#TBT – Unreliable narrator

It is frankly astonishing that child protective services never showed up at my front door to question my parents.

There was the time I left out some details. 

One of my favorite activities around the age of six was to sit in the middle of a blanket and have my dad pull up the corners to create a Rhiannon sack and carry me around the house.  Bonus if he swung it around a little.  Extra bonus if he deposited me outside the back door.  It felt slightly dangerous, which was thrilling.

So when I had to write about something I enjoy, it only made sense to me to write, “I like it when my dad ties me up in a sheet and throws me around the room.”

At least I wrote it as something I enjoy?  But still, perhaps I should have been more clear.

There was the time my imagination won.

The waterfront of New Bern is built with the sidewalk at river level, and then a higher sidewalk a foot or two above that.  It floods a lot, but that’s not really relevant.

The way I remember it is that I was sitting in the kid seat on the back of my dad’s bike, and he was riding along the upper sidewalk/ledge when suddenly the front wheel slipped off, and we went tumbling down into the vast abyss of the lower sidewalk.  That drop was suddenly like five feet, and we landed on our side, me somehow skinning my knees while still buckled into the baby seat.  I have a very clear memory of this.  I can picture myself scared and on my side after having fallen off this cliff, as my dad scrambled to save me.

My dad says one bike tire dropped off the curb and he corrected it and we went along our merry way.

Likely story, dad.  Likely story.