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Try a Little Tenderness: Notes on a Daughter’s Broken Finger

We were sitting in a private room in the ER, X-rays done, waiting for the doctor to arrive to show us the pictures and prescribe a course of action. That’s when my 14-year-old daughter had what was her first, I think, enlightenment moment, fully grasping, in a personal and urgent way, the strange tragic happenstances that can alter life in a brief blink. And thankfully, the in-breaking bit of wisdom didn’t cost her very much by way of bodily injury.

“It’s so weird,” she said, a shallow laugh coming into her voice somewhere near the top of her throat. “This morning I woke up and went to school and everything was all usual, and now I’m in ER with a broken finger.”

She’d been playing first base for her high school’s JV softball team when she reached to dig a throw out of the dirt and the ball struck her non-gloved hand in just the right freakish way to dislocate the joint at her knuckle and cause ...

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