I Would Drape Him In Bubble Wrap If It Was Socially Acceptable

Please pity the poor Pony, who is currently convalescing from yet another summer school PE mishap.

The first one was during his second week, when he put a foot wrong during a softball game. He was running after the ball, and fell on some gravel. For some reason, the game was being held on the parking lot of Elementia, a short hike through the woods from Newmentia, where summer school convenes. Gummi Mary only knows why the main baseball field over there was not the site. Perhaps another event was being readied on that field, so the freshmen PE kids had to make do with a parking lot.

The first injury was a bloody scrape just below the kneecap. Nobody bothered to tend to The Pony's compromised flesh. He, himself, did not even go wash it off in the bathroom because, well, he was on a parking lot at Elementia, not at his own facility, and besides, there are no paper towels in the student bathrooms, only wall blowers. So he would have had to hoist his knee into the sink under the faucet, then rub it with liquid soap out of the dispenser, then leave a watery trail back to the gym, unless he could balance on one leg and blow-dry his knee. When he got home, I scrubbed it with several paper towels and soap, getting a load of dark dirt out of the wound. For five days, twice a day, we cleaned it of yellowy effluence and applied fresh triple-antibiotic ointment and band-aids. He recovered. It was, after all, just a skinned knee. Not like the two broken elbows he incurred over the past several years from falls in the hallway.

Yesterday, The Pony had a treadmill accident. Don't bother to look for him on MTV's Ridiculousness. Nobody was filming. According the The Pony's mouth, the kids had to stay inside because of the rain. He and his tight crew of two boy friends and one girl friend were in the weight room. Another school coach, not his teacher, was in there supervising them. The Pony was just getting ready to dismount the treadmill. He had already put it on "slow down" or whatever the setting dealybobber was. If you could see me, you would understand why I know so little about treadmills. The coach said something to him. The Pony was distracted from his dismount mission. And he fell. On the moving treadmill. I asked if he shot off the back of it like those poor saps on Ridiculousness. The Pony said, "No. If I did that, I would have slammed into the wall. I was ready to step off the side when it slowed down, so I fell off to the side."

Nobody laughed. Nobody asked if he was okay. Nobody oohed or ahhed at his flesh wounds. Nobody offered to get him a band-aid. He might as well have been The Invisible Pony. It was two hours until time to leave. The Pony took a bathroom break and tried to wash it with water. He did not trust the soap. He avoided the blower, because, "That would have really hurt." When his grandma picked him up to bring him home, she gave The Pony a paper towel from the snacks she had brought to tide him over for the thirty minute drive. She said he was worried that his knee was already infected. She said he told her, "There's yellow stuff coming out. You don't know WHAT was on that treadmill that is now under my skin."

This new wound was pretty gory. He had several quarter to fifty-cent piece sized abrasions from the kneecap down to the head of his tibia. Or whatever that lump is one inch below his knee, (which is not the same as that lump three feet above his @ss, according to Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own). It took one large band-aid and three regular ones to achieve optimum coverage so the seepage was contained. He also had a Nike swoosh-shaped scrape about four inches long by his elbow, and a smattering of treadmill burns on his wrist and pinky finger. I assured him that it was too early to observe infection, and that the yellow fluid (which he reported as clear) had been his plasma oozing out.

I released him to his class this morning covered in band-aids and dabbed with triple-antibiotic ointment. He has four days left of summer PE. And one of those days is bowling.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.