My grandkids, both currently conquering elementary school, have suffered their share of injuries.

The events put our extended family through an arm broken on a scooter, a bump on the head from a coffee table (stitches at the E.R.), and a scary grab of some ill-advised medicine to munch on.

Their mishaps brought home a message to me in my golden years and prompted me to compile an inventory of youthful injuries experienced by me and my schoolmates.

My first-grade class portrait (circa 1960) displays me with a band-aid on my forehead. It reflected the impact of an errantly swung softball bat at the playground of the old Page Elementary School.

Traipsing across slippery stepping stones on Gulf Branch when I was about 7, I sliced my shin on an angled rock. The doctor who happened to live next to our family adjudged that I didn’t need to go to the E.R. for stitches (to this day, the scar remains visible).

At James Madison Elementary School (now a community center), my fourth-grade classmate Jim, he recently reminded me, was trying to cut a yo-yo string from its center axle. Instead, he jabbed his mother’s paring knife into his eye. Had to show up in school wearing an eye patch (and as a 70-year-old, he can still, in the mirror, see the doctor’s incision point).

Our friend Bobby, in second grade, broke a leg on the playground while attempting to “surf” on a large round log. (My friend Marsha recalls being sent to the school office to seek help.)

Our classmate nicknamed JEP stunned us fifth-graders when he came to school with his arm in a cast that elevated it at an odd angle over his head. (Can’t recall how he busted his shoulder.)

At Williamsburg Junior High, during an outdoor lunch break, someone tossed a huge rock in the air. Our classmate Parker, taking it to be a brown lunch bag, swung at it with his fist. He arrived a day or two later with white, thick, but highly signable cast.

Playing youth football, when I attempted to rush through an offensive lineman, my fingers got bent grotesquely back. (The E.R. doc determined that the swollen appendage needed a splint.) In high school football, an elbow from an opposing defensive lineman poked through my facemask and converted my nose to a bloody mass. (His tactic deviated my septum, which meant I had to breathe awkwardly for six years before getting an operation.)

So what is the deep and wise message I bequeath to my grandchildren?

As you struggle through the pain, the uncertainty, the anxious stints in the waiting room — and the vital rallying of family — please know that you are undergoing an experience that, in later life, you likely will remember. 

        ***

The monumental changes we’ve experienced in housing were crystalized for me during a recent sentimental walk through my young boyhood neighborhood of Cherrydale.

At 17th and N. Monroe sts., I strolled down to glimpse the small wooden (still standing) bungalow that was once the domicile of a first-grade classmate. Then, two blocks over—after I passed a narrow lot now the construction site for a sideways McMansion—I came upon a farmhouse-style completed luxury home.

Its detached garage out back is larger than my classmate’s entire home.