Hi folks and welcome back to another season of Knee Deep! I would like to tell you that my summer months have been filled with all sorts of incredible outdoor adventures, but alas that would not be true. For example, I could tell you that our family got stuck four hundred feet off the ground on a Ferris wheel and had to release ourselves upside-down from safety belts and then climb down 119 flights of narrow stairs, but that would not be true. I’m thankful that didn’t happen to me, even though it would have made a great story for my podcast. Still and all, it’s worth mentioning that this podcast, Knee Deep, isn’t so much about edge-of-your-seat stories as it is about the more common moments of life that are uncommonly inspiring.
Listening in to Knee Deep will put us together for a few minutes each week, hanging out just a few feet out in the water. The stories and observances I impart in my presentationI think of like pieces of sea glass that have been tumbled around and are now refined, shiny and just waiting for someone to bring them in to the light of day. I don’t see this podcast so much as me showing you what I’ve found as much as you and I wading in together to examine all the oblique shapes and luminous colors together.
If you’ll remember back the last time we talked here on Knee Deep, we were waving goodbye to Sumatra Sammy, a plastic toy surfer whose magical ability to right himself no matter what the surfing conditions, hovered just beyond our reach after a mis-toss into the Atlantic Ocean. He then turned south, rather anthropomorphically, and sadly disappeared forever from our sight on his self-imposed Closer-to-the-Edge World Tour. Around mid-July, however, we received this short note from the island of Eleuthera, a long, thin Bahamian island originally used by the Air Force to detect Russian subs during the Cold War. Here is what our Sammy’s note said:
“Greeting from Eleuthera! After floating for several days in the Atlantic, I was scooped up in the net of a fishing trawler! Can you believe that?! By then my colors had baked and faded from the intense sun, and I was listing badly to one side. What happened after that is not exactly clear to me, but I awoke to find myself attached to the bow of this ship, now docked in Eleuthera. To say that I am thankful to be a toy figurehead on a fishing trawler, protecting the fisherman from the cruelties of the sea, yes, this would be true, except that the ship’s name is “Whoops-A-Daisy,” which frankly, waters down the otherwise honored position I thought I had at the front of the ship. I’m not sure how long I can stand this disgrace, but I am safe for now, blistered and worn, but safe. I hope all is well in your corner of the world, as I remain always yours, Sumatra Sammy, Surfer Dude.”
Reading this short message, I couldn’t help but be touched by the inherent good nature of those fishermen, who could have easily thrown Sammy back in with the rest of the chum. Reading Sammy’s letter, I felt my hope in all mankind restored, and at the same time transported in memory back to a time when I too was rescued from a perilous journey at sea. Actually, it wasn’t the sea, but a sink… actually, a bathroom sink, and it wasn’t really a perilous journey either, but more of a divine, baptismal POP.
It all happened back in my youth when I still believed that if I swallowed a seed it would grow into a tree in my stomach, and that deep holes of treacherous quicksand were everywhere. I was on vacation with my family at a resort in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and when I say family, I am including here a father that was a doctor and a mom that was a nurse, so that when I began to turn a shade of yellow not on the color chart I was quarantined to my hotel bed with some form of the flu, probably the one any of us have at any given moment. In my flu haze-delirium, I looked out through our sliding glass doors, past the lanai, to what I thought were giant sea turtles soaring through the clouds. Palm trees, lined up like hula girls, swayed gently back and forth along the horizon, and could it be? Yes! It was George Jetson in his flying saucer hovering over beach bathers and dumping out samples of Baby Oil, the most popular sunscreen at the time with an SPF of minus 40. Envy and pity crept into me like watered-down intravenous ginger ale. I decided that I’d had enough of this bed rest nonsense, complete with complimentary baby aspirin and reruns of My Three Sons. It was time, I thought, for a bit of an adventure of my own, yellow fever or not! It was time to mix it up!
