When I was the ripe old age of sixteen, I was the unwilling recipient of a BB in the eye.  Yes, the first thing that will come to your mind is the warning of Ralphie’s mom, or even funnier, that of the department store Santa, both of whom are from A Christmas Story.   Well, friends, I’d like to think that Jean Shepherd (the writer of that story) borrowed the whole idea from me…but of course, I won’t.  That cry (and the title of this blog) has been the cry of many a mother for many years, and that BB hit my eye a good five years or so before that movie came out.
        Now, let’s clear some things up.
        The offending BB did not exactly shoot my eye out.  It is true that I am indeed using one eye as I hammer these words out on my Royal KMM typewriter in February of 2024.  But this has nothing to do with the other story about the BB.   We’ll talk about this story, the present-day story, in a minute. But for now, we’ll jump back to 1979.
        I won’t go into specifics as to how that BB got into my face.  Let’s just say that I was involved in the kind of tomfoolery that you think is all fun and really cool when you are sixteen and are a fan of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies.  This is the same kind of tomfoolery that you look back on now and realize was damn stupid.  I almost wish that, at the time, there was someone yelling “Don’t do it, you moron, you’ll shoot your eye out!”  But there wasn’t.  The adults who might have yelled those words were, at the time, upstairs watching The Love Boat, never realizing that a moment of near-tragedy was unfolding in the basement.  The perpetrators of that near-tragedy, three teenage boys, should have been out looking for girls, rather than playing with a BB pistol in the basement.
        Regardless of how it happened…I won’t give you the play-by-play, because we were all at fault…a little after eight o’clock on a late winter evening in 1979, just before my seventeenth birthday, a BB made contact with the left side of my face, in between the side of my nose, directly underneath the corner of my left eye.  When it hit, I felt like I had been punched in the nose and the sudden tinnitus could have shattered a glass, had one been standing on top of my head.  I almost wish it had been, it would have made a better target.  I had been sitting in a chair and immediately turned to my right and leaned over its right arm.  I covered my right eye, the good one, and could see very clearly out of my left eye.
        “It’s okay, it didn’t hit my eye!!” I screamed, in an effort to calm down the other two guys in the room.  Empathetic of me, wasn’t it?
        However, what I witnessed was a pool of blood that had formed on the basement floor, courtesy of a steady stream of blood that was pouring out of both nostrils.
        (You can open your eyes now, the gory part is over.)
        I grabbed what I thought was a nearby cloth, which turned out to be a shirt laying on top of a nearby laundry basket.   After gathering ourselves, we made the long trudge up the basement stairs to the main part of the house, in order to await our fate.  I mean, there was no way we were going to be able to hide this from Mom and Dad.  Especially if that was Dad’s shirt that I had grabbed.
        Well, naturally, common sense prevailed and the parents in question remained very calm as Mom prepared more paper towels for me (apparently, that had been a really, really good shirt).  No hysterics;  in fact, we filled the next hour with humor, which is the best antidote for a potentially stressful and traumatic situation that somehow turned out all right, no harm done.
        The funny thing is that it was two hours later when I got the shakes really bad.  Mom was very close to giving me a shot of whiskey, but figured maybe that wouldn’t be a good thing to have the doctors find in my blood if I did, in fact, wind up in the hospital.
        The nose stopped bleeding and I went to bed.  I couldn’t fall asleep for awhile, and I am glad that I didn’t, because Dad made a rare appearance in our bedroom, sitting down on the edge of the bed and remarking how lucky I was.
        “You know,” he said.  “You may think that things don’t go your way and you may complain about things not going your way.  But tonight, you have no idea how much someone was looking out for you.  Call it Lady Luck, call it a Guardian Angel, whatever.  You just remember this bit of good luck whenever you start bemoaning how you never got picked for the Little League team or that you can’t get a girlfriend.”
        Okay Dad, I get your point, but did you really have to go there?
        The fact is that, yeah, in my youth, I was a pretty good second baseman.  Or at least I would have been if I had ever progressed from sandlot games and gotten into organized little league.  I had great range, being a tall and somewhat flexible kid.  I was six-foot and weighed like a hundred and ten.  My pants size was a 28-36.   It was really hard to get pants to fit me.  Your run of the mill department stores wouldn’t have much in stock, and when the tailors saw me coming, they’d run off.
        My point is, I didn’t have alot of meat on me.  I could hit screaming line drives, but those coaches were looking for kids who could knock the cover off the ball.
        As far as the other thing to which Dad alluded?
        Let’s put it this way.  If I could have played second base, I might have gotten to first base, you know what I’m saying?   But whatever…
        By the time I went back to school that Monday morning, I had two black eyes.  People thought I had gotten into a bout with Kid Dynamite or something like that.  I should have played that card, I should have told that story.  But, no, I was in a Catholic high school and I felt it in my heart to tell the truth.  Or, some colorful fabrication of it.
