Our third-base coach motioned frantically: “Slide! Slide!”
Adrenaline pumping, I dropped to the ground and felt the red dirt
swooshing underneath my left hip. The other team’s third baseman
stretched out his glove hand for the ball and—
Crack!
The sound of my leg breaking was so loud that I imagined the ball had
zinged in from the outfield and smacked it. Fire exploded in my shin and
ankle. I fell to my back, contracted into a fetal position, and pulled my knee
up to my belly. The pain was searing, and I remember the dirt around me
transforming into a blur of legs, then concerned faces, as two of our
players, both EMTs, ran to my aid.
I dimly remember Sonja rushing over to take a look. I could tell by her
expression that my leg was bent in ways that didn’t look natural. She
stepped back to let our EMT friends get to work. A twenty-mile ride later,
hospital Xrays revealed a pair of nasty breaks. The tibia, the larger bone in
my lower leg, had sustained what doctors call a “spiral break,” meaning
that each end of the break looked like the barber-pole pattern on a drill bit.
Also, my ankle had snapped completely in half. That was probably the
break I had heard. I later learned that the cracking sound was so loud that
people sitting in the stands at first base heard it.
That sound replayed in my head as Sonja and I watched Cassie and
Colton scamper ahead of us in the Butterfly Pavilion atrium. The kids
stopped on a small bridge and peered down into a koi pond, chattering
and pointing. Clouds of butterflies floated around us, and I glanced at the
brochure I’d bought at the front desk to see if I could tell their names. There
were “blue morphos” with wings a deep aquamarine, black-and-white
“paper kites” that flew slowly and gently like snippets of newsprint floating
down through the air, and the “cloudless sulfur,” a tropical butterfly with
wings the color of fresh mango.
At this point, I was just happy to finally be able to walk without a limp.
Besides the hacksaw pain of the spiral break, the most immediate effect
of my accident was financial. It’s pretty tough to climb up and down ladders
to install garage doors while dragging a ten-pound cast and a knee that
won’t bend. Our bank balance took a sudden and rapid nosedive. On a
blue-collar pastor’s salary, what little reserve we had evaporated within