The Knockout, Round 1

My husband loves his workshop. If you read my earlier posts, you know that our garages never housed cars but always held a workbench, tools and various hardware and junk collections. Mark loves to build things and built our daughters' first bed and some tables for our house so after dinner, he would go downstairs and presumably work on "stuff."

One night we finished dinner and I began cleaning up the kitchen. The girls sat at the table, finishing their homework and Mark asked if I minded if he went downstairs to his workshop. I told him to go ahead and I took David upstairs to give him a bath. The girls came up after awhile and proceeded to get ready for bed themselves. After stories and prayers, I headed downstairs to finish cleaning the kitchen and picking up the clutter around the house. After getting ready for bed, I turned on the television to watch the evening news. Not long after the news started, I heard footsteps coming up the basement stairs. Knowing it was Mark, I waited for him to come in the living room and watch the rest of the news with me. After several minutes, I went into the kitchen and found him sitting in a kitchen chair. He looked a little dazed and before I could ask what was wrong, he blurted out, "Nice to know nobody wondered about me the last few hours." I looked at him with a puzzled look, not really sure what he meant and asked him what was going on.

"Well, I was down there working at the workbench and bent over to get something that fell on the floor. I raised my head up and hit it on the edge of the bench and I've been on the floor, knocked out cold for THREE hours." Oops!! I did not realize how much time passed since he went down into the depths of his workshop. Mark always gets so absorbed in what he's doing that he rarely surfaces unless it's an emergency and since I saw no blood, this didn't qualify as an emergency in my book. Getting the kids to bed and picking up the house kept me busy and I just assumed he was happy tinkering. Come to find out, he was happy but it was in his post-trauma dreams, not at the workbench. Nex time I'll make sure and rig him to an alarm system so when he falls, bells will ring, whistles will blow and the entire family will circle the wounded man with ice packs, band-aids and several bottles of Tylenol. Oh, and don't forget the masks so we can laugh ourselves silly without him seeing us.