[At the circus]
Phil's 13-year-old brother, Rickey, had a really bad four-wheeler accident last night at his home in Shiloh. He broke his right arm (he's right-handed) and got a concussion as well as the obligatory covering of cuts and scrapes and bruises that are going to be oh-so-fun to wash out. They sped him to Savannah's fancy new medical center (I'd love to link, but the only link to it I could find is broken), where he laid for several hours without anything for pain before they decided to ship him at 3:30 this morning to Le Bonheur here in Memphis. Apparently Hardin County only has one bone doctor and he wasn't there, so they couldn't do jack for Rickey but send him elsewhere. They didn't even clean off the dirt that was all over him.

Phil's mom called at 5 a.m. to tell us that Rickey kept asking if Phil was going to come see him, so we drug ourselves out of bed, unshowered, and made the 20-minute drive. We were gonna go, you know, at 8 or 9 or some reasonable time, but moms always win. Man, the kid was roughed up pretty bad. He's going to have some righteous scars and scabs to show off to the chicks for a long time.

There was one point of morphine-induced comedy that cracked everyone up. The nurse came in to check on him and pointed at Phil and said, "Do you know who that is?"

He said, "Yeah. Philip."

And she said, "Who is Philip?"

"My brother."

"Do you know where you are?"

"The circus."

Apparently the little kiddie border around the room, which had a circus motif, had convinced him that he was in a far better place than the hospital, which, I guess, is its purpose.

Anyway, Phil's mom, Lila, said they're taking him into surgery to set the arm (the fracture was pretty bad — it broke the bone and laid it on top of itself) and that he'd probably be released to go home today. So they might stop by later. (As a side note, there were three other kids involved in the accident, in which Rickey, who had to little girls on his machine, was following this other boy on another four-wheeler, when the kid in front stopped abruptly and Rickey didn't. All the other kids were hurt, but the other boy was hurt the least. One of the girls had to be rushed to Jackson, but aside from being bloody and sore, I think all of them will be fine with a little time to heal. No one was wearing a helmet.)

Lila also told us that Rickey, while laying on the ground, waiting for the ambulance, kept screaming, "Where are they? Where is the ambulance?!?" and that, finally, his impatience got the best of his good manners and he screamed out, "Where is the FUCKING ambulance?!?!"

The worst thing is that Rickey is a video game addict and that his right hand is going to be useless for a while. He also plays the trumpet in band, but he'll get out of a summer of practicing, so maybe that's not too bad.

+++
My grandmother just called to say she's on her way. So let the cleaning and grandparent-proofing commence.