Where The Sidewalk Ends

The majority of my neighborhood lacks sidewalks; however, once in a while, one will appear out of nowhere, then disappear into some bushes.

Saturday afternoon, I took the punk for a walk. He wasn't enjoying the outing as much as I had hoped he would, so we were on our way back home when (soon after taking this picture,) I heard a man moaning and groaning. I noticed that the older gentleman who had been sitting on his front porch when we passed him going north was no longer there. It puzzled and alarmed me a bit, but I was more curious than afraid. I left the punk in his stroller on the driveway and ventured down the side of the house towards the moaning.

Narrow cement steps descended from the front yard to the back yard, and lying across them were some tree branches. A man ("Mr. X") was stumbling down the last two steps and he had obviously had some kind of accident. His shirt sleeve was torn, and he was bleeding from his elbow and his head. I said, "Sir? Excuse me, Sir, are you hurt?" All the while, he was still moaning, more from shock, I think, than anything else. I asked him if he would like me to call 911, but he refused. Besides being scraped up and a little frightened and winded, he seemed okay. So, after retrieving the punk from his stroller, I met Mr. X inside his house where he attempted to get a hold of his wife while I got him a glass of water. Now that I think about it, it was odd that I was in a stranger's home rummaging around his kitchen trying to find the glasses (which were in the last cupboard I opened, because that's always how those things go), but at the time, it was the most natural thing in the world. A nice gentleman needed my assistance and I was there at the right time. It turns out, he was trying to carry branches up the cement steps to the garbage can, but somehow lost his footing and tumbled down the unforgiving terrain.

I called my man and asked him to come over to help me make sure Mr. X was alright. On his way over, he brought the neighbors who live across the street from the man. These are the same neighbors who helped me when I locked myself out of the house the week before. They are busy people, rescuing everyone around them from crises.

The next day, Mr. X's wife, Mrs. X, retold the story over the pulpit in testimony meeting. Because I was in the mother's lounge with the punk, I only heard bits and pieces, but was commended later for coming to Mr. X's rescue. Apparently, a story becomes better and better the more it is told because today, when a friend in the neighborhood learned that it was me who had "found Mr. X," she was greatly impressed. She had heard that he was lying on the ground when I came to his aid. I'm hoping that as the story circulates, I'll eventually be the girl who, upon finding poor Mr. X at the bottom of a ravine in a pool of his blood, which was pulsating from his severed arm, made a tourniquet from my bra and reattached his limb using my MacGyver skills and grass woven from his overgrown lawn.