To the best of my recollection, it was the summer I was about eight years old. We, my cousins and I, were outside playing one of the games little kids like to play, hide-and-seek, freeze tag…I don’t know, we might have been fighting with each other. It was hot. I mean South Alabama, end-of-July, long-time-between-rains hot. The grass was begging for rain and that sandy soil felt like it hadn’t been long since it had come out of the oven to my bare feet. Papaw was sitting in a braided-bottom rocker on his front porch cleaning his finger nails out with his Old Timer pocket knife. It was just one of those wonderful summer days of my past that so much of my present and future rests on.
Well, as playing bare-footed would have it, the fun was about to slow down for a few minutes. I took off running toward the porch, probably to see if I could talk Mamaw out of a drink of water (she wasn’t much for us sweaty, stinkin’ youngin’s coming in the house, so we had to get a drink where the water hose outside was hooked up). About the time I went to jump up on the porch, I didn’t lift my foot high enough. If you said, “ouch,” you got it right. I hung my big toe on the edge of the concrete and peeled the hide from the edge of my toenail down. Immediately a one-legged dance began that resembled some kind of rain dance where the dancer forgot to use his other foot, complete with chanting, or in my case hollering. I hobbled over to Papaw and was wanting some attention. “Oh Papaw, I need a band aid!” Then it happened. One of those seemingly insignificant moments that comes and goes but splashes in the pond of your mind and ripples for the rest of your life. Papaw looked at me through gentle eyes and a slight smile and said, “Aw Derek, put a little dirt in it. It’ll be alright.” Shocked by what seemed in that moment as unconcern, I stopped crying and looked at Papaw. He was serious! Being the trusting kid I was, at least when Papaw said something, I did. I walked right off the porch and wiggled my little, big toe in that sandy dirt. The bleeding stopped. It didn’t get infected. I went right on back to playing almost like nothing happened.
“What is the moral to this little story, Derek,” you may ask. Well, you see, it’s like this. Life often throws us some unexpected turns like not lifting your bare foot high enough when jumping up on the porch. But, generally speaking, that stubbed toe is not as bad as we initially think it is. Just put a little dirt in it.
Now, after saying that last statement, with the present state of pollution in our world, I don’t issue my advice in the literal. I would recommend, rather than dirt for the literal stubbed toe, some soapy water, antibiotic cream and a band aid. But when faced with some proverbial stubbed toe, don’t take it so seriously. Chill out and give it a little time and see if that “one legged, hollering dance” is really merited.
