then socked him in the face.

   “Never mind about your demerits!” said the white-faced Mr. Bunksquee just

before he hit the floor.  I shook my head.  Adults.  No way to control their

surprise.

   I ran up the steps, head over heels with the idea of getting Mrs. Yug-doog back and fell down the steps, heels over head with unconsciousness.  After waking up, I rearranged my bones, walked up the steps, and took the prescription, an envelope, a stamp, and a pen out of my pocket. (I’m such a packrat!) I scrawled Mrs. Yug-doog’s address down on the envelope, put the stamp on, and stuck the prescription inside.  Thank goodness Mrs. Yug-doog was in the same zip code as the school!  Now the prescription would get to her tomorrow.  I raced outside.  I could see the mailman coming in the distance.  Then a hand pounded down on my shoulder.  It was Mrs. Reltih!

   “Oh, hi.  I was just going to mail Mrs. Yug-doog’s prescription to her so she can come back to school tomorrow,” I gulped.

   “Don’t you want me to stay?” her overly-friendly voice asked.  “You aren’t

going anywhere, sonny!  I still need to get total revenge on this wicked class!”

her now-nasty voice snapped.

   I thought it was hopeless until I saw Watsin behind Mrs. Reltih.  I threw the

envelope to him.  He caught it and handed it to the mailman as he pulled up.

   “Nooo!” yelled Mrs. Reltih as she ran after the mailman and soon disappeared.

   I glanced at my watch.  It was time to pack up.

   The next morning we didn’t even have a substitute.  A puzzled Mr. Bunksquee led us into the cafeteria.  We watched an eternal filmstrip until eleven thirty.  (I needed to get more sleep anyway.)  I awoke by hearing some of my fellow classmates muttering.  They were asking kids if they knew what happened to Mrs. Reltih.  They were wondering why we didn’t have a substitute.  (I figured that Mrs. Reltih had chased the mail truck so far that she’d gotten lost.)  I became angry.  I was angry that the kids hadn’t tried to help us get rid of Mrs. Reltih.  I was angry that Watsin and I weren’t being honored for being the only ones brave enough to get rid of her.

   “You are all cowards!"  I exploded.  “Watsin and I took great risks to try to get rid of Mrs. Reltih, but you guys were too scared!  Since I’m new in this school, I wanted to get to know some of you, but no one wants to get to know cowards!” I sat shaking back down.  Watsin started clapping for me.  “Shut up!” I snapped.  Kids were looking at me with expressions of hurt on their faces.  “What are you looking at?”  I asked rudely.  Just then, Mr. Bunksquee came back into the room.  He took us back into our sixth grade room.  I groaned.  There, at the teacher’s desk, was Mrs. Reltih!  She must’ve given up chasing the mail truck and come back to the school recently.  When Mr. Bunksquee left, she grabbed Watsin and me by the collar and slammed us against the wall.  She sneered,

   “This’ll be great!”  She threw me into the air.  As I zoomed back to the ground, I saw a flash of light.  At first I excitedly thought I was going to heaven.  I looked up and only saw that Melissa’s black camera for show-and-tell had taken a picture.  Mrs. Reltih threw Watsin onto the ground and raised a ruler in the air.  She smiled nastily.  “Which one of you wants to be whipped first?”

   I smiled nervously at Watsin.  “Well, buddy, at least we’re in this together.”

   “I know.  I’ll whip both of you at the same time!”  the not-too-brilliant Mrs. Reltih laughed as if she’d thought of the best idea in the world.  She quickly brought the ruler down.  I braced myself, but the whipping never came.  Instead, I heard a high voice call out,

   “Mrs. Reltih, what are you doing?”  I looked up, surprised.  It was Mrs. Yug-doog!

   “W-well, these boys tripped, you see,”  stammered Mrs. Reltih.  “And I-I am holding my ruler because-”

   “Because you were going to whip us!!” I interrupted.

   “That’s not true!!”  yelled Mrs. Reltih.  We began arguing.

   “QUIET!” said Mrs. Yug-doog tiredly.  “Aaron, do you realize that if you are

lying to me, a teacher, you will get a detention?” I nodded.  “Do you, Mrs. Reltih, realize that if you are lying, you could be arrested for child abuse?”  Mrs. Reltih nodded.  “I just don’t know who to believe!”

   “Believe Aaron, Mrs. Yug-doog!  Mrs. Reltih has been very mean to us.  She gave me this black eye!”  an angry boy said.  Kids rose out of their chairs and walked toward Mrs. Reltih, murmuring their agreement.

   “That’s not true!  Would you take kids’ words over an adult’s?” asked Mrs.

Reltih.  Mr. Bunksquee had been listening through the door, and right then he

came in the classroom and told about seeing Mrs. Reltih giving a kid a black

eye.  The leader of the rebellion (his name was “Jason”) tapped his black eye.  “They have no proof!” shrieked a very scared Mrs. Reltih as she backed away from the human wall that was swiftly moving towards her.

   “Yes, we do!” smiled Jason in delight.  He ripped the picture out of Melissa’s instant-developing camera.  It showed Mrs. Reltih holding Watsin against the wall with me in the air.  Mrs. Reltih was now backed up against the wall, totally beaten.  Her face was white.

   That proof did it.  Mrs. Yug-doog now knew exactly who to believe.  “Come with me!” she demanded as she led the terrified Mrs. Reltih out the door.  A wild cheer went up as all the adults, including Mr. Bunksquee, left the room. 

Everyone was happy except for me.

   “Listen everyone,” I ordered as I stood at the podium.  “Hello!  LISTEN!!” 

Watsin, get their attention.”  Watsin drew in his breath and let out the loudest,

longest belch anyone has ever heard on this side of the Mississippi.  Everyone stopped and stared at him, including me.

   “Hey, it worked!”  he grinned sheepishly.  I shook my head, marveling at the

incredible unintelligence of my friend.

   “I just want to say that I’m sorry for calling you all cowards.  I, myself, was

scared to death just before when Mrs. Reltih had us on the floor!  You guys

stood up for me, though.  That was anything but cowardly.  I judged you all

permanently by your first appearance.  No one should ever do that.  Thank you.”

    I was pleased at the effects of my speech.  People were saying the usual “It’s all right.  No problem” to me.  Some were taking oaths not to do what I had done.  Watsin had burst into tears.

   Mrs. Yug-doog came back into the room.  “Okay, class, take out your whale reports.  Yes, they were due today.”  A kid asked her why she was back in school.  “It’s the strangest thing,” puzzled Mrs. Yug-doog.  “Today I

received my pill prescription in the mail.  So I took it to the pharmacy and got

more.”  I exchanged a knowing glance with Watsin.  A kid asked her what

became of Mrs. Reltih.  “Never you mind.”  Mrs. Yug-doog demanded.  But as I took out my whale report, I looked out the window.  A police car pulled out of the parking lot.  I’m not sure, but I think the person in the back with handcuffs on had a beehive hairdo and an eyepatch.

                                              THE END

Well, would you look at that?  I've skipped over an entire month with my little entries here, and now it's November already!  November the first...and my semester will be over in less than five weeks.  Just this past Sunday I was forced to think again about how the days are flying, when that clock-changing time of year came around once again, and I realized that more than two months of school were already gone.

So time, and its tendency to outrun me, has been on my mind a lot lately, so much so that it morphed into the topic for my newest essay...or at least for the very beginning and very end of it (you know how these things go.)  I should warn you that this is a little different from most of my past essays; this style of writing isn't typical for me, and I don't really even like when other people use it.  But hey, that's what being a writer is all about; trying new things and stretching yourself.  So here we go...one more essay to read, and if you've never liked my usual writing, maybe this is the one you've been waiting for.

This Thing All Things Devours

I’ve been thinking a lot about time.  This has actually been happening for some years now.  I never used to think about time; but then again, I suppose no one thinks much about something that they take for granted.  When I was a lot younger, it seemed like I had all sorts of time.  There were even instances in which I felt like I had too much of it—or, at least, too much of it devoted to some particular thing that I didn’t want to do.  But this hasn’t happened for quite a while.  Since I’ve come to college, and especially since I’ve started student teaching, the weeks, and even months, go by so quickly that it is a constant source of amazement to me, if not of outright alarm.

But even now that time seems to be bustling along at a much quicker pace than it used to, I have to admit that there’s still a lot of it.  I’m not always sure where it all seems to go, but I’d be kidding myself if I pretended that it isn’t there.  In fact, I can think of no other commodity on earth that is at once so precious and yet so abundant.  If you can’t count on having anything else in your future, you can at least count on having time (because it holds everything else,) and every day is filled to the brim with it.  (In fact, it can never be filled any more or less than the brim.  Think about that for a while!)  You may never truly have “all the time in the world,” but you always have all the time in the day, and as short as the days sometimes seem, they are always quite long enough to hold a whole lot if you’re determined for them to do so.

However, with all that said, I find it extremely distressing the number of things that simply don’t get done, no matter how much time there is to do them.  Now, of course, there are a number of very serious and important things to which this statement could apply, and indeed does apply, and for which I could write any number of insightful essays.  This website, for instance, stands as a testament to how little writing I truly get done, though it is one of my favorite pastimes and is indeed a self-proclaimed hobby.  And I may not have been teaching for very long yet, but I’ve been doing it for long enough to know already that even if I constantly improve from now until retirement, I don’t think I’ll ever completely succeed at being the kind of teacher I want to be and should be.  But the things that alarm me with their very refusal to be accomplished aren’t always as grand and worthwhile as these things.  Sometimes they can be as unassuming as simply trying to get ice cream.

