No Hands

I had twenty dollars and I spent it all on donuts. There was a Winchell's near my house and my little friends and I rode there on our bikes. We picked out what seemed like hundreds of pastries and I payed for them all with my twenty dollar bill. (I later received a lecture from my father about "the value of a dollar." This lecture failed. For one thing, it was poorly framed. I could not make the abstraction from "a dollar" to "money in general." I just kept thinking, "a dollar isn't worth very much at all." To this day I maintain my contemptuous attitude towards money, though I do try to avoid blowing it on donuts.) So now I had all these donuts to carry and I had to get them home so we could eat them all. My little friends didn't offer to help carry the load, and I didn't ask. They just told me to ride my bike with no hands as they rolled off down the hill. I had never been able to ride my bike with no hands and now I had to do just that, while holding two giant bags of donuts. I started off down the hill and almost immediately crashed. My little friends were long gone. There were boxes of donuts everywhere. I was laying in the middle of the street with blood pouring out of my leg. Some neighborhood woman had seen the crash from her front porch. She rushed out to help me. She didn't have any proper bandages, so she tried to cover the wound with a paper bag from some clothing store. The bag had a drawing of a woman's face on it, and it had the bright primary colors and bold lines common to the fashions of the late 80's. I was overwhelmed by the situation and the earnestness of the woman's attempt at first-aid. I felt she was too beautiful to be out there in the street with me and my donuts. Soon I was able to ride home, pushed away from the scene by a profound feeling of embarrassment. I still have the scar. It is a small white patch on my shin where no hair grows.