Monkey Bars

In my earliest detailed memory, I was three. My mother was pregnant. I was playing in the park and was up on top of the monkey bars. They don't seem to have monkey bars in parks anymore. Anyway, I was up at the top, and I yelled out to my father, "Look Daddy, no hands."

As you might expect, I fell. I remember falling, but I don't remember hitting the cement. I must have been unconscious for a while because the next thing I remember is my father taking me back to our apartment. I was crying because I'd scraped my thumb. My father took me to his uncle Benny, a GP, and uncle Benny took an X-ray of my skull. He diagnosed a fracture and said I needed to stay in bed for a month

Just so you'll know, they no longer prescribe quite so much rest for a linear fracture of the skull that doesn't need surgery, which I didn't need. I remember that at night, I was in my own bed, but in the daytime, my parents let me rest in their bed. That was good because their bed was much springier than mine, and whenever they weren't in the room, I'd be jumping up and down on the bed.

It was only a three room apartment so, thinking about it, my parents must have known what I was doing. Jumping on the bed has a distinctive sound. But they let me do it. I'm not sure they kept that bed rest thing up for an entire month. My sense of time wasn't all that accurate, and I didn't know about calendars when I was three.

I have a tonsillectomy memory from around that same age. I'd been
getting sick pretty often, and the doctor would come to our little
apartment and give me a shot. Eventually, he told my parents I needed
to get my tonsils out.

My parents took me to Beth Israel Hospital in New York, the same hospital where I was born, I remember a doctor in a mask holding a bad smelling rubber thing on my face and telling me to count to ten. I never got to ten, My next memory was that I was in an elevator, asking my mother when they were going to take out my tonsils, She told me they were already out and that I was going to get ice cream.

They put me in a pediatric ward with lots of other kids,and they told me I'd have a special nurse who would be right by my crib all the time. My problem with that was that when I woke up in the middle of the night, I was a bit reluctant to tell a stranger that I had to pee. Eventually, I did tell her.

I have no specific memory of actually getting any ice cream.