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Attention Stance

by Michael Mandaville  

“You have to take your son to the Emergency room.”

Such words throw a stone into any parent’s stomach. We worry and fret over our children in these times, worried about threats from predators released in a lax justice system, car accidents and schoolyard injuries. Fortunately, it was the latter.

I drove to the school, speeding along streets. My heart was racing. As a parent, we seek to comfort our child, to hold them when the world seems to be crashing around them and, for a short while, shield them from life’s harsher realities.

My son, Johnny, is a typical seven-year old boy – energetic, daring, always pushing the envelope. On this occasion, he’d been climbing the jungle gym at school and, attempting a quadruple Olympic handspring, landed hard on his chin. The nurse said that, though it bled profusely, Johnny had hardly cried, probably very scared.

I raced through the front door of the school. Johnny was lying down in the clinic with a bandaged chin. The nurse showed me the wound. It was the size of a dime, cut to the bone. I carried him out to the car, put him in his seat and dashed for the Cedars-Sinai Emergency room.

The facility was crowded, brimming with patients. A few were bleeding, moaning in pain. I sensed Johnny’s fear rise a notch. Once through the paperwork, we waited our turn and were led to a room bustling with nurses and helpers. Seated on a bed, the doctor came over and examined the gash on Johnny’s chin.

“Playing pretty hard, huh?” asked the doctor.

Johnny seemed shy, but it was fear. A woman in the next bed had bloody bandages. A man to our right was getting a row of stitches on his forearm. Johnny clenched his jaw and nodded.

“Looks like you’re going to need some stitches,” concluded the doctor, giving Johnny a friendly pat. Within minutes, a nurse approached us with an emesis basin, bandages and a local anesthetic solution. He held the basin under Johnny’s chin and applied the solution. Another patient came into the room, sobbing uncontrollably. I could feel Johnny’s chest pumping. I took his hand. He clutched mine, hard. It was time for the stitches.

The doctor pulled up a chair and examined the wound, probing for any splinters or dirt. Satisfied, he laid out several stitch kits. “We have quite a bit of stitching to do here. Maybe fifteen little ones and six or eight big ones.”

I nodded. Johnny’s eyes went wide, looking over at the man with the stitched forearm. This was not promising.

“It’s alright Johnny,” I said. “You can’t feel your chin, right?”  He nodded. It wasn’t the chin. It was the fear. Johnny lay down on the table.

The doctor set down a bed sheet and opened a stitch kits. He pulled out the first stitch kit which looked ominously like a fish hook big enough to pull in a swordfish from the Pacific. “Alright, Johnny,” said the doctor, “You’re going to have to be very still. You can’t push my hands away or move around when I’m doing this, right? Otherwise, it might just make a bigger cut. So you have to be very still, understand? We’re either going to have to use a bed sheet and wrap you up in it to hold your arms down or, maybe your dad can hold your arms.” This was not the doctor’s first fishing expedition. He’d done this before, probably with tons of kids, dealing with the expected hysteria. He had the fish hook in hand, looking down at Johnny. The bedsheet was standing by.

“No,” said Johnny. “I’m going to attention stance.”

The doctor’s face screwed up quizzically, leaving the fishhook hovering in the air. “What?”

Johnny’s gaze was steady. “I’m going to attention stance.”

The doctor looked up from Johnny to me. I could read his expression right away. Oh my God. These people are in a cult.

Well, we don’t wear Nikes and purple capes, just our uniforms. “Johnny takes Kenpo,” I said.

The eyes still said ‘cult’.

“Kenpo karate,” I said. “The kids not only learn self-defense, but self-discipline. During class, they have to come to attention stance.”

The doctor’s face deflated in sheer relief, washing away his trepidation.

“My dad doesn’t have to hold my arms,” insisted Johnny. “I’m going to be at attention stance.”

The doctor looked from me down to Johnny and nodded. “Oh, man,” he said. “We need more Kenpo kids.”

He got to work. Johnny’s chin was numb but that did little to blunt the fear in his heart from the painful groans a few feet away, the ghastly cut on a man’s forearm or the bloody bandages from a patient beyond the curtain.

He lay there, perfectly still, through six large stitches and twelve minor stitches. A few tears glistened down his cheeks from fear, from the unknown, from reality chipping away at his childhood idyll.

Tears did come to my eyes, resonating to my memory of Johnny’s yellow belt test. On that day, James West and I, instructors on the board, gave belts to our sons. Mr. Hawkins noted that it was rare for one teacher to give a belt to his son, but never two instructors. That day also brought tears of joy to both James and me. I can only remember saying that I stood on the board, with the finest people I’ve ever known and you, my son, have taken the first important step in life’s journey, today, with your belt.

My pride in Johnny echoed now in another place, removed by time and distance. He passed his yellow belt test. Another in the Emergency Room that day.

A day will come when I must surrender him to life’s currents, the ebb and flow of its mystery, but that day is not now. Both moments crystallized immutable truths.

That there are those for whom I would forfeit my life.

That a legacy must be left.

And that time itself is fleeting.

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