I first heard about the place from Steve Abel.  He was a worthwhile source to hear it from, and certainly a worthwhile person to know.  If you’ve never met Steve Abel, I suggest that you rectify this, and that you do it as soon as possible, because I don’t know how many more chances you’ll have.  Those of you who attend Grove City College will have an easier time of it than those who don’t, for he attends the college as well, but my knowledge of Steve Abel reaches back further than our undergraduate years, back into high school.  He was one of only two people in my graduating class who accompanied me into Grove City as a freshman, and as a result I used to talk with him a great deal.  Our exchanges have diminished in the ensuing years because our high school background has become increasingly remote, and with my days taken up by student teaching and my nights spent in the seclusion of the school apartments, I have seen almost nothing of him in recent months.  Then there’s the matter that during his time at college, his family relocated from my home area out to Kansas or Wyoming or some other place where humans don’t traditionally live, and so after this year I doubt whether I’ll ever see him again, but I guess that’s the way things sometimes go.

Anyway, even if I don’t talk with Steve Abel much anymore, I certainly used to, and it was during one of these conversations that I first heard about the place.  It was over three years ago now; early in my first year at college.  I had run into Steve Abel one weekend and we were briefly relating our activities of the evening before.  I can’t remember now what I told him, and anyway I doubt it was anything of much interest.  Knowing my behavior during the first several weekends at college, I’m sure I must have spent the evening huddled in a corner trying to convince myself that I was too good to need any friends.  Steve Abel’s night, thankfully, had been rather more rewarding than mine, and it had involved a trip to a nearby ice cream shop, the name of which I had not heard before.  “Some friends and I went down to Katie’s Corner last night and got ice cream,” he told me.  “Have you ever been there?”  I rarely left my own room.  “You should go sometime.  It’s a good place.”

And right then, with that offhand suggestion that essentially ended our conversation, if memory serves, I resolved to follow his advice.  Indeed I would go to this Katie’s Corner, just as Steve Abel had said.  I’m always on the lookout for a good ice cream place, and as this one was foreign to me, I thought I might as well see what it had to offer.  Yes, his advice made a lot of sense.  Actually, I’m sure I would have agreed to whatever he said at the time, out of the ecstasy of hearing a friendly human voice, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.  Got to get out to Katie’s Corner, I told myself many times after that weekend.  Steve Abel said so.

There are several reasons I could offer why I didn’t visit the place for over three years.  Many of them are probably fairly understandable.  I didn’t have a car on campus until my junior year, for one, which was enough right there to render me incapable of visiting the place by myself, it lying considerably outside of convenient walking distance.  The transit to the Grove City Alliance Church, which I attended semi-faithfully during my first two years of college, went right by the ice cream shop, and so I saw it often out of the window, though riding in a church van is hardly the time to request a stop for ice cream.  Still, I was reminded of the place, and of Steve Abel’s advice, once every week or so, and once a week I renewed my promise to myself.  Any day now I’ll do it.  Have to visit Katie’s Corner.

It was a month or so into my senior year before I even made any sort of definite plan to act on my promise, as I was once again reminded of my old personal resolution during a trip to the Grove City Outlet stores, which also took me past the ice cream shop.  The trip was actually the first episode in the Brown Dress Shoes Incident, which I will not stop to explain here, but with which many of you I know are already familiar.  Ah, yes! I told myself as it scrolled by outside the window once again.  Katie’s Corner!  How long has it been, and I’ve still never been there!  And, with the industriousness of one who knows he is in his final months at someplace, I resolved that before long, I would really really visit Katie’s Corner.

I continued to think about the place as September turned into early October, and as autumn grew older I reasoned with myself that since the Dairy Queen in town closed its doors during the colder months, Katie might follow a similar policy, and that my time for the semester might be running out.  If I wanted to catch the place before next spring, I would have to get moving.  This time I was honestly really truly going to do it.  And I told people, too.  “Have you ever been to Katie’s Corner?” I asked Alex Johnson, who is probably more familiar to most of you than Steve Abel is.  “Yes,” she answered, “some friends and I went there just the other day.”  “I think I’m going to go pretty soon,” I announced proudly.  “Better hurry up,” she told me.  “They’re going out of business this weekend.”

My chest deflated.  “Excuse me?”  Apparently when the place closed down for the season, it was also changing management.  My days had just become a lot more numbered than I thought.  I wasn’t just looking at my last chances to visit before the spring—I was looking at my last chances to visit it at all.  But it wasn’t too late yet.  The time had finally come.  Alex Johnson, and the store itself, had set the date for me.  This weekend, I was heading to Katie’s Corner.

When the weekend finally came, however, I was a little less excited about it.  That Saturday was a messy, morale-sapping day; one of those when you’re not quite sure if it’s actually raining, but everything is wet anyway, and it’s a lot worse than if it really were raining.  One of those where you keep your blinds shut all day; not because it’s too bright outside, but because it’s so gray and dull that you’re afraid it’ll actually seep through the window and dim the lights on the inside.  It was the kind of day that was seemingly designed for staying inside and pretending it doesn’t exist, and I frankly wasn’t altogether certain that I wanted to venture out into the middle of it, particularly for the purpose of eating ice cream at an outdoor shop.  Especially since I had already committed to going on an outing later that night, which was more than I wanted to leave my apartment building already, part of me wondered if it was truly worth it to leave the comfort of the indoors at all, no matter when the place was closing.

So I decided to run an experiment, in order to figure out what to do, the only way I knew how: by walking into the weather and seeing what it felt like.  Since I was going out later that evening anyway, I would get ready to leave, walk out of the door, and see then if I had the resolve to keep walking all the way to my car.  I stepped skeptically out into the morbid grayness of the early afternoon and shivered.  It was chillier that day than it had been in quite a while, the autumn weather having ceded control of the outside to the lingering residue of a stubborn summer for the past few weeks, and apparently making up for the lost time today.  Do I really want to go and get ice cream right now, I asked myself, if I’m already shivering just standing out here?

If someone ever told me I was a partial masochist, I don’t think I would be entirely surprised.  I’ve noticed that in certain circumstances where some stimulus is affecting me a little too strongly, or even a little too painfully, for my liking, I will often act in such a way that whatever affect this is becomes a little bit worse.  This isn’t consistently true in every scenario, of course, but one situation in which it is always reliable is in regard to the extremes of the weather.  Pennsylvania hasn’t had a summer day hot enough that I haven’t heard the call to dinner in the evening and half-hoped the menu included heavy, oven-prepared food; and many are the days when I’ve found myself shuddering and stamping in the cold and thought to myself, “Hey, let’s go get some ice cream!”  That Saturday was no exception.  I hugged myself against the cold, looked at the gray sky and the turning leaves, and said, “Katie’s Corner?  Sure; why not?”

I got in my car and headed for the ice cream shop…that is, after making a wrong turn and driving a mile or two in another direction (which doesn’t have much to do with this particular essay, but which you might recognize as a recurring theme on this webpage nonetheless.)  After finally reaching the unassuming, white, low-to-the-ground road sign that read simply “Katie’s Corner,” I turned into the place’s spacious gravel parking lot and eyed it, I must confess, with some skepticism.  Like its roadside advertisement, the building itself didn’t go out of its way to catch the eye, nor even to impress it once it was caught.  A small, nondescript white building with sliding windows at the front, it had the kind of structure peculiar to localized food vendors in which the employees stay inside, the customers stay outside, and hardly the twain shall meet except to hand money and orders in and out of the window.  I sighed inwardly as I closed my car door, hoping that this would be worth the wait; that Katie’s Corner wasn’t merely one of those unremarkable local haunts that somehow gains a cult following through no discernable reason other than its close proximity to the undiscriminating (I’ll just mention the phrase “Victor Lee’s” here and leave you to infer what you will.)  If this is just one more place that sells chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and Moose Tracks, I’ll be pretty disappointed, I thought to myself.

The sign on the front window read “Closing on _________”; giving the date of the next day—a precise wording which has always confused me.  In separate situations and under the pens of different authors, that phrase could indicate that the day in question is the last chance for the customer to visit, or that it will already be too late by that time.  I’m never completely sure which it means, and this combined with the fact that as I approached the store no one was ready at the window caused me to wonder if I had not arrived too late even then.  Either way, I thought I’d better make sure.

I was finally spotted lurking uneasily at the front window, and a short older woman approached it from the other side and slid it back.  “Still open?” I asked stupidly, and she answered, “Yes, but we’re only open through tomorrow, as long as supplies last,” putting my mind to ease on that question as well.  “All right.  I think I’ll have…uh…” I droned, scanning the list of ice cream flavors perfunctorily in the unlikely event that one of them would arrest my attention.  To my surprise, one did.  I blinked, impressed, at a selection reading “Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter”; a flavor I didn’t remember seeing at too many small-town ice cream joints—or, the more I thought about it, anywhere else at all.  My eyes darted to some adjoining flavors, noticing with mounting astonishment that there were several names that in all my years of ice cream exploration I had never encountered.  It appeared that in my doubts of a few minutes prior I had severely underestimated the place.

