The Little Scar That Could

In July of 2015, I took a bad fall while running in downtown Chicago. We were in town for my youngest sister’s wedding and after spending several days in the suburbs where she was married on the vast lawn of our father’s and stepmother’s house next to the Fox River, we spent a few days downtown. My husband and I had previously lived in Chicago and our first son was born there; the city is a favorite.

The Nichols Bridgeway is a pedestrian bridge that joins the Great Lawn of Millennium Park to the Modern Wing of Chicago’s wonderful Art Institute, and it was opened in 2009, nine years after we’d left the city. That morning, we had mistakenly jogged across it, until realizing it ended at the museum. We had spent a half hour or so running from our hotel on Miracle Mile, along the teeming sidewalks and around the park with its futuristic bean and band shell.

Someone amidst a group standing at the rail of the bridge stepped back as I sped by; I was going fairly fast as the bridge declined back into the park. The walking surface of the bridge is steel and has the appearance of a grid: thick lines of metal crisscrossing, with spaces in between. It left two gaping wounds in my knee, which immediately began to stream blood. For a while, it didn’t hurt. We had nothing to use to staunch the blood so my husband wiped a good amount from my leg with the bottom of his shorts, then we ran…