Memoir -- Installment One

"Christian, are you coming?" Mom shouted from across the parking lot with a hint of haste in her voice. She wasn't usually in this much of a hurry.

"Yeah!" I shouted back, thinking nothing of where we were going, or what we were doing here.

Near-post-infancy in small towns are routinely mundane. It goes like this: Wake up at 9 o'clock, get dressed, eat cereal (or some other sugary treat), watch whatever palette of colors amazed me on the television, spend a couple hours at the local preschool, go home, eat 'supper,' then head to bed.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

 The sun crept between the unique cracks and crevices of the trees, yielding a series a godly rays on a secluded structure, beneath an oak canopy that almost omitted the cloudless sky above. I was too young to even remember the time of day, let alone care. Like I said, I didn't know what we were doing here - it simply wasn't important to a three-year-old. I let my parents take care of the adult-business kind of stuff - they were better at it, anyway. The parking lot presented itself  in a manner that I wasn't usually exposed to: a wide, open lot, free to run around in, with the 1-story structure overlooking the two or three cars parked there.

I had been awoken especially early for some event or meeting at the preschool my parents enrolled me in, so naturally, a spite-filled three-year-old me tended to slow down his routine noticeably: two extra minutes to get dressed...an extra minute or so brushing my teeth, even if I didn't like the overbearing taste of mint; I didn't care, it was worth showing what waking me up early meant. An extra four or five minutes getting dressed and dragging myself down the stairs, only to eat cereal at the nautical velocity of a multi-ton cargo ship. By the time the last drop of milk left my bowl, we were practically already on our way out to the car.
By the time we'd arrived, we were noticeably late. Restless as usual, I hopped out of our car, proceeding to skip towards the school entrance which, obviously, yielded more efficient speeds than walking.

At this point, it should be noted that the school decorated the patio near the front entrance with a cactus to display; yet, balancing on the concrete bricks surrounding the cactus was a very inviting thought. Naturally, I did.

And I fell. Into the cactus.

I woke up a few hours later, strapped to a hospital bed, with a series of nurses wielding tweezers pulling each individual needle out of my body, and, despite the incredible pain, led me to one of my first life lessons: if something can go wrong, it will almost always go wrong.

Within a few more hours, I was released from the hospital and returned home.

Wash. Rinse Repeat.