A flavor like Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter is hard for me to resist, so I requested it.  “Oh, actually, we’re all out of that one.  I’ve been letting supplies run down since we’re closing tomorrow,” the older woman answered.  I wondered if she was Katie.  I wondered if there had ever really been a Katie.  “We do have a flavor called Dark Chocolate Something-or-other” (here my memory cuts out.)  From her description, this recommended replacement included both dark chocolate and peanut butter, as well as walnuts and white chocolate chips (I think.)  I accepted the suggestion and asked for it in a sundae.  Her sheepish expression told me my request would not be honored.  “Sorry—I can’t do sundaes either.  Right now, all I can do are double cones, single cones, or quarts.”  I asked for a single cone of it.  “It’s just…we’re closing tomorrow,” she appealed as she backed away from the window and moved to assemble the compromised order.  I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected in her confession, along with the embarrassment, a hint of sadness.

As she busied herself behind the impassible window, my gaze wandered over the inside of the building and over the intricacies of the impressively long menu.  The variety therein wasn’t limited to the ice cream flavors—I saw floats there, and milkshakes, and specials, and all sorts of things I wouldn’t have the opportunity to try now.  Bizarrely, I felt a twinge of sadness for this place I had never visited before; even for this woman I had never met.  Now that I was finally standing here after all these years of idle planning, it almost made me wonder…

But here she was again, back with my ice cream.  I was pleasantly taken aback by the size of the cone, and of the density with which it had been packed—for the price of a single scoop, this was certainly more than I had been expecting.  I thanked her and turned away from the window, which slid shut decisively behind me, and faced the early evening.  I had noticed since leaving the car that the air was of a different quality than I had expected; it was surprisingly invigorating, in comparison with the misleading drabness I had seen out of my room window.  To the eye the weather was mushy and drizzly and gray, but to the skin it was crisp and frosty and silver.  In fact, it was pretty close to what I would call ideal October weather, and as this type of day has never failed to inspire me, I decided cheerfully to walk with my cone and enjoy the autumn air.

Within a few minutes, after tentatively taking a few steps along one road and then another, I realized that I didn’t really have anywhere to walk to, there being no sidewalks or paths in the immediate area.  So, doubling around the back of the store so the employees wouldn’t notice my foolishness, I wound up sitting at one of about three picnic tables that had been set up to the side of the store.  Now that I was sitting there, relaxing with my cone and its newly-discovered contents, I noticed some things about the place I had never taken the time to realize on my quick glances through car windows.  The picnic tables, for instance, lay under the shadow of some large pine trees in the yard bordering the ice cream shop, which was marked off by a white picket fence running by a few feet away.  The locale had very much of a Tom Sawyer feel about it, and I noticed that the shop lay both off of the main road and next to a small perpendicular street, making it quite literally the “corner ice cream store.”  (Which, I suppose, figured into its name.)

I shivered happily in the brisk fall outdoors, delighted with my overstuffed ice cream cone and with the fact that it was making me even colder.  And I realized right then that Steve Abel had been right all these years.  Not, of course, that I expected him to be wrong; but I guess I hadn’t known until that moment how right he was.  Sure, I had been looking forward to trying the place for three years, but I guess I had been expecting that once I finally tried it, I would nod thoughtfully and tell myself “Not bad!” and be happy that I had broadened my confectionary horizons.  But it had turned out to be much more than that.

I leaned my elbow on the wooden table and sighed.  So this is Katie’s Corner! I told myself.  I finally did it!  And on the day before it went out of business.  Incredible.  But at the back of my mind, something bothered me.  Now that I had finally driven here and was sitting at the picnic table trying a new flavor of ice cream, my happiness was overshadowed by answerless questions about why I hadn’t done this long ago.  I realized, wistfully, that this could have been something.  I could have had a lot of fun here.  This was no “Yeah, we go to the corner ice cream store because there’s nowhere else close by” kind of place.  I could have tried new things here.  I was already eating a flavor I’d never heard of before, and they didn’t even have all their supplies in.  I wondered what other new things I could have been trying all this time…and why I had never bothered to try them.

I let my gaze wander slowly over the store and its surroundings.  The white picket fence was there, and the pine trees—the only trees within view whose leaves hadn’t turned warm colors to balance the cooling air.  A few picnic tables away, a young couple had bought cones of their own and sat side by side on the tabletop facing the road—a sight which normally would have soured my mood, but which seemed oddly endearing in that welcoming, small-town, early-autumn scene.  I sighed.  Small-town.  Yes.  That was it; that was the feel of the place right there.  A perfect small-town corner ice cream store.  It was the kind of place I could have stopped at on Sunday afternoons, at those times when I had nothing in the world to do—or at least wanted to pretend like it.  I could have pulled my car into that gravel parking lot and smiled at the workers through the window.  I could have found out whether the older woman was really Katie…and if not, what her name really was.  She would have recognized me and smiled and asked, “Hello again.  What’ll it be this time?”  And I would grin and squint at the board and say, “Something I’ve never tried before.”  And then I would take my bulging cone and would sit by the fence under the pine trees, lost in thought as I reclined at the picnic table in the bright afternoon air.

That’s what I could have done all this time.  But I never did.  And now I never would.  I had always longed for a place like this; had lamented the disappearance of the small personable businesses that I had really never known.  I had wished so many times for a place to call my own, a little atmospheric spot that I would visit not only for its wares, but just for the enjoyment of being there.  I realized now that this was the place.  It had been right under my nose all these years, and I had kept brushing it off until later.  Out of a Norman Rockwell print, here was a corner store with a picket fence and a sliding window that gave out a little too much ice cream for what it charged.  Exactly what I had been looking for.  And I had never given it a chance.  Had never given it my time.  I had waited until the day before it closed, and had cheated myself out of four years of potential memories.  Like so many other important jobs and responsibilities and goals, I had put it off until the night beforehand.

But, I told myself, I still had another chance.  It was only the night beforehand, after all.  “Katie” had said that they would be open through the morrow, as long as supplies held out.  I would be driving by anyway, having already planned to visit the outlet stores the next day for the conclusion of the Brown Dress Shoes Incident (but I’m sure you already know about that.)  I could stop there again tomorrow, on closing day, and have another chance to experience the place.  Then I could tell people, “Yeah, I’ve been to Katie’s Corner twice—the last two days it was ever open, in fact!”  So it was all settled.  Perfect.  One more chance.

But I didn’t go back the next day.

At the time, I don’t think even I knew quite why.  Oh, I had a few reasons I kept repeating to myself.  After all, it had been so low on supplies the day before—who knew what the pickings would be like on closing day?  Besides, I had just had that kind of ice cream the night before; I didn’t really want it two days in a row like that.  It made sense.  No reason to force myself to go.

That’s what I told myself that day.  But the more I think back on it, the more I’m convinced that the reason I didn’t go back is because…I was afraid to go.  If my visit from the day before was the only one I ever took, it would stand in my memory as a chance occurrence; “That one time I went to Katie’s Corner”; almost a fluke of sorts.  A once-and-done deal, not worth too much speculation, because it wouldn’t happen again.  But if I went back, it would be a lot harder to think this way.  Visiting the place a second time would open it up beyond just “an occurrence.”  No one ever says the term “twice-and-done.”  Returning to the place and experiencing it again would be the beginning step toward a habit—one I knew I could never see through.  It would open up all sorts of questions: if I went there twice, why couldn’t I have gone three times?  Or five times?  Or four years’ worth of times?  Yesterday’s visit could forever be “a thing”; an event of a single day.  Today’s visit would have, perhaps nearly imperceptibly, stretched that event into a custom.  Into a relationship, almost.  A relationship that would have to end as soon as it began.  I had very deftly seen to that.

I ended up swinging by the town Dairy Queen on my way back from the outlets; a place I had been to many times before and will likely go on to visit many times again.  I got my ice cream and took it outside.  There were picnic tables at the Dairy Queen, kind of like the ones at Katie’s Corner.  But there was no picket fence here.  No pine trees to keep watch as I sat and ate.  There was no sliding window in the Dairy Queen, and I doubted I would ever know the names of the people who worked there…or care.  I sat at one of the tables with my ice cream…my ice cream and my thoughts.

Tomorrow I would be heading back to Commodore Perry to teach English.  There would be lesson plans to write, and activities to plan out, and papers to grade, and kids to connect with.  Tomorrow afternoon I would have to miss part of Touring Choir, leaving me with notes to practice and words to memorize.  I hadn’t read a book for fun in so long.  My head teemed with a million stories.  So many things…so many important things that I knew I would put off until the night before, that I wouldn’t take the time to do perfectly.  So many opportunities to better myself, to better others.  So many goals and desires and hopes and dreams that would simply never be realized.  Even if I had time to realize them all.  Even if I had all the time in the world.

                  By Aaron M. Gottier:   Keeping you posted…

                                                        one essay at a time

You know, it's funny the way that life can be relatively uneventful for a while and then suddenly become interesting all at once.  For instance, I think I fit just about every interesting summer story I had into my last post, but then a day or two afterward, my whole day was so unusual that I decided it deserved its own post by itself.  This is, as you'll soon find out, a chronicle of a less-than-ideal day in my life, stylistically modeled after a work of literature that you may recognize from elsewhere, culminating in a decidedly unpleasant surprise ending.  Honestly, if anyone finds the tone of this post to be in poor taste, I legitimately apologize.  Call it a dark period in my writing. 

