Lake County Memorial Hospital

Cleveland, OH

I am the oldest of six kids. My wife is an only child. When physicists explain the Big Bang, they say things like:

“Time and Gravity didn’t exist until a few movements after the Bang, when elements cooled enough to create order. Prior to that, the universe is best thought of as pure chaos that we cannot understand.”

My wife looks at my family as something that was born in that tumultuous inferno, before organization and gravity took hold.

When Jess first met my parents, she mentioned that there were only ten guests at her parents’ wedding. When my mom heard that, she gave a bellowing laugh and said, “Oh, honey, I think that many people were kicked out of our wedding!”

Many of my current habits are due to growing up inside the loudness of a large family in a small house. I speak too loudly; I eat food too quickly; I take curiously-short showers; but, most of all, I am completely unbothered by injuries.

Someone was always getting hurt in our house. You would hear laughter and play outside, then a kid would enter the house with a branch sticking out of their eyeball.

The sounds of the injuries had structured movements, like a symphony. First was the raucous banging and crashing and laughing: The Overture. Then a crash, inordinately louder than all previous crashes: The Accident. This is immediately followed by The Silence, which is the scariest part—because silence is the most unnerving thing you can hear from a child. Silence means they have either hurt themselves so badly that we’re all taking a trip to the hospital, or they have broken something so expensive, they are left speechless. Silence means they are processing consequences.

Next we have The Crescendo, when one of the non-injured kids runs down the stairs, a screaming herald, announcing: “Mom! Dad! Mom! Brendan just broke every bone in his body!”

A parent will run in, asking for more details, which then leads to: The Reveal. Brendan descends the stairs slowly with a clearly broken wrist. “Shit!” your mom yells knowing she has to pack up six kids and go to the emergency room. The Injury Symphony always ends with the same Carol: the herald yelling, “It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t my fault!”

If you were to hear only the sounds of that house, you would think the world’s most happy, yet accident-prone construction crew was constantly renovating it. This was back when kids could hurt themselves; the final years of The Era of The Great Whoopsie-Daisy, which stretched from the start of humanity to the late 1980s—before the introduction of childproof bottle caps and car seats and helicopter parents —when kids still had some level of independence, which they used to, almost exclusively, injure themselves.

Throughout history, the story of kids playing is a story of each generation being amazed at how much more danger they got in than their progeny. Every story I’ve heard from an adult about his or her childhood concludes with a laugh, a pause, then the same universal thought:

“Wow, you would get arrested if you let kids do that now.”

Everything our parents allowed us to do a mere two decades ago would land them in jail today. My father-in-law built a functioning guillotine for my wife’s third grade class Halloween party. When I asked him if it worked, he answered, “It could have decapitated a horse.” My siblings and I would often be driven four towns over in the bed of a pickup truck, like pumpkins being shipped to the market. Nowadays, I honestly believe if a helicopter were to crash and explode in the middle of a highway it would generate fewer 911 calls then if people saw a man merge onto that same highway with six kids in the back of his truck.

My siblings and I often tease our parents about allowing these activities—“We could have died!”—and they always respond with, “We didn’t know any better! Back then it was normal.” And then, in what is a better defense, they share a story about how their childhoods were even crazier. My parents have insane stories about playing hide and seek in active factories in Cleveland, being bitten by actual junkyard dogs, or falling through ice. Each of my uncles has a story of plunging into a frozen body of water.

“What?” we’d inquire, “how did you fall through ice, Uncle Marty?”

“Well, your grandpa got home,” the reply would start, “—he was a window washer you know—and he liked to relax with a beer. And I started asking him questions. I think I was asking him what the difference between a toad and a frog was and he said, ‘Why don’t you and your brothers go play on that ice?’ And the next thing you know: I’m trapped under one inch of ice.”

Half the stories of my parents and their peers end with them chuckling, “I thought I was going to die!”. It’s a big escalation past our feeble, “We could have died, mom!” complaint.

But crazier yet are the stories of my grandparents being raised by their parents, my great-grandparents. My Grandpa Flannery only had one eye. He often removed his glass eye, and let it roll about on the table while he napped; he said the eye could watch us while he slept, like if Sauron just wanted a decent rest. He had seven brothers and I don’t think any of them had a full set of eyes.

When I asked my grandpa how he lost his eye, he described his best friend shooting him in the face while hunting birds for dinner: “I thought I was dead,” he finished laughing, somehow one-upping the old, “I thought I was gonna die!”