With renewed vigor, I jumped up and ran into our salmon-tiled bathroom with matching soaps and a brochure of a nearby alligator farm, to douse my face with multiple splash attacks to simulate the effects of an imaginary Splashin’ Safari. I had no interest in riding dolphins, or getting my picture taken kissing a sea lion that was trained to rocket itself out of the 100,000-gallon tank and slide up within an inch of my lips. No, all I wanted was to pretend for a moment that I was out there with the rest of the beach crowd, taking in the Florida experience, smelling the salt spray, perhaps get washed out to sea for an hour, then hop back into bed before anyone noticed I was missing.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, like our surfer friend Sammy, things turned nasty rather quickly for me. And for those of you who have ever done anything wildly stupid, this next part is going to make you feel a whole lot better. I was not in my right mind, so in keeping with my temporary insanity, I turned on only the hot water and stuck my head under the faucet, jamming the opening so that water scattered out in all directions.
There, I had done it. I had placed myself on an imaginary ride on top of a tsunami Splashin’ wave, dodging the sharks circling feverishly below me, and watching, at least in my own mind, judges hold up score cards of perfect tens. When I came back to reality I realized my head, that most important of body parts, was in fact not free and self-governing as it had been all my life but stuck inside the sink like cement, and roasting under a jet stream of water. In my exuberance, I had managed, in one amazing motion, to wedge the back of my head under the faucet while simultaneously jamming my front two teeth, yes, my front two incisors, under the front lip of the sink.
Even as I tell this story, now, some sixty years later, I can feel an uneasy vibration run through my teeth, not unlike a root canal. Even my eyes will begin to twitch as a kind of bathroom shell shock still tries to set in. And in these circumstances, with my teeth locked under the front lip of a porcelain pink sink, scalding water spewing forth in torrents, my screams for help were not of this earth. Suffice to say I was in a private hell of sorts, like some strange orthodontic nightmare where the somber looking dentist walks in and announces the following:
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this Mr. Bender, but the news is not good. We were unable to detach your head from the sink you jammed it into. We can fit you with a prosthetic, but that is about it (long pause with sobs). With time, and some therapy, we think you might be able to live with it, but you’ll never get rid of it. I’m sorry, very sorry.”
In what seemed like years later, when my dad finally walked into the steaming bathroom and discovered me uttering cries for help using only the bottom half of my mouth, he calmly turned off the water, and simply asked me what in the Sam Hill I was doing out of bed.
“I unted to oh oo ashin afari,” I whimpered, “ut eye ed hot uck in a ink.”
Dumbfounded at that reply, Dad simply grabbed a jar of Vaseline, slathered a handful on my mouth, teeth and gums, and with one coordinated chiropractic move, popped my head out of the sink like a cork.
Pushing me gently through the bathroom fog, Dad settled me back into bed and I gratefully allowed the full measure of my flu symptoms to return. I erased all thoughts of ever visiting a theme park again, especially ones with water, and began an exercise of repeated swallowing to erase the hotel sink aftertaste from my mouth. I knew I would probably never feel completely comfortable in a bathroom again, at least alone with a sink, and that this was one of those family incidents that was so bizarre it would be brought up again and again during get-togethers as close relatives tried to make some sense of it.
The trauma of what had just happened was just too much, my embarrassing future too bleak to handle at my age. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a sink quite that small, I thought, ever! I looked outside, past the sliding glass doors and let the hypnotizing effect of the swaying palm trees rinse over me. Surfers riding salmon-colored surfboards rode to their oceanic destiny just beyond, but I’d had enough of that awful off-pinkish hue for one day, rolled over, and let my yellow skin tone return, a color I might live with, a color, as it were, I could actually sink my teeth into.
That night as calm was restored in our hotel room and my parents sat watching the TV, the nightly news reported that Cape Canaveral, only a short distance away, had picked up some bizarre interference on their radar, an unidentified shriek of some sort, and had for safety reasons postponed their scheduled lunar launch.