2000-09-18 - 1:51pm

On the internal soundtrack: Bach's Prelude V in D major, from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

So, I went skating with the group yesterday, and some guy fell and broke his wrist. Ack. Wrist fractures are supposedly the most common inline skating injury. I'm going to have to nag Poindexter's Papa into wearing some when he skates with me. I'm just too nervous.

I don't know who he was. I stayed there 'til the ambulance came, gave him some water, used my shadow to keep the sun out of his face, gave him my backpack to rest his head on (he didn't get up off the ground).

What I wanted to do, when this happened, was keep skating. There were other people around, after all. And I didn't know what he'd done to himself, and I'm squeamish about injuries and blood (other people's, anyway). Plus, did he really need one more person standing around looking at him?

Well, I figure facing my fears is the way to minimize them, and who knows whether those people standing around would actually do anything to help. So I stopped, and did the abovementioned things to try to make him comfortable. I offered him some Advil or Tylenol, too.

A doctor out biking with her family dropped by, looked at it, and put his wrist across his belly to make him more comfortable. She was very reassuring. She was so sweet I wanted to ask her if she was a GP or internist, if she was taking new patients, but it just seemed terribly inappropriate. She was probably a pediatrician, anyway. Aren't pediatricians always the nicest? If they're not, they'd just have shrieking kids all the time.

But I digress. Eventually the paramedics came, and I paid close attention to how they did the splint. Could come in handy someday.

It's true, though, that facing my fears minimizes them. I think what I'm afraid of most is what my imagination comes up with. Reality is almost never as bad.

So, there's this guy I talk to sometimes on the skates, who is always asking me where my husband is. He's a tease, and he makes cracks that I thought rather lacked in taste. Not that I mind, of course, but some people might take offense, especially if they'd just met him. Yesterday he told me a joke involving the made-up diseases "tolio", "kneesles", and "smallcox", which made me laugh. We had a brief discussion about my inability to be offended, and he said, "That means you have a good sense of humor."

So I told him Sam's favorite "Farmer Brown" joke, which involves a farmer falling asleep in church and a minister asking him religion-related questions to embarrass him into staying awake. The farmer gets the questions right because, although he doesn't hear the questions, an old lady pokes him in the back with her umbrella to wake him up, leading him to shout the correct answers "God Almighty!", "Jesus Christ!". The punchline, in "answer" to the question "What did Mary say to Joseph when he approached her about having another child?", is Farmer Brown saying "If you poke that thing at me one more time, I'm going to break it over your head!"

So, he didn't get the joke at first. Then he said, "I'm very religious," which freaked me out. Was he joking? It's the kind of joke he might make. Nevertheless, I apologized. I told him that I had considered that beforehand, and that he seemed like an irreverent kind of person so I figured he'd take the joke in the spirit in which it was intended, even if he was religious. My grandmother was very religious, too, and she laughed 'til she had tears in her eyes.

I'm not really sure what his point was, here. Was he trying to tell me he was offended? He told me not to feel bad, and that he thought it was a good joke. So why say "I'm very religious", right then? To explain why he didn't get it right away? He said later that he's slow with punchlines. I don't know.

So I felt awful. Still do. Even though intellectually I don't feel that I should. Basically, it's up to him now if he wants to associate with me, knowing that I'll tell a joke like that. We shall see.

The joke does not, after all, put down religious folks or question the religion. It's just a play on how people take the Lord's name in vain. I suppose if you take that commandment very seriously, the joke could be offensive, but even the most religious folks in my family still say "Oh my God" on a fairly regular basis. The older folks like to say "Oh, Lord". Mom's mom, back when she still had pep, said "Holy Moses, bless my soul" if she was really surprised by something.

At any rate, I won't be making any assumptions from now about how religion figures into a person's sense of humor.

previous index next