By the way, this narrative takes place on the Tuesday before last--September the 5th, to be precise.  I had planned to write this a little closer to that date, but it took me longer than I expected to finish it (can you believe that?)  Oh, and except for a few minor changes to quotes and stuff (which I think you'll be able to identify,) this story is completely true.  None of the events have been fabricated at all.

Aaron Gottier and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I went to sleep late because I was up grading papers for my seventh-grade classes, and then by the time I took a shower and went to bed, I ended up lying in bed for an hour because I wasn’t tired anymore, so then I was tired when I woke up instead.  I slept later than I wanted to, and when I got out of bed this morning I didn’t have time to make a real lunch before I left for school, so all I could get together was two pieces of fruit and a granola bar, and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

When I got to school I was supposed to give the seventh-graders their papers back and tell them how they did and go over the right answers, and so I thought I’d introduce myself since I hadn’t been in front of the class before.  I told them who I was and tried to be funny and told some stories about when I worked at Dorney Park.  No one even laughed.  Then when I was going over the answers to the papers, I talked too quickly and didn’t explain things well and got nervous and the kids gave each other weird looks about me and didn’t listen.  I asked if anyone wanted to read what they wrote out loud.  No one even answered.  I think I’ll move to Australia.

After that, I remembered I was supposed to turn in a class schedule for the week way back on Friday, so now it was four days late and I’d have to hurry to get it done, just so that in a couple of days I could turn in another one all over again, about the schedule for next week.  Next week, I thought, I’m going to Australia.

There were chicken sandwiches in the school cafeteria and salads and ice cream bars and other good lunch foods.  Guess who didn’t pack a good lunch that morning?  I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I could tell because at the end of the school day I was still hungry, so I stopped by the vending machines by the front door on my way out of the building.  But all that the vending machines took was dollar bills, and all that I had was ten-dollar bills, and I thought I might have had enough spare change, but I remembered I left it all in my room.  So I went home hungry because I didn’t have exact change.  Who needs exact change?  I bet they wouldn’t make me give exact change in Australia, I said to the vending machines.  No one even answered.

I drove back to college and parked my car next to the Student Union and I was going to fill out that school schedule except that I didn’t have a pen, so I had to go look for one.  Then when I closed the car door I realized that my keys were still in the car, and the doors lock by themselves when you close them, and I usually leave the windows open except for today, and I hadn’t brought another pair of keys to school because we couldn’t find them when I was packing in the summer.  I was locked out of my car, and I still didn’t have a pen.  It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

That’s what it was, because I went into the Student Union to see if I could find anyone I knew, but no one was there, and then I checked my mail and saw something in the mailbox, but I couldn’t open it because my mail key was with my other keys in the car.  So then I went into the Hall of Arts and Letters to see Mrs. VanTil about the school schedule (and to borrow a pen,) but she wasn’t in her office and I had to wait there until she came.  When she finally got there, I borrowed a pen and tried to fill out the school schedule, and it asked for what times the class periods ran, but I forgot.  I told Mrs. VanTil that I had a paper that told me the right times, but it was in my car with my keys.  Then she told me that there were people at campus security who could open anything, so she called them to help me open my car, but she said that she might be gone before I came back, and that I should just turn the schedule in tomorrow.  She also said that she was going to visit my school on Friday to meet the teacher, and I didn’t remember that the teacher would be absent on Friday until it was too late to tell her.

I had to wait out in the parking lot for the security guard to come, and when he got there he made fun of my tie and took out some tools and also a paper for me to sign.  I looked at the paper, and it said that he wasn’t guaranteed to get me back into the car at all.  Then he took out a long metal strip and put it into the crack between the window and the outside of the car and moved it up and down.  I don’t know what he was trying to do, but I know it didn’t work, because he took out some more tools.

He had a long metal hook, and something that looked like a blood pressure pump, and something that looked like a doorstop.  He pushed the door open a little with the door stop and slid the pump into the crack, and then he pumped it up to open the door a little wider.  Then he put the long hook through the crack and tried to reach the lock in the inside, but he couldn’t because there was a big handle in the way on the inside of the door.  He told me that we had a real mess on our hands.  Then he reached the lever that unlocks all the doors at once, but it didn’t work right, and I told him he should try the other lever that just unlocks that door.  He said, Are you telling me that your locks don’t work right?  I said, They can be a little sticky.  He tried again for a while, and then he got annoyed and called me Brother and told me he was getting ticked.  He said, I can kick the window in if you want.  I told him that was okay with me, and then he said, No, I can’t—you still have to drive the car.  I thought, Not if I fly to Australia.

Finally, he told me to try it instead, and he went to the other side of the car and looked in the window while I used the long hook, and he gave me directions until I found the lock.  It had taken about a half hour to unlock the door.  I told him I was sorry for the trouble, but he said, Hey, that’s our job, Brother; just call us again next time it happens.  I wasn’t planning on a next time, and I wasn’t expecting to see him again any time soon.

I found the paper I had been looking for, and I wrote the right times down on my schedule, but Mrs. VanTil was gone by then, so after all that, I had to wait to give it to her until tomorrow anyway.  I knew it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I knew it because after I drove back to the apartment, I thought I finally had a chance to relax for a few hours until Touring Choir started, and I was going to write some lesson plans that I needed to write.  So I was there for a little while, and I was just sitting around in my underwear, and I was just about to start writing the lesson plans, when the fire alarm went off all over the apartments.  We all had to go outside and wait for it to be turned off, but I was still in my underwear, so I got some shorts and some shower shoes and went out and stood on the sidewalk wearing only an undershirt, shorts, and shower shoes.  Some people told me they liked my outfit.  I thought, I’ll bet everyone wears this in Australia.

We waited out there until the alarm went off, and then we heard it was safe, and everyone started to go inside.  So my suitemate and I went back into our apartment, and it was a good thing that I had taken my key out with me.  We were back in there for a little bit, when my suitemate told me to look out the window, and we saw a bunch of people still waiting out on the sidewalk.  Some of our friends down there saw us at the window and pointed at us, and then some of the R.A.’s saw us inside, and they sent someone in to clear the hall of people, so we had to go back outside again.  They told us they hadn’t gotten clearance yet to let people back inside, but we wondered why everyone had gone in just before.  My suitemate asked if I had brought my key with me again, but I said no, so he got his instead.

So we had to wait out there for even longer, and when they finally let us back in for real, they made us all meet down in the basement for a talk.  Some guys had set off the alarm when they were trying to cook, so they wanted to remind us all to be careful.  I walked into the basement and stood near the door, but my suitemate walked in farther and sat down.  Then when someone came to talk to us, it turned out to be the same security guard from that afternoon.  When he saw me he said, Hey, Brother.  I think he might have been having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, too.

After he was done talking to us, we were allowed back upstairs to our rooms, but since my suitemate and I weren’t next to each other in the basement, we got separated on our way up the stairs, and when I got to our room door he wasn’t there.  I couldn’t get back into the room because I hadn’t brought my key with me this time, so I had to go back down to the basement again to find him, and we’re on the third floor.  I saw the security guard in the basement again, and he went into the elevator to go upstairs, and then when I walked back up to the ground floor, he came out of the elevator and saw me again.  He told me, I think I just saw your twin down there.  For a minute I thought he was talking about my suitemate, so I said, Oh good—until I realized that he wouldn’t even know who my suitemate was.  If really I had a twin, I thought, he’d be in Australia by now.

When I finally got back into the apartment, there wasn’t even an hour left before Touring Choir practice, so I didn’t get to work on my lesson plans, and I didn’t get to take a shower, either.  There was undercooked chicken for dinner, and I hate undercooked chicken.  It was undercooked because I took it out of the freezer because I thought it would be easy to make, and I put it in the oven for as long as I could afford to, which was about fifteen minutes, and then I remembered that I think it’s supposed to be in there for half an hour.  It’s supposed to have melted cheese inside it, but it hadn’t melted yet when I had to take it out, so the cheese was cold and rubbery inside, but I had to eat it that way because Touring Choir was starting soon, and I knew it had been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

That’s for sure, because when I finished eating and got to the car and drove to the music building, I was a little bit late for choir practice anyway, and I had to walk into the first rehearsal of the year while they were praying, and I got a dirty look from Dr. Browne.  It was an extra-long rehearsal that night, so when I got back to the apartment, I was too tired to do any work at all, so I just took a shower and went to bed.  It was a terrible, horrible ending to a no good, very bad day.

When I went to bed, I couldn’t fall asleep again until late, just like last night.  So I just thought about how I still hadn’t written my lesson plans, or turned my schedule in, or got to choir practice on time, or gone to bed early, or done anything I’d wanted to do.  I just wanted to start over again tomorrow and forget everything that had happened today.  It had been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, all right.  But I guess some days are just like that…

…even in Australia.

                  By Aaron M. Gottier:   Cheering people up…

                                                        one essay at a time

Well, we've come to the beginning of yet another school year, which means that we've passed by another summer again.  That's pretty hard to believe, but what's even harder to believe is that I haven't put anything on here since my vacation in the middle of July.  As the summer went on after that, interesting things did continue to happen to me (of course,) but I was kind of stuck as far as how to write about them.  See, it's been my policy not to use this site as a simple journaling site like most people do, but I had an awful lot of personal anecdotes and experiences to write about.  In the past, I had been including these things at the beginning of my posts, before I got into the main attraction, but I was quickly racking up far too many anecdotes and far too few essays.  Since I really lost interest in my Pirates of the Caribbean review and didn't really have any other ideas for posts, I wasn't sure how to communicate all these interesting summer stories to everyone--not without violating my own rule and doing a general journaling post.

