Abio 12: Life After Oillie the Sock Puppet at Age 5 - March 3 2024

March 3, 2024 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 1,115 words

Abio 12: Life after Ollie at age five

After I refused to talk to Dr. Mahogany’s totally fake, below-my-age-level Ollie the sock puppet at the Erie Clinic for Kids with Brain Traumas, Dr. Mahogany closed the book on me. He gave no more tests. Not sure I could have said anything, but I never tried.

Instead, he bumped us upstairs from Serious to Severe. A receptionist scheduled us to return in two weeks, when I would be injected with radioactive dye and hung upside down to pinpoint the blockage.

We took the 120-mile train home and waited to depart again. Two weeks later we walked to the Ridgway station to catch the morning Erie train. We were already packed.

Little did we know, but this train ride would be like no other.

From my window seat, I had learned that looking straight out made everything blurry, but if I turned my head sideways against the glass, looking up the tracks, everything was clear. I could see the whole countryside, the backsides of cities.

Also, the vibrations from the cold glass against my skull – clickity-clack, clickity-clack – were soothing. They bumped me right on my sore spots, behind my right ear, like a massage. I fell asleep.

A road-crossing bell woke me up. Cars were lined up. We were entering the cut into the slope of an Allegheny canyon. We would follow the Clarion River’s right bank for several miles. It was my favorite stretch of track, right around the bend. I pressed my head to the glass again and looked at the approaching canyon.

That is when I saw it.

No one else saw it. No one else was looking out the window.

A white pickup truck smashing through the guardrails above us on a curve in the highway leading down the sloping hillside. It tore through the rails about 150-feet in front of us, and came bounding down the canyon wall, as we headed into its path.

As predicted, it crashed right at my feet, right below my window. The truck exploded into a ball of flame. The train car shook. Gasoline splashed across my entire window and burst into hot orange flame. The train squealed, and stopped. My window was still orange, but not hot enough to burn me behind the safety glass, so I kept staring at it, thinking, “Woooooo”.

I turned to get my mom’s reaction, but she was gone. So was everyone else. People were crawling on their hands and knees toward the nearest exit. I sat alone in the closest seat. Everything seemed normal to me. A truck crashed, but that’s over now.

Someone yelled, “Get the kid,’ and a guy took me by the shirt.

Outside afternoon on the banks of a river was pleasant. Rocks to hop on. Pollywogs skittered in the reeds. Behind me were flames behind the train, black smoke, terrible smells, and now firehoses. OK. All in order there.

Some passengers sat on rocks with shoes off and put their feet in the water. Others stood clustered around unpicked blackberry bushes, plucking and eating. There were plenty of unpicked blackberries.

Several policemen climbed down the slippery slope with their leather shoes and clipboards, hanging onto saplings. They were the first two to risk the treacherous slope.

I suddenly realized that I was taking all this in, the whole scene, with the details, the people, the pollywogs, blackberry thorns, the commotion and hollering. Gone was the usual, familiar blurry world just beyond my fingertips. My surroundings had come into focus. I saw flashing firetrucks, firemen and police in uniforms, kids in the river.

My mother squeezed my hand, and I turned to notice that two police officers were talking to the train engineer, and that the train engineer was pointing directly at me.

The policemen walked directly up to us, smiling. They introduced themselves. “May we speak with you and you son?” they asked my mother politely. She agreed.

“What is the purpose of your travel?”

My mother replied that we were going to Erie so I could be treated for a traumatic brain injury caused by an automobile accident. The two officers looked long at each other.

Then one clean-shaven officer knelt down in the grass to my height, holding his pencil to paper. He met my eyes and asked, “Tell me, Son. What did you see?”

At last someone asked me an important question that only I could answer. I gladly spoke up like it was nothing. “A white truck,” and pointed to the broken guardrails. Then I drew a line to myself. “It came down and hit the train outside my window. A lot of fire.”

My mother cried aloud, “Oh! God! My baby boy is speaking!” She fell to her knees. “He hasn’t spoken a word in three months. It’s a miracle. Thank you. Thank you.” She cradled me and cried.

The police officers were happy to have helped, and stepped away,

The train was moveable so everyone got a ride to the next station where busses would take over. Instead of taking the Erie bus, she booked us two tickets home to Ridgway. She used the wait time to call the Erie brain clinic from a payphone and cancelled our appointment. I would not be needing any radioactive injections. Then she gave me 25-cents for pinball.

I was able to talk again, roughly speaking. I don’t know why. Maybe something got jarred loose by the vibrating train ride, the window massage, or the exploding truck and ball of flame that covered my window.

On the dark bus ride home, I did my best to answer my mother’s questions. I could tell she had a bunch of them.

“Could I recognize her voice when I was in my coma for three days?” “No,” I said.

“Did I recognize other people’s voices? My dad, sisters, grandmother, aunt and uncle, our pastor.” “No,” I said.

“Daddy wanted to know if you liked the chocolate milkshake,” she said. Easy one, dad. “Yes.”

I did my best to explain that toward the end, perhaps after the fluid leaked out, I could recognize voice tones but not words. I could tell the difference between a soothing voice of love and well wishes and a voice of questions and encouragement.

Over the weeks as the swelling continued to go down, language came back slowly, but I still did not speak. My earliest memories were gone for good.

Just two weeks ago I learned that my mother had kept a Baby Diary from before my accident and had handed it off to my wife, Susan, when we got married. Sue never opened it or mentioned it until two weeks ago. We read the few entries together. My mother wrote that I could sing the alphabet song and Davy Crockett, that we had taken a bus ride to Oklahoma, and I pulled the emergency cord. All that is still gone.

For years after the accident, I would have wordless memories. I am floating around surrounded by billowy clouds and soft surfaces and nothing else happens.

(Find previous episodes: gibbs-different-drummer.blogspot.com, with room for commentary.)