        With two black eyes, I am glad that I was at an all-boys school.  I would have never wanted the pretty McAuley girls seeing me like that.  Not that it did that much good without the black eyes…
        Now, let’s jump forward forty-five years.
        If that’s not a jump-forward right out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, then I don’t know what is.
        Through Christmas of 2023, just a couple of short months ago, I had the cold that everyone else in the world seemed to have caught.  Around New Year, it went into my ears.  I was just taking an antihistamine and the fact that my hearing was cut to fifty-percent wasn’t a bad thing.  In fact, it’s a good reason to throw subtitles on when you’re watching a movie, a habit I have picked up.   I wished I could have had them on when I saw Oppenheimer in the theatre.  Three hours of discussions about nuclear physics, guys, please give me something so I can follow along.
        Eventually that went away to a degree.  On the evening of Friday, January 12, I felt a sudden, short pressure behind my right eye.  Note that it was the right eye and not the left.  I know what you were thinking there for a moment.  The dull pain went away just as quickly.
        On the morning of Wednesday, January 17, I woke up with double vision.
        I somehow drove to work and back;  thankfully, I only live five blocks from the office, six if you count my occasional stop at Dunkin Donuts, and don’t judge me.
        The ride home, though, was an adventure, as the double vision was getting worse.  I almost took out six side-view mirrors from parked cars as I came down Homan Avenue.
        I went to the doctor the next afternoon, as I was thinking that my sinuses were screwing up my vision.  I told the story to my doctor and I could see the panic rising in his eyes.  All four of them.  He ordered a CT scan of my brain and told me to get downstairs to radiology as fast as my two legs…well, four…could get me.  Well, this did my blood pressure no good, as you can imagine.  I got the quick scan and he sent me home, telling me he’d call me with the results.
        An hour later, he called to tell me that the brain scan showed no abnormalities.
        I kept thinking of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners:  “Alice, you can send me to any doctor in world to check my head.  You can bring doctors down from the MOON to examine my head.  And you know what?  They’ll find nothing there!”
        But I did have acute sinusitis, he put me on penicillin and sent me to an ophthalmologist.   Since then, I have been to an ENT once, and the eye doctor three times. 
        I asked him, “Should I get an MRI?”
        The eye doctor replied, “You really can’t.”
        “Why not?”
        He scratched his chin before replying.
        “I’m looking at this CT scan.  Do you know that you have a BB lodged in the bone underneath your left eye?”

        That’s it folks.  If I so much as walk into a room with an active MRI machine, I am going to get sucked into it like a bird in a jet engine.
        Now, all is going to be fine.  Somehow, I am suffering from (not really suffering, but being hellishly inconvenience by) something called Sixth Cranial Nerve Palsy.  This means that, for a little while, my right eye is kind of stuck and won’t turn to the right.  This is what is causing the double vision.  It is believed that this will fix itself in two or three months.  The eye is already showing some signs of flexibility.
        This just means that I have to walk around with a frosted sleeve on the right lens of  my glasses, because my left eye…would you believe…is absolutely fine.  It’s doing all the hard work now.
        Because the CT scan showed no abnormalities, both the ENT and the eye doctor feel that there is no urgency, that this should clear up soon.   My Google searches tell me it should be three months. 
        I can deal with that, am I am getting along fine.  Really, the worst part of the double vision is going to the bathroom and seeing two streams.  That freaks you out for a minute.
        If this does not show significant change by, say, the end of March, they will go in and do the MRI.
        How do you suppose they will do that, you say, with that BB still lodged in the lower crown of my left eye?  The very BB that we had imagined had just bounced away those forty-five years ago?
        The ENT, who, conveniently, is a surgeon, says that it will be very easy for him to remove it.  He says he can just lower my eyelid, make a slit, and then drill it out.  I listened to this intently and asked, quietly, “And you will, of course, do this while I am out cold, right?”
        This all begs one final question before I let you go.
        After he takes it out, what in the hell do I do with it?
        I am thinking that I ought to keep the damn thing.  It’s been a part of me since 1979 and I’ve kind of gotten used to it.   I would not feel the same way about a ruptured appendix.  Keeping that, I believe, is illegal, not to mention gross.
        But that BB.
        I think I’m gonna keep it.  Call me nostalgic, but it would look good on my mantel, in a little case.   I can get the case.  I would just need to get a mantel.
        One more thing.
        When this is all behind me, and when I can see straight, I am going to call the Superintendent of our local high school and ask if I can spend some time on their brand new baseball field.
        I’d love to shag some ground balls at second base.