But then, wouldn't you know it, while I was surfing the Internet for current world news, I just happened to stumble across several news articles that said the exact same things that I had been planning to say!  I guess I'm a lot more popular than even I thought, because I found quite a few articles that were already written about all those experiences I had wanted to write about.  So, not wanting to let this amazing coincidence go to waste, I quickly assembled these different articles of interest and have posted them here for your reading pleasure.  This pretty much kills two birds with one stone--you guys get to read all about the second half of my summer, and I don't have to break my rule and write a journaling post, since these are all professionally-published news articles!  Really, I had nothing to do with these at all!

This Summer in World News

News articles of practically universal interest, assembled from reputable sources all over the globe.  The ultimate in investigative reporting; you can’t get this sort of quality from some guy making stuff up at a computer in his basement.  Really, you can’t.

Vacationing Youth Recuperates from Freak Accident

A young vacationer to the Ocean City, New Jersey area is continuing to recover well, experts say, after having been struck in the forehead last week by a wind-blown umbrella.  The young man made his second trip to a local emergency center on Monday, the week after the incident occurred, to bid farewell to the stitches that had accompanied him for most of his vacation.  The same day of the week that saw the stitches sewn into his head (Monday) was the day, a week later, that those same stitches were pulled out.  The patient, an Emmaus, Pennsylvania resident named Aaron Gottier, commented on the apparent irony.  “[It]’s really something,” he said.

The vacationing man was rounding his family’s large beach umbrella late in the afternoon when the umbrella was suddenly uprooted from the sand by the seaside breeze and blown into his left temple.  “It all happened so fast,” Gottier recalled.  “I didn’t think it was a big deal until [people] were telling me I needed stitches.”  Eyewitnesses reported that his body blocked the umbrella from tumbling further toward a nearby family with a young child, with some claiming his interference as nothing short of heroic.  One man described seeing the metal pole of the umbrella “crumple up like a straw” as it collided with Gottier’s cranium, before omitting an audible shriek and subsequently bursting into flames.  The umbrella itself could not be recovered for examination, and a local expert on umbrellas refused to comment.

Gottier was admitted into a walk-in emergency center later that afternoon and given three stitches to the head, and he returned to the same center to have the stitches removed this past Monday.  “It was strange,” he commented on the return trip, “[the doctors] didn’t have to give me a shot this time.  I mean, last time they numbed the area first, but this time I didn’t have any painkillers at all.  It wasn’t bad, though… The worst thing about the trip was the magazines in the waiting room, really—all they had was celebrity gossip magazines.”  The same duo who had inserted Gottier’s stitches the previous week, an undergraduate medical assistant and a senior doctor, were there again to take them out.  The doctor claimed that he would leave the operation entirely in the hands of the assistant, but according to Gottier, he continued to hover over her and tell her what to do throughout the procedure anyway.

The stitches were removed without complications, and Gottier was surprised over the speed and ease of the procedure.  “I could feel the first one being taken out, but the other two were so quick, I was surprised when it was over.  I didn’t think they had started on the second one yet!”  Even the first stitch, Gottier says, was not entirely painful; it merely felt like something was being pulled out from underneath his skin.  The supervising doctor confirmed that the procedure was a standard one and was completed as expected.

Gottier returned to his family’s rental house and spent the rest of his vacation without further injury.  He did express regret, though, that the remaining scar is so well-hidden that he can no longer feel it without the stitches to guide him.  “Now I don’t even know how to show people where it is,” he complained.

Gottier returned home after his second week of vacation and everything seemed to return to normal, though some residents of Ocean City were heard to complain that the town seemed a lot less awesome all of a sudden.  Gottier could not be reached for comment, as he was busy testing to see how tough he was by nailing his lips to a tree.

Disaster Narrowly Avoided in Local Home

For Emmaus resident Aaron Gottier, it began as a summer afternoon like any other.  The rest of his family had left the house to drive his sister to another one of her never-ending social engagements, leaving him alone and in charge of the house and its property—including the surrounding lawn.  His father had asked him to cut the grass while they were out, and Gottier was looking forward to finishing the task in the early afternoon and having the rest of the day to himself.  That’s when things got out of control.

Gottier first knew something was wrong when the riding mower began to sputter and lurch forward as it drove.  He looked down at the gas gauge to find that it was hovering around “empty.”  Since he still had a large portion of the yard to finish, he decided to drive the machine back around to the garage to refuel it.  He parked the tractor at the top of the driveway and reached for the small plastic container of gasoline that was kept inside the family’s garage.  That’s when his second clue came that something was wrong.  The container was empty.

“I thought it was pretty weird,” Gottier recollected.  “I mean, [my father] had told me to finish the lawn and then left…I guess I thought he would have made sure I’d be able to do it first.”  It would indeed seem that Gottier was not the only one aware of the lack of fuel.  “When I thought about it some more, I remembered my dad had told me that the mower might run out of gas before I was done.  I thought, ‘He must have made sure that there was enough gas somewhere so I could refill it, right?’ ”

Then he remembered something—a second container of gasoline that he had sometimes seen his father fall back on when the first one ran dry.  “It was bigger than the other one, and he kept it farther back [in the garage],” Gottier said of this second can.  “I think it was the one he used to actually take out and fill up, and then he’d fill the smaller one from it.”  Whatever the case, Gottier was sure that this container presented a second resource of fuel—or he was until that day, at least.

Gottier picked up the larger container, which was fortunately far from empty.  “I checked just to make sure…It said ‘gasoline’ right there on the side, so I thought, ‘Well, what could go wrong?’ ”  Gottier brought the container to the empty lawn mower and tipped it toward the fuel cap.  The container had a small spout where the gas was poured out, and Gottier inserted this into the opening on the mower so that he couldn’t see the fuel he was dispensing.  After several seconds, he decided to look into the fuel tank to see how much he had filled it.  As he lifted the spout of the container and some last drops ran out, he got his third clue that something was wrong.

“The stuff I was pouring looked a lot different than I expected,” Gottier admitted.  “For one thing, it was a lot thicker than gasoline usually is.  For another thing, it was dark black.”  Gottier hesitated, unsure of what he had seen.  In order to be certain, he stepped away from the mower and poured a little of the container’s contents onto the driveway.  Sure enough, it was thick and black.  “It slowly dawned on me what had happened,” he said.  “I thought to myself, ‘Oh my g-sh, I think I just poured oil into the gas tank.’ ”

Deciding that his father had found a new use for the container without telling him, Gottier put it back into the garage.  “I was just glad I only poured a little bit in before checking on the gas tank.”  Reasoning that there was little good he could do by running the mower as it was, and still without a source of gasoline, Gottier decided to bypass finishing the lawn and opted instead to head inside and watch TV.  “I mean, it did say ‘gasoline’ on the side,” Gottier stressed.

After his family returned home and his father heard the news, he immediately went outside to see what could be salvaged of the lawn mower.  Gottier asked him how much oil it looked like he had put in.  “Enough,” his father answered.  “Now I have to see whether I can just empty the gas tank or whether the mower is ruined.”

Gottier made himself scarce around the house as his father took the lawnmower apart for the better part of an hour, finally succeeding in removing the fuel tank and emptying it onto the driveway.  Gottier was relieved to hear that the mower, once reassembled, was none the worse for wear, and would be up and running as soon as it was provided with some actual gasoline.  Gottier’s father purchased some at a nearby gas station and then took it upon himself to finish mowing the lawn.  “I offered to finish the job, but he said he preferred to use the lawnmower for the rest of the day.  I’m not really sure why,” Gottier mused.

Young Shopper Tempted by More than Cheesecake at Pennsylvania Mall

Located near Philadelphia, the King of Prussia Mall is the largest shopping mall on the East Coast, and the second-largest in the entire United States.  Boasting two separate buildings and a multitude of different stores and restaurants, the mall is a shopper’s paradise, serving as a tourist attraction as well as a successful business center.  Some recent complaints from customers, however, have hinted that there may be more to this mall than first meets the eye.

Some recent visitors to the shopping mall were the Gottier family, who made a Friday evening trip there from their home in Emmaus, over an hour away.  Following a recommendation to visit a restaurant inside the mall called The Cheesecake Factory, the shoppers were planning to look at the various stores before they left the mall, and they split up to survey the building after they left the restaurant.  For oldest child Aaron, it was a shopping trip he would never forget.

“It was getting close to when we had agreed to leave,” Aaron recalled, “and I was kind of wandering around upstairs in the mall.  Suddenly, this girl who was standing several feet in front of me stepped toward me and asked a question.  She sounded foreign; it was kind of hard to understand her, and I wasn’t sure at first that she was talking to me.  But then she repeated, ‘Can I ask you a question?’ and no one else was around.”

Gottier somewhat hesitantly moved toward the girl, and almost immediately wondered if it had been a bad idea.  “She held her hands out toward mine like she was expecting something, and when I came closer to her, she took both of my hands in hers.”  With Gottier’s hands clasped in hers, the girl proceeded to ask him her question.  Smiling disarmingly, she asked Gottier, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“It took me completely off guard,” Gottier said.  “I didn’t know what to do.  She might as well have asked me, ‘Do you know how easy it would be to kill you?’  I was so scared.”  Gottier squeaked out a reply in the negative, and the inquisitive ingénue asked him how old he was, manifesting surprise at his answer and claiming that he was older than she was.  She began to talk to him, slowly leading him by the hand—both of which were still firmly grasped in hers—over to a small stand in the mall.  “At that point, I knew for sure that she was a worker there.  I mean, I had suspected it before and everything.  I was kind of relieved to know for sure, actually,” he said.

