It's a delightful beginning to a novel. It draws you in and tells the end and the beginning, only to go back around and carefully unfold a story that America might not have thought they were quite ready to hear fifty years ago..... Above is, of course, the classic first sentence of To Kill A Mockingbird.
Her novel proved so poignant, that after writing To Kill A Mockingbird in 1960, Nelle Harper Lee never wrote another book. Her single solitary novel (which has impacted America and literature and education) began with a broken bone.
Not to infer in the slightest that the paltry ponderings brought forth on this page (with, it now seems, great infrequency), bears even the mildest resemblance to the accomplished Ms Lee, who was, among other things, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her literary contribution. But I too, have a broken bone story to tell.
"When she was ten, my daughter Eliza got her arm broken mildly at the wrist."
Ten, has so far proved a dangerous age for my usually mild mannered, calculatingly cautious, middle daughter. It may turn out that ten is officially the age of ER visits, ace bandages, ice packs, and arm slings. Her tenth year has included it all, with the addition of five staples in the back of her head from the unseasonably warm day last January, when I coaxed her away from homework and onto the playground with her sister. It was there she then sustained a slow motion fall that ended in a marvelous bloody gash on an old-school merry-go-round. She has gotten a black eye from her iPod dock crashing down from a shelf while she slept, a bee sting in her eyebrow, and most recently a gently fractured right radius on the last day of summer vacation ... from the blow of a soccer ball during practice drills.
It missed the growth plate. It was just the radius. It was set with a splint and then again in a cast, and a week later in yet another fiberglass cast.
But it was also her writing hand, and the first week of school, and put her out of recess, PE and the brief six week school soccer season.
"At least it happened at the end of the summer," Mr Johnson and I both told her rather unhelpfully. Other unhelpful comments included: "You're not supposed to use your hands in soccer."
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| E and her sisters on the last day of summer vacation {with her healthy wrist ... just hours before the fateful soccer ball incident} |
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| {waiting to be seen by the orthopedic} |
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| {First Day of 5th grade with a splint and sling} |
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| {beginning the casting process} |
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| forming the fiberglass cast {Ever the individual, she got black, so she could use metallic sharpies!} |
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