The Dora the Explorer bandaids Kat gave me aren't big enough for my booboo.

The other night at my uncle's birthday party I took a misstep--into a black abyss of concrete.  Here's my battle wound.

I feel like knee scrapes are little-kid injuries.  This scab is identical--same knee and everything--to one I got at approximately the age of seven.  I was at Newark airport, recently landed to visit my grandma in Park Ridge, having big time on one of those moving sidewalks.  I took an untimely spill at the very end of the line, and the hem of my dress, as well as the skin on my knee, got trapped in the crack where the conveyor-sheet-thing meets its mysterious disappearance.  A kind Samaritan, an older man whose face I'll never forget (although the memory is probably far from the real face), pulled me up by the armpits, rescuing me from certain doom.  I was sure that if he hadn't appeared just then, I would have been sucked down into the Dr. Seuss world of darkness, fluffy-neon monsters, and farcical rhyme lurking on the other side.

As it happened, my fate was to grow up on this side of the walkalator, to learn that it's no less nonsensical or frightening than the inverse.  I would venture that ours is not as cleverly metered and rhymed, but with better and more varied cuisine.  Green, pink or purple, ham isn't kosher.