“My mother and I are bound, as it should be, in both clumsiness and blood,” writes N.C. Harrison.
I am willing to admit that I look almost like a carbon copy of my father, uncles and grandfather—almost all of the males in my family do. We tend towards being a little shorter than tall, going grey in our late twenties (I actually started at seventeen, during a particularly miserable football season) and developing a little bald spot even earlier—I’ve always had one, I think. I also have the family’s tendency to become quickly frustrated with foolish situations and people who will not remove their blinders in the face of evidence and an appreciation for organization and structure. I can only pray that I do not inherit their propensity towards heart disease, but I’m not holding out too much hope.
In personality and interest, however, I am very similar to my mother and her somewhat unusual clan of river rats. I share her dislike of organized schedules—which is why I would rather remain on the poorer side of comfortable, living humbly in a small house, rather than submit to a nine-to-five sentence, sitting behind a desk and serving someone’s profit margin—and trace my interest in the paranormal, religion and crappy fantasy novels to her influence. She took me to see the Transformers movie when I was eight months old, way back in 1986, and until I was twelve years old I believed that the face of God was a big, blue one, like Optimus Prime’s. We watched Star Trek, Designing Women and The Real Ghostbusters. It was, all in all, a pretty awesome childhood.
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As my sister and I fry chicken for my mom (and I try to teach my sister’s little fellow that, no, the raw chicken won’t hurt you, it’s already dead), I am reminded of another, slightly less successful Mother’s Day dinner in 2008. I had determined that day to make pork vindaloo and was slicing, chopping and spicing like a madman. Manson Family Hauntings was on the History Channel, and we were all having a pretty good time.
And then it happened. The long, razor sharp chef’s knife (what Guy Fieri calls a “big boy knife”) slipped. The piece of pork I was cutting fell to the floor. A goodly fraction of the tip of my thumb followed suit. Big, long spurts of blood didn’t wait around for permission and came along for the ride. The scarlet splashed so violently that for a moment my mom looked up, wondering if I’d spilled the red wine cooking sauce.
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This is, apparently, another thing I inherited from my mother. I remember coming home one day from football practice and finding her hand wrapped like the mummy of a large spider, three fingers and a thumb poking through like the beast’s legs. “Hey, well,” she said, “a glass busted in my hand. I think I nicked an artery.” This was topped only by her adventure with the mandolin slicer sometime later, which scooped a teaspoon of flesh out of her finger. “Wow,” she said, clutching the offended digit, “I think that I might have cut myself.” No kidding, I thought, looking at the little bit of ragged flesh, lying there among the slices of squash. We did the only thing we could: took her to the hospital and laughed about it later.
We also did the only thing possible for me that fateful day, as I had no insurance and didn’t appear to be immediately bleeding to death. She sat me on the couch, packed my thumb, and told me, “Just… sit there and try to not bleed too much.” I managed this, I guess, since I didn’t die, although I did feel a little faint for a few days afterward. She finished the vindaloo and the four of us ate, each of us slipping little bits of pork, rice and naan to the little dogs when we thought everyone else wasn’t looking.
My thumb healed, though the tip of it is still a little deformed, and I’ve gotten better at prep cooking and haven’t cut myself in a couple of years now—though saying this almost certainly dooms me to an amputated finger at some point. My injury hurt a lot when it happened, and it derailed my writing and weight lifting for more than a month—it’s hard to type or hook a dead lift when you ooze blood at the slightest provocation—but I don’t think I’d trade my diced-up thumb for anything. It makes me feel closer, in a weird way, to one of those responsible for bringing me here. We are bound, as it should be, in both clumsiness and blood—in all senses of the word.
Photo–Flickr/Morgos S