Then you go back further and further, until you eventually reach the Bible, where the parents are so negligent, most of their kids were killed by their own siblings or swallowed by whales. They grin, their final words being, as the lions encircle or the whale inhales, “Whelp, I’m dead.”

That was the story of humanity: each generation grew up unsafely and, upon becoming an adult, raised their kids slightly more cautiously while laughing at how dangerous their own youth was.

But that makes me wonder: Now that the Era of the Great Whoopsie-Daisy is over, and a child is never alone for more than two seconds, what will this current generation laugh about when they grow old? What could my kids possibly look back on and say, “Wow that was dangerous; I can’t believe we were allowed to do that.”

My best guess is: peanuts. Peanuts might be banned in forty years.

They will still exist, but it will be like buying cigarettes, where you will need a photo ID to get them and, like smoking, you won’t be allowed to consume them in public. In fifty years, if you eat a peanut in a public park, police will descend on you like you just exposed yourself to a group of joggers.

A few years ago, I sent one of my kids to school with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the school— with no exaggeration—reacted like I packed a sandbag full of live grenades.

“What were you thinking?” my wife asked me incredulously that night.

“It’s peanut butter; not actual peanuts, babe,” I responded.

“It doesn’t matter, Sean. There are too many allergies.”

“It’s a sandwich! People have been eating PB&J’s for centuries without a problem. Plus, it comes from a grocery store! Everything in that fucking store is just made out of corn syrup dyed to the right color! But, even if there were peanuts in it, I ask you: Where did all these kids with allergies that sensitive come from? Where were they when I was growing up? Did a prolific seducer with a peanut allergy”—I was gyrating my hips at this point, like the seducer—”travel America and father an entire generation of peanut-allergic kids?”

“I don’t care!” she snapped, “I don’t care where it came from. Just don’t make a PB&J for his lunch! I don’t want to get called into the principal’s office again.”

“Did they ever over-react to that!” I sighed and pondered, “You know, when I was growing up, if you hadn’t studied for a test and you wanted to shut down school, you called in a bomb threat. But now, if I was a kid and I hadn’t studied for a test, I would just pack myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They would shut down that school like they just found a gas leak!”

“Jesus,” said Jess, “don’t tell our kids this.”

“What part?”

“Any of it! You! I don’t want them to know you don’t believe in allergies or that you hated school. Or that you called in bomb threats!”

“Well what did you guys do?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“We studied!”
 

W henever my wife yells at me during a disagreement, I never think it’s due to the current debate as much as that the current debate revealed how big of a jackass I used to be, and she’s alarmed that she is raising kids with such a person. I once used the word “exacta” in an argument and she asked what that meant, thinking it would be some Latin phrase I knew and she would benefit from.

“It’s when you correctly predict the first two horses in a race, in the exact order,” I explained.

“How do you know that word?” she asked.

“I used to skip high school and go bet on horses.”

This was followed by a full minute of silence and her staring at me.

“You didn’t know that about me?” I asked, eventually.

My wife knows me better than anyone and most of that knowledge comes directly from our conversations; sharing what bands we enjoy or stories of how our families celebrated Christmas. But my wife does not fully understand how big of a disaster I used to be, or, if she does, she has deduced it indirectly, the way an archaeologist understands a past civilization by looking at bones. For example, at the first family wedding Jessica attended with me, I broke my ribs drinking with my brothers the night before the wedding. Jessica was flabbergasted, less by the injury, but more by how normal my family considered it.

The four sides of my family are Flannery, Murray, Donovan, and McGinty, and I would say, at any wedding on any one of those sides, at least ten percent of the guests are attending with a bone they broke in the previous twenty-four hours.

When you are in a family like mine, bad injuries and trips to the hospital blend together the same way trips to the beach seem to most families: realistically, you were there often but only the biggest trips are remembered. These are the three I best remember:
 

1. When my brother Paul broke his arm.
 

My wife and I obviously have a lot of divergent customs, me being the oldest of six and her being an only child, but none separate more than how birthdays are treated. The way my wife explains how her birthday was celebrated growing up sounds like how the Soviet Union celebrated the birth of Lenin: a month of parades and bowing and gifts. And the best way to sum up how my family treated birthdays is to point out that for the first nine years of his life, we celebrated my brother Paul’s birthday on the wrong day.

Paul broke his arm. Or maybe it was his wrist or a finger; no one really recalls what he broke, only that during the admittance process at the emergency room— as they consulted their records—we discovered that Paul was born on a completely different date than the one we had been celebrating. And we were not off by a day or two; it was a completely different season. He went from a winter birthday to a summer birthday.

