I think it was around 1985, when I was about 10 years old, living on Severin Street. In our front yard we had a rope swing: a single rope hanging from a tree branch with a small wooden circle tied at the bottom that you could sit on. I loved that thing and I would swing as high as I could.
One day the swing broke and I hit my head hard on something. I do not remember the accident itself clearly, because the clearest parts of what happened next come from my mom telling the story later. She said I came into the house with this odd, blank look on my face, and she took me to the hospital.
For hours I was basically as broken as that swing. I could not hold onto memories for more than a few seconds, and I got stuck in this loop. Any time a doctor came into the room, I would start crying and ask, “what’s the bill?” If they asked me who the president was, I would say “Rotten Reagan.” Those were the tracks my brain kept replaying. The “what’s the bill” part felt especially sad to me later because we were not well off then, and it touched that family fear of not being able to pay for things. The doctors said there was a chance I could remain in that state for the rest of my life.
I have vague memories of repeating “what’s the bill,” but the first real memory I have of coming back online is being on the couch at my parents’ house, eating Totino’s personal pizzas. I remember it clearly being a sausage Totino’s pizza, and to this day I still have a soft spot in my heart (and, probably, a sclerotic spot in my arteries) for that brand and that variety.
What is remarkable to me is that because memory suddenly became scarce, it felt incredibly valuable, like something I had to hold onto with everything I had. I remember so much from that day and the day before. I can still see us washing off a canoe we had made, with a kind of blue vinyl bottom, beside our house. I also remember going to Pullen Park in Raleigh and staring at the music coming from the orchestrion (the mechanical musical contraption) in the middle of the carouse. I remember details of it, including the little conductress with a sun hat, her arm waving as it played.
Afterward I was out of school at least a day, and word got around. My parents must have told the school, then the teachers, then the kids, because classmates peppered me with questions, mostly “Do you remember me?” and “Do you remember my name?” I played along sometimes, even feigning forgetting, but eventually I remembered everything and I have been fine ever since. I maybe only lost a *few* IQ points.