The Summer of my Shiner

My One and Only ...

The summer I turned sixteen was memorable for me. It stands out as ‘The Summer of My Shiner’, more commonly known as a black eye.  I’ll let you in on the backstory …

My whole family lived in Ohio —that was until my grandparents retired.  Soul-sick of northern winters with snow, ice, and cold, they packed everything up, sold their home on the river, and retired to Florida where they had built a little house on a small lake.

Every year after that, our family spent one to two weeks of our summer vacation driving Mama to Florida to visit her parents. All eight of us were stuffed into our station wagon for 23 hours of blissful August travel … with no air conditioning.

The redeeming feature was, Daddy drove all night while we kids slept.  The next morning after breakfast, we got a motel with a nice pool and we kids swam all day.  My cousin lived with us and he was my age.  We were in charge of watching the younger kids, fixing lunch and Kool Aid from our cooler, and in general, keeping the peace while Mama and Daddy slept until dinnertime.  After dinner, we all piled back in the car to resume our drive south.

But back to my sixteenth summer … I was the oldest of six children. I was exactly thirteen years older than Shari, my youngest sister, which made her three years-old that summer. She was just learning how to swim and Grandma and Grampa lived on a beautiful little lake —so crystal clear, you could see the minnows swimming and almost count the grains of white sand on the bottom beneath the minnows.

We spent most days down at the lake, swimming, skiing, boating, or just doing cannon ball jumps off the wooden dock. Mama insisted that Shari wear a Styrofoam swim ‘bubble’ on her back to aid her in staying afloat, in case she forgot her swimming skills.

Shari loved jumping off the dock along with everyone else. Being oldest, I made it my job to catch her so I could let her down more gently. All it took was a two-second breach in my attention span … Shari’s chin collided directly with the orbital socket of my cheekbone and the pain, OMG the pain!  It was immediate. Thankfully, it went numb within a few seconds and it gave me time to make sure Shari was okay.

That evening, I had plans with some girls I knew on the lake to go to a local teen hangout, the Tastee Freeze. We usually had some ice cream and flirted with boys our age who were there. By suppertime, my shiner had fully bloomed —black and blue, throw in a little purple, a touch of red, and that’s what glared fiercely back at me from the mirror in the bathroom.

“Mama, I’m going to cancel my plans and just stay home.”

“Honey, you do what you want, but I’m looking right at the perfect way to meet people. They’re all going to be curious about that black eye. Trust me. You couldn’t find a better ice breaker.”

As usual, Mama was right. I relaxed right away when I heard, “WOW!  Hey there, Slugger, what’s the other guy look like?”

Poet/Writer/Author of 5 books.
Quora Top Writer 2018.
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