“Thank God you don’t seem to be much of an astrology family,” the nurse said. An understatement, considering that one of the kids just had his birthday moved half a year ahead.

In most families, where your birthday is tied to your identity this might have been a more traumatic experience, but Paul cut right to the meat of the matter:

“Does that mean I’m actually older?”

“Yes,” my parents answered.

“So, my real birthday already happened?”

“Yes.”

“So, hmm…” he pondered as he hopped down, his arm now in a cast, “...can we get a cake?”

“Yes.”

Paul exited the room, managing his cast, announcing “GUYS! I have great news!” His arm was in a splint and he was holding an X-Ray. “We are getting a cake!” he proclaimed.

“YES! Hooray!” we yelled back. “Is it because you were so tough about the injury?”

“No! It’s because the doctor says I’m a year older!”

“You’re not seven anymore?”

“Nope!”

We looked at each other puzzled, not sure how to interpret that, but behind us was a teenager with road rash and I heard the kid’s dad whisper, “What the hell kind of operation did that kid have?”
 

2. When my sister Eileen got into the medicine cabinet.
 

I remember the first time my mom and dad left me and my sister Sarah in charge of the other four kids while they went out for an evening. I was probably around eleven or twelve and my sister was a year younger. It was the last time I was part of “management.” Sarah was placed singularly in charge after this incident.

Like all people who have been fired, I maintain I was let go because I took instructions from management “too seriously.”

As my parents were leaving, they left a note detailing what restaurant they would be at and the phone number to it so they could be contacted if anything happened (again, before cell phones).

“But don’t call unless you really need us!” my dad added.

“Brian! We want them to call if something is wrong!” my mom corrected him. She assured us that she wanted us to call if there was an emergency but to not bother them with small bickering. While she was explaining this, my dad shook his head “no” at me, signaling he just did not want to be bothered. I give him an “I got it” look.

They left.

About an hour later, Eileen—who was two or three at this time and who we thought was sleeping—walked downstairs to see us. She was blue and swollen to twice her size.

“What happened to you?” Sarah asked, concerned. Eileen held out a canister of medicine.

“Oh no! She ate medicine!” Sarah yelled.

“Well, hold on,” I responded calmly, “it could be fiber or something. Let’s not panic.”

Sarah grabbed the bottle and read it. “It’s dad’s back medicine!” she exclaimed, “I’m gonna call mom and dad.” She started walking to the phone and I ran in front of her.

“Hold on, they asked us not to bother them,” I reminded her.

“Sean, she’s a baby that ate adult-back-pain medicine.”

“Sarah, I think we can all agree she’s learning a valuable lesson.”

“What?! We need to call them!”

“We were specifically instructed not to do that.”

“That was for bickering! This is an emergency!”

It should be noted that by this point Eileen was now, physically, the biggest kid in the house and blue. She was laughing and having a good time and did not appear sick.

“I agree this isn’t a great situation. But I don’t think we should bother them,” I opined.

Sarah shook her head, walked around me, called the restaurant and described my parents so the hostess could locate them and inform them they had a phone call. When I watched movies as a kid, it was common for one of the characters to get a call at a restaurant. A tuxedoed waiter would interrupt a party and apologize, explaining a phone call was waiting for them; our heroes would answer and learn that their lead witness was just shot or that France has tested a new type of nuclear bomb. It always seemed so fancy and important to receive a phone call at a restaurant, but you eventually grow up and realize that when people get a phone call at a restaurant in real life, it is the babysitter saying one of the kids just broke their shoulder.

There was a pause as the hostess looked for our parents. Eventually I heard Sarah say, “Mom? Eileen ate dad’s back pain medicine.”

Sarah listened for a few seconds, then started answering questions:

“She looks swollen, but is happy...We don’t know how many she ate because she spilled the rest in the sink...I think most of the bottle is in the sink...it all just happened...Ok...OK!”

At this point, I felt the need to apologize to our parents for this overreaction and to let them know I was against it. I grabbed the phone:

“Mom? It’s Sean. Listen, I told Sarah we shouldn’t bother you with this. I know she is overreacting and everything will be fine.”

There was a measurable pause, and the hostess at the restaurant answered, “Your parents already left. In a hurry.”

Many years later, after our grandparents passed, we found a letter that my brother Paul mailed to our grandma. It was an assignment at school to write and mail a letter:

“Hi Granma,

I LoVe you. I loss 2 tooths and TooTTH Fairy came!!

Uh uh. I havta go Granma.

