I have been fortunate through my life. For, yea, I am a klutz. Despite that fact, serious injury has not befallen me.

I don’t recall how old I would have been, but I was probably in the 8- to 11-year-old range, when one day I was over at the house of a friend who lived just around the corner from me. And we decided to play baseball. And, we had fun (especially because her yard was bigger than ours, though home runs would be hit into the forest instead of over a fence). But it was often hard to retrieve balls, so we’d try to keep them on their lawn instead of ruining the fun by losing the ball.

So, I remember her pitching to me. I remember getting a great hit, and excitedly thinking I had a sure home run. And I started to run. I touched first base, which was probably somebody’s jacket. I ran and kept running as I circled second base, which may have been a patch of sand in the lawn.

Then, as I kept running, something felt wrong. You know those Wile E. Coyote cartoons, where all of a sudden there’s no ground beneath his feet? Yup. There was dew on the grass and I lost my footing. If you were rather generous (and not looking at how far away the ball still was), you might term what happened next attempting to slide into third base. In reality, I was falling into third base.

In a normal game, this would not be a huge problem. But in this one…oh, yes…I guess I haven’t mentioned yet that third base was a tree stump!

Yes, dear reader, third base was a tree stump. And, you can imagine that there are all sorts of different possibilities for how to slide into a base which is a tree stump. Most of those possibilities will leave the athlete with little more than a bruised ego to show for it or maybe a scrape or a bruise.

But your I was no ordinary klutz, and so I managed to surpass such pedestrian efforts at sports bloopers and instead managed to have the bridge of my nose land upon the edge of the stump on my way down. Needless to say, I was a little sore…oh, yes! Did I mention that I sustained a rather severe cut?

In fact, my friend’s mother was a little worried when she saw me. (Panicked might be closer to the truth, though she managed to hide that from her daughter and me.) So she called my mother who drove down and then picked me up and drove me over to emergency where I received something like 4 or 5 stitches in my nose. Isn’t that easy to see, but if you’re close enough (and my glasses aren’t covering the spot), you can still see the mark that game left on me.