MÊL's Confession

Okay, for those who want to confess -- this is as good a place as any. Note to the confessors, if you choose to confess, create a new blog entry and cross-post it to the group. Don't just add your confession in a reply to this one -- your confession is special and should be listed in its' own entry. Also, once the board is up, we can link to it directly. (We can't link to comments directly).

My Confession

On January 1st, 1969 -- the day after my parents had a lot of friends over for a New Year's Eve party -- I woke up and ran into the living room to watch TV. We had just gotten our first color TV for Christmas and the novelty hadn't worn off yet. I was doing what 4 year olds tend to do when their parents were sleeping off a hangover -- I ran around, jumped up and down, and made a lot of noise. I'm sure that noise was banging around my parent's skull -- but that was nothing compared to the noise I made when I jumped off the couch and my little left foot smashed down on a champagne glass that had been forgotten on the floor.

Ouch! The glass broke, and my pinky toe was just about cut off. There ain't much bone in a 4 year old's pinky toe -- and what bone there is slices like butter, apparently. My toe was hanging from a thread. My parents rushed me to the hospital where they said there wasn't much they could do. An old doctor said he'd sew it back on, just so I wouldn't walk uneven the rest of my life, but that it wouldn't be much good to me. Fair enough -- what good is a pinky toe anyway. To this day, I can't move it independently -- and I can't say that I've really missed having that ability. I've never had any feeling in that toe again.

Flash forward a few years -- and, somehow, I discovered that I could stick a needle all the way through the toe {chuckle}

How did I find out? I don't recall. But it seemed pretty cool -- and in my friend's basement, we did a "magic show" where I took a needle and pushed it all the way through the toe while the other kids "ooohed" and "ahhhed." It was actually pretty cool. Anyway, the day after the show, the toe started swelling up and turning a funny color -- and dripping stuff. Pus. That was pretty gross. I didn't say anything to my parents, but in a day or two I started burning up -- I had a fever -- I had an infection. So I got whisked to the doctor and by the time we were going there I was having trouble walking. They took off my socks and my mother almost died when she saw the toe. They asked me what happened to my pinky toe and I gave the classic 7-year old's answer --

"I dunno."

The doctor poured some nasty stuff on my toe -- it friggin' burned. And I was forced to give up my career in magic.