The forward female remarked that she liked the feel of Gottier’s hands, but that they were still rougher than they needed to be (which, Gottier was pretty certain, was actually not true.)  Running her fingers along his hands, and then his arms, she proceeded to tell him that she had the answer to this newly-discovered problem with his hands.  “She reached for this bottle of skin care stuff; I knew that that’s where she was going even before she showed me the bottle, but all the same, it wasn’t as easy to get out of it as you’d think.  She had her little routine down pat; there was no yes-or-no question or sales pitch that I could use as an excuse to refuse her offer and bolt.  It was a very natural-seeming conversation that just ‘happened’ to flow gradually into a discussion of this cosmetic stuff.  There was no quick way to say ‘I’m not interested’ and still be polite—I was afraid of being rude.”

The decisive damsel then proceeded to pour the product into Gottier’s hands as she extolled its virtues.  “Even the lotion, or whatever it was, was weird.  The whole thing was weird.  The stuff felt really grainy and sandy, like half-crystallized honey.  She told me to work it between my hands, but it wasn’t the easiest stuff in the world to use.  It didn’t make suds or evaporate into my skin like normal stuff.  It just smeared everywhere, kind of like…well, half-crystallized honey.  Then I realized that she really had me.  Even if I didn’t care about being polite anymore, I had this stuff all over my hands.  If I wanted her to wash it off, I was going to have to stay put.”

As she gave Gottier her little spiel, the vigorous little vixen kept punctuating it with some very unique and unusual little touches.  “It was no ordinary sales pitch.  She kept describing in very personal terms how I was supposed to use the stuff in the shower and what it would do—not only to my skin, but apparently to my love life as well.  She made more than one reference to the way I was supposed to shake my…um, rear end.  She was also really hard to understand, which made the whole conversation even more surreal, and I don’t usually have a problem with accents.  She wasn’t big on personal space, either—as she talked, she kept stroking my arms, and at one point, my face.  A couple of times she told me, ‘Ah, you’re so cute.’  It wasn’t exactly a comfortable conversation.”

As the forceful little filly at last rinsed the sandy mess off of Gottier’s hands, he began looking for a good time to make his exit.  “I really wanted to leave, especially since we were planning to drive back home soon.  At one point I felt my cell phone ringing in my pocket, and I really wanted to show it as evidence that I had to leave.  She just wouldn’t stop talking.  I guess I was being too courteous.”

Gottier’s deliverance finally came, unexpectedly, through a chance meeting with some familiar faces.  “She had just gotten to the part about what a year’s supply would cost, and how much my mother would love it as a present, and all that.  When I told her that I wasn’t really planning to take any home, she didn’t look very happy.  I wasn’t sure what she was going to say next, but fortunately, my parents happened to walk by and see me there.  I shot them some helpless glances, hoping they would ‘force’ me to come with them.  Then I got an idea from this one trick I used to get away from an annoying girl once in high school.  ‘Gee, guys, do we have to leave now?’ I asked them loudly, and they agreed that it was indeed time to go.  I figured that the girl could see what a hurry I was in and how there was just nothing I could do about it, so I finally left and hid behind my parents.”

Gottier’s encounter, fortunately, ended happily for him, but not everyone may be so fortunate.  “What really scares me is to think that she’s still out there somewhere,” Gottier admitted.  “Still waiting around on the second floor of the mall for people to come by, so she can ask if they have girlfriends.”  Visitors to the King of Prussia Mall are advised to watch out for a young dark-skinned female with a foreign accent, who stands at about 5’4” tall.

 Excitement, Nervousness for First-Time Students Traveling to College

As another summer draws to a close in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, many familiar sites and faces are disappearing with it.  Not only are the residents bidding a fond farewell to long days and warm weather, but many are also waving goodbye to friends and family members as a new batch of aspiring young freshman head off to seek new experiences at college.  Sales counters, swimming pools, and bedrooms alike are being vacated as many of the area youth set out for their first year of higher education, bringing mixed feelings of excitement and apprehensiveness as they embark on this new social and educational journey.

Both sentiments ran high for local student Nicole Gottier and her family as she left in mid-August for Indiana’s Taylor University, a private Christian college where she was accepted as a student in the spring and hopes to be accepted as a member of the soccer team as well at the end of the month.  The young athletes who wished to try for a spot on the school’s sports teams reported to the campus two weeks before the rest of the students did, using the time to run drills and practices, meet other athletes, and await the results of the teams’ decisions.  For Gottier, who wished to test her skill on the soccer field, this meant an early trip to college—and a condensed amount of time for the usual pre-college preparation chaos.

For Gottier, traveling to the Indiana campus figured to about a ten-hour drive in each direction, and for this reason, she planned to come home by airplane during school vacations.  In order to see her off, though, and to get a look at the campus where she would (ideally) be spending her next four years, Gottier’s family decided to not only accompany her on the initial trip out, but to do it by car.  Leaving their Emmaus home in their tightly-packed minivan early on a Saturday afternoon, the family drove for most of the day, stopped at a hotel for the evening, and reached Taylor University mid-morning on Sunday.

For older brother Aaron, the campus was a familiar site, though the rest of the family was seeing it for the first time.  “I was there once before in tenth grade as part of a college tour,” the 21-year-old recalled.  “Don’t really remember much about it…they had these two brick towers in the middle of the campus that symbolized something; I can’t really remember.  The guy who gave us a tour last time I was there reminded me of my uncle Brian—but I guess he wouldn’t be there anymore, would he?  It was a while ago now…I didn’t really get to see much of the campus this time, either.  In kind of a hurry to get back, you know.  But I’m sure it must be really nice.”

Gottier’s family spent most of the afternoon helping to get her settled into her “temporary” dorm room—which, thankfully, was also her permanent dorm room.  Most of the athletes had only temporary lodging for the two weeks of sports tryouts and would have to move to another room all over again once school started.  Gottier was fortunate enough to be housed in the same building where her freshman room was, so she was able to move into the same room and didn’t have to switch.

With the goodwill of a first-year-student’s family, Gottier’s family got her comfortably moved in and settled before turning around and heading for home again.  Younger sister Caitlin helped decorate the wall with pictures and magazine cutouts, and Aaron made a valiant struggle to assemble some obstinate stacking crates.  After buying a few last-minute items from a nearby Wal-Mart, the family came to the time for good-byes at last.

After a tearful farewell, especially among the three females in the family, Gottier’s family returned to the parking lot, and she walked in the other direction to the physical education center for her first meeting at Taylor University.  Her older brother remembered the feeling of the first day at college, and he found the sight particularly poignant.  “I remember what it’s like, walking away from your family for the first time.  I mean, I knew she’d be all right; it’s exciting, in a way.  But when I saw her walking away, alone, toward a whole new group of people, and the rest of her family getting into the car to drive back home, I was wondering what she must have felt and thought.  I know how lonely that can feel the first few days.”

For Aaron himself, now a college senior, the campus experience seems old hat in some ways, yet this year in particular will seem strikingly new.  “I’m going back to live on campus at Grove City College, but it’ll be really different this time from past years,” he said.  “For one thing, my living arrangements this year are completely new—not just to me, but to everybody.”  From the spring into the summer of this year, Grove City constructed a new apartment complex for returning seniors and juniors, made up of different sizes of suites—from two-man suites to four-man ones.  “It’ll be a lot different from the regular dorms.  I mean, it’s on school property, but it’s right at the end of lower campus, the opposite side from all the other dorms and the educational buildings—pretty much everything.”

The apartments represent a transition for the upperclassmen into the next stage of their lives; a sort of in-between phase before they strike out on their own.  “There’s no meal plan in the cafeterias; not unless you arrange for one,” Gottier explained.  “Most of the residents will be buying and cooking their own food.  The apartments have a kitchen with the basic appliances—along with a common living room, and two bathrooms per apartment.  Except the two-man suites; they only have one.  And the services provided by the college are reduced, too; there’s no cleaning staff that comes into the suites, or even the bathrooms.  We all have to learn how to cook, clean, and take care of ourselves pretty quickly!”

In addition to a new type of living arrangement, Gottier will also be experiencing a new type of school curriculum this semester as he sets out on his student teaching assignment.  No longer required to report to daily classes at the college, Gottier will instead be driving to a nearby (sort of) high school each day to observe, assist, and eventually relieve an English teacher of his classes for the first half of the school year.  “It’s a small rural school called Commodore Perry, about 35 minutes from Grove City.  I’ll be laying down quite a bundle for gas this semester; that’s for sure.  There were originally going to be two other students going to the school along with me, so I thought that would help with expenses, but they both fell through, so now it’s all up to me.”  Gottier did not mention planning any strategies to ensure that he did not fill his gas tank with oil.

“I was kind of nervous for a while there, because I was supposed to meet with the teacher at the end of last semester, but I couldn’t get in touch with him.  I didn’t even talk to him until the end of the summer, but then he finally e-mailed me, so I guess I’m all set.  So, I’m off to my fourth year at Grove City—but now it’ll be up to me to take care of myself in the dorm, and of an English class at school!”  It would seem, then, that Nicole is not the only Gottier who will be setting out on new experiences this school year.

