I have a pain in my neck.

I mean a real pain in my neck, like the kind Mary Shelley must have been having when she envisioned the character of Frankenstein; his head being held on with a bolt that went clean through from one side to the other.

Sometimes, it keeps me awake at night and sometimes it gets into my dreams like I have been shot through the neck or I am wearing a tight collar and tie that I can’t get loose.  My fingers fumble with the knot and then the button underneath; I wake up before I can get it undone and the pain in my neck is collar high.

I have had this pain on and off since I was a kid.  I had an injury and I think it has stayed with me.

My sister and I had been away at 4-H camp – a joyful respite that we both lived for throughout the rest of the year – and we were slumped in the back seat of the Chevy wagon with our parents in the front seat acting weird.  Mom was talking about the scenery in this sing songy voice as though there was someone else in the car besides the four of us and Dad was whistling like he was doing something fun instead of driving the car and at some point my sister and I looked at each other and made faces that said “what the hell is going on – they’re not arguing about him driving too fast or her nagging – are they drunk?’  The closer we got to home the more we knew something was up but we didn’t say a word.

We lived in a small New Hampshire town in a house my Dad built on wedding present land from his father.  The house was a respectable gray cape with white shutters and a red front door and there was a screened in breezeway that connected the house to a large two-car garage.  As we crackled up the dirt driveway and into the space where the car belonged, my sister pointed through the screens and asked, “What’s that?’

My family was poor; my dad was a young high school educated engineer and my mother was a housewife and we had a new little brother which my dad said was very nice but made one more mouth to feed.   So what I saw through the screen made no sense in a family where every penny was fought about and split in half.  What was there was a swimming pool.

All of the heaviness that had gathered in me with leaving camp disappeared and what Mom simply said was, “better go get in your suits”.  We both took off up to our rooms, appearing back on the deck out of breath and jiggling our hands and feet until my Dad said okay and in I dove.

The pool was an above ground type, blue and beautiful, and I did a perfect forward dive, the kind I had been working on this past year at camp, but the pool was not as deep as Spruce Pond.  My forehead hit the bottom and everything went fuzzy and I thought I was going to drown.  I crawled to the back side of the pool and came out of the water with my face away from Mom and Dad and my sister.  I stayed like that; I could not ruin the best surprise that had ever happened in our family.

I heard my sister splashing around and I heard Mom and Dad’s voices like they were in a bowl and I hung on to the edge of the pool. I tried to talk but my tongue was numb and floppy and I felt like I had been stabbed through the neck.  As my memory picture disappears I see myself clinging to the side of the pool. I don’t remember what happened from there but I have returned to that vignette many times in my life when my neck is thrumming and I wonder what would have been different if I could have cried out and said, “Holy shit I just broke my neck.  Please help me.”

One of the things I treasure most about writing is that it is never too late to cry out.  So I just have to tell you, today my neck hurts like hell.