January 16 Dennis Chavez Elementary

Hired a new dentist to work with us this week, Dr. Karen Misla. So far, so good! The school is old and outdated, and the roof was being torn out and re-shingled. Despite the aging look of the school, last year they built a new $1.2 million gymnasium, a real thing of beauty that stills smell like freshly laid rubber flooring and wood in the rafters. Without question, this will be replaced with a stinky sock and gymshorts sort of odor as time goes on, but for now the smell matches the view.

As I often do now when I go into a gym, I caught myself studying the rafters and the ceiling and sort of chuckled....1985 was a rough year, as we had just returned from Guam and I was attending Castle Rock Jr. High in Colorado. Within a 5 week period, I had my tonsils removed (no easy operation for me as I had complications), a severe case of chicken pox that left me quite badly scarred, and then the incident in the gym. I had just returned from the chicken pox sickness, and was playing 3-on-3 basketball in gym class in preparation for 7th grade basketball tryouts. I was going up for a layup when all of the sudden I felt something heavy and metallic-like come crashing down on my head. I remember laying on the floor, dazed, and had the uneasy paranoiac thought that someone had thrown a Walk-man stereo through my brain. I was escorted to the locker room to put a towel on my bleeding head and to get the cobwebs out. As I was laying down, my friend Ed Taylor came up to me and showed me what had hit me. He held up the largest, fattest bolt I'd ever seen. It was probably 10 inches long, an inch thick, and weighed quite a bit. The gym coach then explained to me that this was one of the metal bolts that held up the metal rafter beams at the top of the gym ceiling, and that it had somehow wiggled loose from the rafters, fallen down, and grazed the back of my head precisely as I was going up for the winning layup! A trip to the radiologist later that day revealed no cracked skull or serious concussion, but even he admitted that if that bolt had hit me even a 1/4 inch closer to the center of my head, it would've undoubtedly cracked my skull and likely killed me...

and now you know why I always study the ceiling of a gymnasium!