frank, jr.

so if you know my father, you know that he is just about the clumsiest guy ever . . . tied with three of my brothers. those three are all just about as clumsy as he is. however, his girls are all equally as clumsy (including me). we may not all look like ol' frankie one eye (as we like to call him since he lost his right eye to cancer and had it removed), but **we all inherited his clumsy gene.**

and before he comments on this note and says he's not clumsy, let me just give you **a rundown of some of his most famous "moments" :**

-- fell down concrete stairs playing santa claus at church and broke his ankle. ended up in the emergency room in full santa garb.

-- kicked a watermelon once on accident. the rind ended up wedging itself between his toe and his toenail. he had to have surgery to have it removed.

-- dropped a frozen pork roast on his foot and broke his ankle. twice.

-- had corrective surgery on his nose to fix his deviated septum; something ends up happening that i can't remember and he runs into a guy or something and his corrective surgery? done for nothing. guy breaks his nose and dad again has a deviated septum.

-- was sitting on the bench of a picnic table; picnic table ends up flipping over and he falls into a fire, burning his hand.

-- is standing inside a small pop-up trailer that my brother failed to mount properly, while preparing his bed for the night; trailer flips on one end and my father falls and gets trapped inside the trailer until my brothers come to his rescue.

-- middle of vietnam war : dad is walking in the dark in his barracks, kicks a bunk bed and breaks his toe (i think it was a toe; it might've been his foot); he likes to tell the story that had they been under attack at that very moment, he would've received a purple heart for his injury.

-- is getting out of the cab of a semi tow truck. misses the step, falls out of the tow truck. stands up, bloody from head to toe, thanks the man for the ride in the tow truck, shuts the door and goes inside the house.

pretty sure that my list can go on and on, but as you can see . . . my point is proven. **my daddy is, by far, one of the clumsiest men i know and now, prolly one of the clumsiest men you know.** so why am i talking about this today? cuz unfortunately, as mentioned previously, i am my father's daughter.

i run into walls constantly. and it's not like i am walking in the dark or in an unfamiliar place. i am typically walking from the living room to my bedroom, via the kitchen. for some reason, whenever i take that corner from the kitchen to my bedroom, **nine times out of ten, i run into the wall.** and i have the bruises to prove it. funny thing is, i have had conversations with my brothers and sisters and they all do the same thing. that one time out of ten that i miss the wall? it's cuz i have to consciously think, "i will not run into that wall" when i am walking by it. my brothers and sisters do the same thing.

once, at dinner, daddy noticed some of my bruises and asked what i did. i told him **my beau beats me.** my beau looked mortified (mind you, this was still fairly new into the relationship). my daddy laughed and asked me what really happened. he knows me too well. turns out, i could only tell him what happened with one of the bruises. the other twelve? not sure where those came from, but undoubtedly, they were from a wall or a desk corner or something of that nature.

last weekend, my beau and i spent the better part of it cleaning and organizing. at one point, he leaves the bedroom to put something away. what do i do? **walk by the bed and kick it,** stubbing my toe to the point that i was pretty sure i broke it (and it's still sore, by the way). of course i screamed and said a few expletives and my beau comes running in. he asks me what happened, am i okay and i just tell him i'm fine. again, he asks what happens, but i refuse to tell him, stating that he makes fun of me and calls me "frank, jr" whenever i hurt myself. he shakes his head, turns and exits the room, leaving me there to rub my toe and wipe tears out of my eyes.

i would go ahead and list all of my latest debaucles but quite honestly, i can't remember how i got most of my bruises. i do remember that i once stepped off the front porch at my parents' house, landing half on the sidewalk, and half in a hole. **twisted my ankle and ended up tearing all the ligaments on the top of my foot.**i still have a bad ankle from that. and once you hurt an ankle in the pritchard family, you always hurt that same ankle.

last night **which brings me to the whole reasoning behind this post** i was putting things away in my room. i happen to have a full-length mirror resting against one of the walls in my bedroom cuz i haven't yet hung it on said wall. let me preface all this with the fact that a couple of times that this mirror has been moved from my room to other places and then put back against the wall in my room for various reasons, i have managed to chip off one of the corners of the mirror, basically leaving a sharp, jagged edge (see picture below).



so what do i do? walk too close to the wall and the said mirror and slice open my "pinky" toe. i can't say that the cut wasn't bad enough for stitches, but since i have no medical insurance, i knew that that wasn't happening. **three bandaids and five bloodied tissues later,** my toe stops bleeding enough for me to put a bandaid on it that i don't have to take off ten minutes later due to the fact that it's blood-soaked and no longer effective at stopping the bleeding. and i can't help but laugh at myself and to silently thank my daddy in my head for those clumsy genes.

and so now, **whenever my beau calls me frank, jr., i just laugh it off.** i might as well quit denying my fate and realize that should i ever have to have kids one day, they'll prolly end up with the same clumsy gene, and their significant others will call them "holly, jr." at least i have someone else to blame for my genes.

**i'm not sure where my daddy gets his from.**