The rest of the Gottier family left Taylor University on the evening of that Sunday, and after stopping again for the night, made it back to Emmaus the next day.

Editor’s note: Later reports proved that young Gottier was indeed successful in making the Taylor University soccer team.

Concerned News Reader Submits Complaint about Lack of Variety in Articles

“I mean, it seems like it’s about the same guy all the time,” the protestor claimed.  “How can they always interview the same guy for every article?  Isn’t there anything else they can cover?”

Upcoming World News

Local reporter Aaron Gottier plans to release written accounts of his summer job and of the beginning of his school year.  Updates to come, as soon as he darn well feels like it.

Well, boys and girls, this is certainly a first.  In an unprecedented move, I am actually making this xanga post while on vacation.  Yes, so devoted am I to my small handful of Internet readers that I have actually torn myself away from my vacation-time activities in order to keep you up to date on my adventures.

Though why I'm doing it is beyond me; it's not as though any of you will appreciate it.  I'm not even sure whether anyone's reading the stuff I put out there, since there were NO responses to my last masterpiece for something like three weeks (thank you, Carissa, for breaking the electronic silence.)  Come on, people; surely you can think of something to say.  Did you like my last article?  Hate it?  (READ it?)  Let me know, either way!  If I don't get any feedback, I won't know what you guys want to see more of.  (This is assuming that anyone cares at all.)

But even though you guys don't deserve it, I'm giving you yet another work of art to read.  I've made a habit of chronicling certain kinds of events in my life, and the nature of today's subject made it a prime choice for an article.  You may recognize this post as another entry in a series of similarly-themed essays; the things these essays talk about seem to happen to me more as time goes on.  I trust that this will be another helpful report about the state of my well-being.

Some of you may be wondering why this isn't a review for Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one,) since I've been saying for several months that I was preparing one.  The truth is, I've been writing the review off and on, but after the lack of response that my last article got, I'm wondering if enough people will even read something like a movie review for it to be worth my while.  If you really want me to post the movie review, leave me a comment telling me so.  I'll only bother if enough people are interested.  And if not, no big deal.  I'll just keep working on those bigger projects of mine.

One last note: I was originally intending to post this article on Monday.  It's hard to find an Internet connection here.  (I'm in an Internet cafe right now.)

All Other Ground is Sinking Sand

Well, I’ve had an interesting day.

It wasn’t supposed to be that interesting…although it wasn’t really supposed to be boring, either.  Relaxing, I suppose.  Fun, ideally.  But not exactly interesting.  See, today was one of several that my family is spending on vacation, and like the days surrounding it, it was infused with all sorts of plans for vacation-type activities; none of which, theoretically, involved any trips to the hospital.  We are currently in Ocean City, New Jersey; which, if you’ll remember from my article about feeling old, is our getaway of choice.  In fact, we try to make it here at least once a summer; but even after all these years, this particular vacation is out of the ordinary, because we’re here for two full weeks instead of our normal one week.  Though that wasn’t the only reason it turned out to be interesting…

So anyway, I spent most of last week packing for the trip to the shore (by which I mean I did it in a couple of hours the night beforehand,) and by the next morning, I was all ready to go except for one small factor: I couldn’t tell time.  See, sometime last semester, my watch battery died, and I had to go bare-wristed until the summer when my mother purchased a new one.  At least, that’s what I thought would happen.  It turns out that my watch is still dead even now, because I can’t figure out how to get the battery in it.  I think I’m supposed to remove the back of the watch so I can reach the inside, but the watch is water-proof, which means it’s pretty much everything-else-proof, too.  I’ve spent many an evening in front of the television trying for two hours at a time to pry the back of my watch off with a pocketknife, and winding up with no visible results except some chinks on the knife blade.  I suppose I could use my cell phone as a makeshift watch, except that I haven’t seen it since about May.  As soon as I came home for the summer, it became clear to me that my youngest sister Caitlin still desperately wanted her own cell phone, and since I don’t like mine, I was only too willing to give her my phone in return for the privilege of not knowing where it is.  She’s clung to it like the One Ring ever since.  (This will all be significant later, I promise.)

After a having spent a couple of enjoyable but unremarkable days at the beach (which I’ll skip over in the interest of brevity,) we come to today—this morning, to be precise.  We woke up at our various times, and I reluctantly headed into the kitchen to risk epidermal asphyxiation via the application of sunscreen.  Let me clarify that I really hate sunscreen, and I made a ruse for my parents’ benefit of confusing the sunscreen with an open jar of mayonnaise on the table (the deeper meaning, of course, being that I perceived little difference between the two.)  My sister Nicole dutifully—and obnoxiously—reminded me of the importance of this little safety measure, claiming that if I sustained any sunburn that day through my inadequate preparation, she would while away the nighttime hours crying with the knowledge that I was in pain.  I conceded that I should indeed probably submit to the slimy protection of the No-Ad bottle, agreeing that I wanted to avoid getting myself hurt.  Ah, if only damage from the sun were really the worst injury I had to worry about…

My father didn’t join us on the beach right away this morning, finding it necessary instead to stop off at Internet café first in order to take care of some business-related e-mail.  This left it to my mother and me to stake out a spot on the sand and set everything up for the day’s shorefront activities.  Perhaps, if my father had been there to oversee the setup, it would never have happened.

I was immediately struck by how windy it was on the beach.  We’ve had quite a string of breezy beach days so far, but they certainly culminated with today’s forceful gustiness, and it only got windier as the day went on.  Wind on the beach is particularly unpleasant, as I’m sure you’re aware if you’ve ever experienced it, because the wind tends to carry most of the beach right along with it, depositing it in convenient places like your eyes.  Yes, sand has a tendency to blow away during strong winds, and, as I came to find out, so do some things that are far, far heavier than sand.

We found an open spot of the beach, realized that it was a little too far from the water, and relocated to a different one.  My mother was wheeling most of our beach supplies along in our trusty Wonder Wheeler, an unfortunately-named device that functions basically as a shopping cart for large personal belongings.  One of the first things that she unpacked in order to stake our temporary claim on the sand was the anchor for our beach umbrella.  This is a metallic gizmo about a foot and a half in length that is basically a giant corkscrew, with a hole in the top for the umbrella and handles on either side.  The idea is that you’re supposed to screw the bottom deeply into the sand by turning it with the handles, then jam the umbrella into the top, providing a secure anchor for the umbrella and a secure source of shade for us.  My mother twisted the thing into the ground, and then she summoned me to turn the handles a few more times, just to make sure that it wasn’t going anywhere.  I turned it as many times as it was easy for me to turn, and then I left it alone, wondering how deeply my father usually screwed it into the ground.  Perhaps I should have asked him.

My mother next removed the umbrella itself—a new one this year, which was larger and supposedly sturdier than our previous one.  It was certainly heavier.  It had all these little flaps along the bottom which were apparently there for the sake of wind resistance.  My mother attempted to force the bottom of the umbrella into the screwed-in anchor, having a little bit of trouble making it fit.  My parents had run into this same problem the previous day; apparently the umbrella pole itself is larger this time around, making it rather a tight fit inside the anchor.  “Do you think this is okay?” she asked me, pushing the umbrella in as far as she could make it go.  “I don’t know,” I said.

Thus commenced a day of lying around in the shade of the large, well-anchored beach umbrella, trying to avoid the wind that blew across the sands.  My father didn’t join us until a considerable time after we were already on the beach; until then, he and my mother called back and forth to each other’s cell phones a few times.  She had brought her cell phone to the beach, but in an effort to shield it from the sand that was being kicked up by the breeze, she kept it sealed inside a Ziploc bag, which she buried in our large cloth beach bag.  However, after my father called a few times, I moved the phone and its plastic bag to the blanket next to me so I could avoid having to root through the towels and stuff to find it every time it started ringing.

Eventually my father showed up and took his place beneath the shade of the umbrella, remarking on how he liked its little flaps and the wind resistance they supposedly supplied.  Later in the afternoon my sisters went walking along the beach while I stayed behind and tried to read my book, but the distraction from the migrating sand afforded me little progress.  I decided that perhaps my sisters had had the right idea, and I abandoned our base camp, with its umbrella, anchor, beach bag, and cell phones, to set out on a constitutional of my own.  It was quite enjoyable; I met my sisters on their way back, and I saw several interesting sights, including a large crowd of people by the water’s edge who supposedly apprehended a crab.  I was walking for quite a long while before I turned around, and the return trip was likewise quite long.  I began to wonder just how long my little stroll had taken me, but since you’ll remember that I was without watch or cellular phone, I was obliged to wait until I reached my destination so that I could find the means to discern the time.

I finally happened back upon our little camp and found the rest of my family lounging about in our beach chairs.  “Where did you go?” my father inquired, and I answered him, “Oh, around.”  I asked after the time, and my mother advised that I check her cell phone in its plastic bag.  Noticing that it was not on the blanket where I had left it, I surmised that someone must have moved the phone back into the beach bag, which was on the other side of the umbrella.  I walked around the umbrella, which was leaning in the direction of the wind, until I reached the vicinity of the beach bag.  It occurred to me that the umbrella seemed to be listing quite drastically to the side, and I intended to make mention of this.  I never got the chance.

