Knocking Down Blocks

I couldn’t understand why he wanted to bother me; he had his blocks and I had mine.


August 1959

I didn’t know anything about Jeff Ward. I didn’t know that he lived on my block, or that he had a sister named Jackie or that his dad was a chain smoker who worked for Dolly Madison Cakes. I didn’t even know anything about Verdugo Park, the place that would be so important to me in the 1960’s. I just knew that Mom dropped me off at this place with a lot of other kids my age. She might have wanted me to get the idea of kindergarten, which would start for me in a month, or she might have wanted to just shop alone for awhile without her five year old begging for candy. In any case she dropped me off at what must have been some kind of make shift pre-school program in the all purpose room. She promised there would be toys and other kids to play with and that she would be back soon.
There was a grown up watching us. He said things to us but I wasn’t paying attention or I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. He looked like my brother except that he did not alternate from smile to scowl as my brother sometimes would; rather, this guy would look pleasant, like he had something good to say to us, and then he would look like he was watching and thinking about what we were doing. I remember that the activities seemed to change from one moment to the next.
At some point the grown up brought out a large box of blocks, giving us instruction that again I did not understand. I had the general idea though that we were to share the blocks. Sharing seemed to be ever present on the minds of adults. So I took a modest amount of blocks, maybe 3 or 4 and began stacking them. That’s when Jeff Ward entered my life.
He had a large assortment of blocks and was busy making a very high stack. I noticed that he had more blocks than I did but other than that I had no interest in him or what he was doing. I turned my attention back to my stack and began thinking about different ways to arrange the blocks when he spoke to me.
“These are my blocks and you can’t touch my blocks.”
“So?”
“You can’t touch my blocks. You can’t knock them down. If you knock them down, I’ll bite you on the arm.”
“No you won’t.”
“Yes I will.”
I couldn’t understand why he wanted to bother me; he had his blocks and I had mine. It seemed as though he wanted me to knock his blocks down. In any case he was wrong when he said that I couldn’t knock his blocks down because I could if I wanted to, so I did. That’s when he took hold of my left arm like it was corn on the cob and bit me. There was that moment of shock that he actually did what he said he would do and then the pain hit my brain and I screamed.
Someone picked me up from behind and whisked me away, out of the room and sat me on an extended ledge of the window to the room where they would check out board games and balls. I remember returning to a more normal, calm state. There were now two adults, the one that I knew and another one. For a moment I could not recall why I had been crying, and then it came to me as if it had happened on a different day. The two adults were talking to me in a very soothing way. One was applying some kind of antiseptic to the bite, and the blowing on it, each time commenting to the other adult, “Right through the skin, right through the skin.” The two men then talked to each other about my condition, and I began to feel as though the skin between the upper and lower bite marks was had been bitten clean off and was mere floating where it was and that the medicine and the blowing was somehow holding it together and fixing it so it would stay with the rest of my arm.
The adult that I knew then spoke to me about blocks and playing nice but I did not have any particular feelings about the blocks or playing nice. I had already pieced it together and wasn’t mad at Jeff; he did do what he said he would but I was still puzzled about why he created a problem where one did not exist.