Eileen ate daddy’S medizine and is puprole.”
 

3. When my brother Kevin swallowed paint thinner.
 

It used to be as easy for a child to open a can of paint thinner as it was for them to open as a container of milk—actually, no, that’s not correct; it was actually harder to open milk because milk was shipped in a cardboard obelisk that was impossible to unfold. Paint thinner lids, on the other hand, unscrewed as easily as turning a doorknob. When I was growing up, it was easier to get into rat poison than a school-issued carton of orange juice.

One day, Kevin was in the garage with my dad, and stumbled across a jar that stunk of fumes. Kevin asked my dad what it was.

“The strongest whiskey in the world!” my dad joked. My brother Kevin, being obsessed with pirates and reasonably confident that he had once heard that pirates drank mostly whiskey, replied, “Ahoy, matey!” and, in one motion—before my dad could intervene—opened the paint thinner and chugged a huge mouthful.

My dad scooped up Kevin, and ran inside the house yelling, “POISON CONTROL!”

To understand the rest of the story—and why I probably remember this incident so vividly—you must know that in the mid-1980s, my home city of Cleveland, Ohio did not yet support the national 911 emergency line. Meaning that when your kid decided to drink paint thinner like a buccaneer trying to dull a toothache; or even when you got mugged or your uncle accidentally lit the pergola on fire, all of those required that you look up the local number for the correct fire department or police.

It was chaos.

And the phones reflected that: everyone had giant, yellow stickers on their phones with the local numbers for various emergency services; police, fire, hospital, poison control, veterinary services, etc. Your phone had more warnings and emergency instructions on it than the emergency escape door on a plane.

The stickers in question were the national, mass-produced kind, just a label marked with an icon—a cross for the hospital, a flame for the fire department, etc.—and you wrote the relevant local number for your city next to them and affixed the completed sticker to your phone. Meaning that, in the moment of the emergency, someone was going to need to read a handwritten number off the phone then dial all ten digits with no mistakes.

Like I said: chaos.

“Poison Control!” my dad yelled, holding Kevin.

“What happened?” my mom asked, grabbing Kevin and hugging him. He started to vomit.

“He drank paint thinner!”

“What?” my mom gasped.

My dad grabbed the receiver off the phone and barked, “It’s a long story!” which is hilarious because it’s genuinely one the shortest stories I’ve ever heard: my dad told his son that poison was potable, as a joke. I have learned, through both my dad’s actions and my own, that when a father brings home an injured child with the excuse, “it’s a long story,” he is really saying,, “I grossly underestimated several risk factors.”

My dad was trying to read the handwritten number on the receiver while simultaneously dialing the digits on the rotary, and was visibly struggling.

“Sean, read the poison control numbers!” he barked.

“Got it dad!” I responded.

“I already dialed 216,” he said, referencing the area code.

“Got it. 878.”

“Dammit! Ok, 878.”

“5461.”

“5461. Done.”

“Hi! Poison Control?! My son just drank paint thinner!”

There was a very short pause, followed by my dad hollering, “This isn’t poison control?!”

My dad had apparently dialed the wrong number. Meanwhile, Kevin had stopped vomiting and now seemed fine; he was explaining how he came to drink paint thinner, the whole pirate/whiskey confusion. “This isn’t 216-878-5461?” my dad snapped, trying to verify the phone number.

Another aspect that will baffle young people about pre-smartphone telephony was that when you dialed an incorrect number it wasn’t like today, where you just apologized and hung up. No, it was a mystery that needed to be solved. Did I dial the wrong number? Or did I dial it correctly, but the number is written down wrong? Or is the person answering the phone just an asshole? A short interrogation would follow.

Also at this moment, my brother Paul was loudly explaining to Kevin that pirates don’t drink whiskey, they drink rum.

“What? Are you sure?” Kevin asked back.

“Of course! Everyone knows pirates drink rum. You’re thinking of leprechauns. Leprechauns drink whiskey, you moron!”

My dad put his hand over the mouthpiece and screamed at the kids, “Stop talking about liquor for a moment!” He waited for silence, and returned to this call:

“216-878-5461? Right? What? And it’s not poison control?”

This meant that my dad had dialed the number correctly, but we had seemingly written down the incorrect number for poison control in the first place. Dad hung up, saying, “Let me see that phone, Sean.”.

I gave it to him, and he re-examined the number.

“Sheila, is this a ‘one’ or a ‘seven’ at the end? I can’t read your writing.”

“It’s a seven,” my mom said without even looking.

“How do you know?”

“We dial it once a week.”