To my surprise, as I reached the beach bag, the force of the wind finally overpowered the umbrella.  As I watched, the anchor suddenly uprooted itself from its earthen resting place, and the umbrella fell forward so that the edge came to rest on the sand.  This pulled the pole and the anchor upward so that they hovered in a horizontal position in the air, the umbrella having essentially rotated ninety degrees.  In response to the wind, which continued to push at it, the umbrella pivoted around the edge that was sticking into the ground, turning the pole around like a huge horizontal wheel and swinging the anchor in a wide sideways arc—directly toward my head.

Thud.

The heavy metal of the umbrella anchor dashed against my left temple, and the umbrella continued to tumble away toward an adjacent camp of innocent bystanders.

Wind resistance indeed.

Shocked, I brought my hand to the place of impact, feeling numb from the blow.  “Are you all right?” my parents asked.  “Yeah, I—I’m fine,” I said, though I was still expecting the pain to kick in.  At the time, I was surprised at how little it hurt, considering that a huge metallic screw had just rebounded off my forehead.  It felt like I had been struck by something, but it was no more intense than, say, if someone had hit me hard with the heel of his palm.  I was ready to shake it off as no more than an “Ow; I hit my head” type of incident; in fact, I was more concerned about the other people who were now in the way of the umbrella than anything, since I knew they had a small baby with them.  “Oh—he’s bleeding!” someone called out.  “I am?” I asked, surprised.  Just then I saw a red drop run off the end of my nose and into the sand.

To hear my family describe it, I covered the area of impact with my hand, and then a veritable river of surprisingly dark red blood ran out from behind my hand and down the middle of my face.  I kind of wish I could have seen it.  By then someone had secured the umbrella and quelled its little uprising, preventing any further casualties.  My father was thus able to turn his full attention to me and my loss of bodily fluid.  “We need to get him to the hospital,” he said.  “He needs stitches.”

“What?  No I don’t!” I insisted.  The blow was still not causing me any notable pain, and enough time had now passed for it to kick in, if it were going to.  I continued to insist that I was fine, but my assurances failed to stop an impressively large crowd of people from gathering around me, including my parents and several onlookers.  “Try to stop the bleeding,” someone advised; and to this end, my mother ran forward with one of our beach towels and, despite my objections, shoved it into my face.  I’m sure she was trying to target the specific area where I had been injured, but the size and nature of the towel caused it to overtake my entire face, blocking my vision.  “Are you sure you want to waste a towel on this?” I asked through my cloth mask, but my mother assured me that the one in questions was old and unimportant.

After hearing several floating voices asking after my condition (along with one assuring that the nearby family with the baby had not been harmed,) I was led to one of our beach chairs, the towel continuing to obscure my sight.  When I finally removed it, I was surprised anew at how many people had gathered out of concern.  A lifeguard was already there to see if I needed a medic (while I assured him that I didn’t,) a woman who happened to have a bag of ice sacrificed it to my cause, and all manner of complete strangers asked after my condition with worried looks.  I was asked several times if I felt dizzy or nauseous or had blacked out, to which the answer was no, and people continually speculated on whether I needed stitches.  I couldn’t believe all the fuss they were making; I had, I maintained, merely been struck upon the head.  "Can somebody PLEASE tell me what time it is?" I asked.

At some point in there, some guy dropped in and announced that he was a physician, asking to take a look at the injury.  I removed the towel for him, and he remarked that it was hard to see the extent of the damage, since the cut was right at the edge of my hair and was mostly obscured by blood-matted follicles.  After asking again whether I had experienced any loss of vision, balance, or consciousness, he came to the conclusion that I did not, in fact, need stitches, but that I should be sure to clean the area and should take steps to close the skin together.  He actually recommended twisting the surrounding hairs together into a knot to accomplish this, if you can believe that.  Regardless of its outlandishness, I liked his advice, since he seemed to be the only person who agreed that I did not need stitches.

This was proven anew after he left and the beach medic arrived, who clarified that I should get stitches, and he gave my mother the names of two nearby walk-in emergency centers that, in his words, “take care of stuff like this all the time.”  My mother agreed with him and listened to his directions about how to reach these places.  He gave me some medical gauze to take the place of the steadily reddening beach towel, and with that, after making sure that I could walk on my own, my mother led me off of the beach and into the car—after first stopping by the house so she could put the beach towel in the wash.  First things first, you know.

As we rode to the emergency center, I still thought that it was all a big fuss over nothing, but I was beginning to agree that I should see a medical professional, if only to ensure that the cut was cleaned properly.  The same wind that had blown the umbrella into my head had almost certainly blown sand particles into the same place, and the towel that my mother had pressed against the wound was not exactly sterilized.  Though I didn’t know much about the medical practice, I knew that sand in an open wound is not particularly ideal, and considering how much of my hair was matted right around the cut, I found myself hoping that nothing foreign had settled itself in my head.

We walked into the emergency center, which seemed to be staffed chiefly by undergraduate female workers (I would have called them “attractive,” if I paid any attention to that sort of thing.)  “What did you do?” one of them asked at the sight of my gauze-adorned forehead, quickly adding, “I like your shirt, by the way.”  I looked down to discover that I was wearing my Super Mario T-shirt, and I found her apparent taste in clothing—and hobbies—much more endearing than the fact that she was a young female.  She led me into a waiting area and asked for a few forms’ worth of information.  Another worker asked if I could use some fresh gauze, and when I removed my current piece, I realized that my flow of blood, which had nearly stopped while I was in the car, was intensifying anew.  Perhaps stitches weren’t such a bad idea.

I was directed into an examining room, and another young female cleaned my cut, assuaging my fears about sand invasion.  I was expecting the sting of the disinfectant to make up for all the pain I had apparently been spared so far, but even this barely hurt.  The assistant left to find a doctor, who surprisingly turned out to be both male and aged.  He took a look at the cut and assured that it was “deep enough,” deciding that I would indeed need stitches.  He directed me to lie down on one of those tables that’s always covered by that sheet of paper that slides all over the place when you move, telling me that he would give me a shot to numb the area around the cut.  It turns out that the painkiller he used was the same kind that I had been administered back when I had my knee operation, so I was able to reminisce about medical adventures past.

(TASTELESSNESS WARNING)  I should clarify here that even though I’ve only mentioned my loss of blood in passing, it was happening continuously.  The towel and both sections of gauze were covered in it; the last piece of gauze had soaked all the way through so that my fingers were damp with the stuff.  It had blended into my hair and dried on my face.  All of this was nothing, however, compared to how the floodgates opened when the doctor pushed that needle into my forehead.  Blood ran out of the area like I had sprung a leak, spreading even further into my hair.  At one point I felt a rivulet of it run down the back of my head and onto the pillow underneath it.  However, while the needle did little to keep in the blood, it did much to keep out the pain, and before long the doctor was ready to sew me back up.

They (the assistant was there, too) shone a light on my head like I was at the dentist, and the doctor covered my face with some paper, the precise goal of which was unclear to me.  He paused long enough to pull several strands of hair out of the cut, and then he went to work.  All the while he was chatting matter-of-factly with the assistant about what he was doing, so I learned a lot of medical information that I have since forgotten.  What I do remember is that he gave me something called an “X-stitch,” so called because it makes a series of x’s under the skin, and that this stitch would both allow the skin to heal and would stop the loss of blood.  It was strange; I couldn’t feel the needle that he was weaving through my flesh, but I could feel the tightness of his pulling on the stitches, and every once in a while I could feel him pulling on my hair.  I found the difference between what I could and couldn’t feel to be very strange.

So now I have six stitches in my head; I’m fingering them right now as I type.  It’s strange; each stitch has two free ends just sticking out like mutant hairs.  It feels kind of like the seam on a piece of clothing, except instead of a shirt, it’s my head.  They’ll be in there for a week; after seven days, I’m supposed to go back to the doctor so he can take them out for me.  In all honesty, as I’m sure you can see from that picture, the stitch really looks pretty cool, and my sister pointed out that it’s as close to a monster-movie cut as she’s ever seen in real life.  It almost makes me wish I had gotten it on my face.  Okay, it really makes me wish I had gotten it on my face.

All things considered, I was pretty fortunate under the circumstances.  Though I was injured, I was definitely not as seriously injured as I could have been.  I definitely didn’t get a concussion (which I learned was the purpose of all those questions about dizziness and fainting,) and the cut wasn’t as deep as it could have been.  The skin around the skull is just so shallow that any kind of a hard blow there will bash it right open, whether it’s all that serious or not.  If I had been hit anywhere else, I doubt that I would have even been cut.  Plus, as my mother pointed out, the umbrella’s collision with my head probably slowed it down; in fact, I might have stopped it long enough to ensure that it didn’t hurt anyone else.  This was especially notable considering that a small child was one of the next things in its path.  So maybe my being in its way wasn’t such an unlucky thing after all.  Who knows; maybe I’ll be hailed as an accidental hero—a legend of the beach.  I can just see the headlines now:

MAN RESCUES INFANT FROM PARASOL-INDUCED DOOM

STOPS RAMPAGING UMBRELLA WITH FACE

So anyway, now I have six stitches in my head, along with another story about a summertime trip to the doctor.  Plus, when I returned to the beach house after the operation, I was able to tell my sister Nicole that even if I hadn’t contracted any sunburn, she could still cry herself to sleep knowing that I had indeed been hurt.  I never did get my watch fixed, though.

And, for the record, if anyone ever asks me if I’ve had any interesting medical experiences…I’ll just tell him to read my website.