A Bonk on the Exceedingly Vascular Head

we are all still near, and so capable of kindness

“We Will Travel As Far As We Can,” Beth Kephart, Collage

I was late because the train was late, but if I ran really fast with my bag of many things, I could retrieve the lost minutes and honor my promise to sign early copies of my yarn-centric book as part of the miracle of the city’s yearly yarn crawl.

And so I was running through Philadelphia in my best houndstooth coat and my flower-power Doc Martens—over the Schuylkill River, down Arch, onto 20th, and across Market—when my long shoe laces, loosened by my speed, began slapping at the asphalt. Stepping onto the curb and dropping my bag, I bent down, fiddled, and stood, only to have my head forcefully collide with the metal box above my head—some sort of sharp-cornered parking voucher thing that I had, in my haste, avoided seeing. Whatever, I thought, and began to run again, only to catch sight of myself in a storefront window. The woman looking back at me might have been cast in a B horror film. So exceedingly vascular is the head. So ready for drama.

My good fortune was my proximity to a CVS pharmacy. My better fortune was the young CVS clerk who took one look as I stepped into his world, led me to a plastic chair, fashioned wads and wads of hold-this-to-your-head paper towels, and began to ask the what-happened, are-you-on-blood-thinners questions. My coat, my scarf, my shirt, even my boots and especially half my face and neck and hands were a bright new crimson color. (Thankfully, my pants were black.) And all those paper towels.

“You’re going to the hospital,” he said.

“I have to be somewhere,” I said.

“Not like that,” he said. “I’m calling 911.”

Such kindness.

And so he did. And so the ambulance came, this young CVS employee and another clerk remaining compassionate and near until we heard the sirens. In through the doors came the two EMTs who did the things that ambulance people do—gently, efficiently, warningly, “We’d like you to go to the hospital for an MRI, but the choice is yours.”

The cut is not deep, they said. And the head: it is so cinematic. But you know that we can’t see inside your brain; we don’t know what’s going on. Quiet talk, knowing talk, while they cleaned the wound and washed my face, my neck, my hands. While they did their utmost best with my now unruly hair.

Such kindness.

By this time, I’d called my editor and publisher, my dear friend Jessie, who had, with the help of her husband Mike, arranged this weekend at the yarn crawl, arranged the table of books, made me a sandwich, even. Soon Jessie was knocking at the ambulance door, and I was signing e-documents, and Jessie was saying “You’re going home,” and I was saying, insisting, “No, I can do this,” for isn’t the head so dramatic? So that Mike, behind the wheel of their car, was now whisking me to 10th and Pine, where I was, yes, later than I might have been and not looking precisely kempt, not representing Tursulowe Press as I had fully intended, with half my hair and oh that houndstooth coat full of the proof of my mishap.

And Jessie saying, “You shouldn’t be here.” And Jessie saying, “Sit. Please.” And Jessie bringing water and that sandwich and watching, as Jessie watches, as she has learned to watch over a lifetime of loving and caring for so very many people.

Such kindness.

I stayed until the pounding on the one side of my head grew insistent. I made my way back to the train through my city. (“I’m getting you a car,” said Jessie. “I need the air,” said I, insisting, stubborn.) There, on my end of the line, my beautiful husband was waiting. He’d done his research, as my husband does. He would be on the lookout, he said, for signs of a concussion. We’d eat peanut butter sandwiches and watch the Swedish drama “Maria Wern”—as many episodes as I wanted, or needed, to watch. And when, so very late, I said I was worried about sleeping lying down, my husband said I should try sleeping sitting up, but who sleeps sitting up?, and so here I am, in the dark early AM, writing this story, and publishing it off schedule, because writing is a salve, because writing has always been, for me, a form of therapeutics, because I believe that you’ll forgive me.

But mostly—this is the biggest because—all this time since this ridiculous bonk I’ve been thinking about the words of my Substack friend Gerri George, a comment layered into my most recent essay. “To me,” Gerri wrote, “loss of kindness is a lost opportunity to care, a chance to immerse fully.”

We live in a world of unnecessary torment. We live in protest lines and battered by the news, afraid of what is coming next, averting our eyes, keeping our own counsel. But we are just people in the end, people who, as the songs says, need people. We are people capable of so much kindness—this opportunity to care, to immerse fully. Utterly compassionate strangers. Dear and tolerant friends. Loved ones. A bonk on the head, and nothing divides us.