The Finger Incident

Little me and my incredible imagination had made me quite a happy artist. In fact, when my parents saw what colorful drawings I could make at four years of age they bought me these wonderful colorful little tubes of paint. Each tube was the color of the paint inside of it and was meant for a child to squeeze out on paper and then smear with a brush. Well, one fine day there I was playing an artist and having a great time when I discovered that I couldn’t open one tube. Well, it was very important that I have that particular color. Now mind you we had a full household that day. Grandma was in bed reading, dad was reading his newspapers and mom was in the kitchen. You would suppose that I could ask someone to open the tube for me.

I was very independent. So I went into the kitchen and while mom wasn’t looking I took a small paring knife and headed back to my room. I suppose my idea was to pry the cover of the tube off with the knife. Well, that wasn’t as easy as I thought. Instead of prying the cover off the knife zipped right into my little finger. When I went crying to the kitchen all my mom saw was a very bloody finger. Grabbing my hand she pulled it over the edge of the kitchen sink with me on tiptoe and held it under a stream of cold running water.

By this time grandma and dad had arrived and mom was telling them that my finger was probably going to fall off. Well, dad was the level headed one and in the end, the finger was bandaged up and didn’t fall off and everything was fine again.