Splinters.
I started educating my feet as soon as I was old enough to run wild over the countryside around our little farm. In those days, it seemed as if the whole earth were carpeted with rusty nails, and stepping on nails and running them into bare feet was a common occurrence among my associates and me. I could have built a small house with all the nails I ran into my feet, which at that early stage of my life were still dumb as the stones they stubbed their toes on.
A rusty nail bites into your foot with a sharp pain, which then fades into a dull, throbbing ache, followed by blood poisoning and possible death. My mother found this degree of torment suffered by her young son to be insufficient. As soon as she detected that I’d run a rusty nail into my foot, she would haul me into the house and add to the torture. She kept a bottle of concentrated liquid fire in the medicine cabinet. I do not recall all the details, but I suppose she first donned an asbestos suit and gloves and then, grasping the bottle of liquid fire with tongs, doused the wound thoroughly. I would then be allowed to ricochet freely about the house and awaken any person who happened to be napping within three miles of our farm. A few such treatments taught my feet to detect a rusty nail at 300 yards. Their education had begun.
Slivers were another important element in the education of my feet. When I was about eight, I ran a huge slab of a sliver into my left foot. From then on, my only mode, of locomotion was the “right-sided hop.†The sliver festered away there for a week or more. My mother came at me repeatedly with a needle, tweezers and her bottle of liquid fire, but she was less strong and less fleet by then, and I could escape-her grasp by means of high-speed hopping.
One Sunday, we went to a loggers picnic. Mom mentioned to one of the loggers that I had a huge sliver in My foot and that I refused to let her operate on it. The logger took out his jack-knife, held a lighted match to the blade and announced to the assembled Picnickers, “I can take out that sliver in nothing flat.â€
“Nothing flat†wasn’t quick enough. My first hop toward escape covered a good 10 yards, but it was executed from a dead stop and is hardly worth mentioning, compared with what I accomplished in the next few moments. Observing my flight, a kangaroo would have been embarrassed by its own feeble efforts at hopping. Eventually, some loutish offspring of the loggers ran me down and gleefully hauled me back to the operating table, which by then had been cleared of picnic residue. A crowd soon gathered around the table to observe the operation, there being little entertainment in people’s lives back then. As I recall, the removal of the splinter was relatively painless, obviously a great disappointment to the audience. But then Mom appeared in her asbestos suit with the bottle of liquid fire. She took a couple of bows. The audience broke into applause.
-Patrick McManus - The Bear in the Attic 2003
