Anticipating what’s ahead in 2017 has me feeling a bit like I’m eight years old again, staring down Melcher Street hill in my Radio Flyer Wagon…

I knelt in my old red wagon, with one foot anchored to the ground, weighing my odds. The wagon’s D-shaped handle had broken off years prior, leaving the sharp, jagged metal digging into my chest.

So instead of sitting, I placed one foot in the wagon, then the other, and began coasting downhill standing up. The stockade fence flashing by on the left reminded me of the words in the song “Hot Rod Lincoln:”

“Now the boys all thought I’d lost my sense.
And telephone poles all looked like a picket fence.”

The muscular roots of the giant elms lining the street had pitched the sections of concrete sidewalk at crazy angles. The bump — pause — bump cadence slowly increased as the front, then the back wheels hit the cracks.

“They said, Slow down! I see spots!
The lines on the road just look like dots.”

By the time I reached Dead Man’s Tree, the bump–bump of the wheels rattled a constant staccato sound with no pause in between. The tempo increased as I shot down the sidewalk, faster than I ever traveled on a sled. As my eyes darted around searching for a soft landing spot, the wagon went airborne, launching off one of the sidewalk slabs angled upward like a ski jump.

“My fenders was clickin’ the guardrail posts.
The guy beside me was white as a ghost.”

For a split-second I imagined I could land on my feet in the wagon and keep right on going. But when the wagon hit the sidewalk, the front wheels violently jerked to the side at nearly a ninety-degree angle. The wagon pitched onto its side, catapulting me in a long, clawing arch through the air until I landed and bounced on the concrete. I lay in a stunned heap, the final lines of the song, which my friends and I always shouted out in unison when the song played on the radio, running through my brain:

“Son, you’re gonna drive me to drinkin.
If you don’t stop driving that Hot Rod Lincoln!”

The next morning I awoke to discover that overnight my New York Giants pajama bottoms had stuck and dried to the gigantic raspberry covering my right buttock. It hurt way too much to pull the fabric away from the wound. So, I pulled my jeans on over my pajamas and walked the three blocks to school with portraits of Alex Webster, Frank Gifford, Rosey Grier, and Sam Huff hidden underneath. I felt bogged down by the extra weight and heat of the flannel during recess. Walking back into class, I caught a cluster of girls stealing glances at me, and whispering to each other. That was unusual enough to prompt me to glance down to check my fly. What I saw was even worse. My pajama bottoms were hanging out well below the cuffs of my jeans.

After school, in the privacy of my bedroom, I examined the damage. The flannel was so thoroughly embedded in my skin it sounded like plywood when I rapped on it with my knuckles. I snipped away the fabric around the perimeter of the wound, leaving behind a portion of Y.A. Tittle’s face. But without his helmet or the other players around him, the bald quarterback wasn’t even recognizable. He just looked like a wizened old man — a creepy thing for a kid to be walking around with on his butt.

The next day I sensed doom. Our gym teacher, Mr. Collins, brought the class outside for a monster tug-of-war contest over the little stream that ran behind the school. Both sides of the stream were slick with wet clay. Normally I loved this kind of free-for-all, but Mr. Collins would surely patrol the locker room, enforcing showers after this mud bath. After hauling the other team slipping and sliding through the mud, I pretended to celebrate with my teammates.

“Okay, everyone hit the showers,” Mr. Collins shouted causing thirty-two mud-covered boys to scream like monkeys as we ran for the locker room. I sprinted to the front of the pack, stripped down to my jockey shorts, wrapped a towel around my waist, and headed toward the showers ahead of everyone else. At the stainless basin sink I stepped on the pedal to turn on the water and dunked my head under the stream. By the time I got back to my locker and was toweling my hair, the other boys were just heading toward the showers.

I had seen far too many kids branded forever with unfortunate nicknames to risk baring my behind in this crowd. Alex Snyder, who was plagued by allergies in the first-grade, was still Snot Rag Snyder. A kid with asthma was renamed Wheezer. The one born with a harelip became Mumbles. Kenny Deerfield who lived one block up the street from me was simply Moan. His mistake in life was being born to parents who were Christian Scientists. When Kenny tried to do the pole vault in his backyard and the bamboo pole snapped, his parents believed that God would relieve their son’s back pain. All these names were ingenious in their simplicity and cruelty. I even had a pretty good idea what my new name would be if my secret were discovered — I would be forever known as Butt-Face.

I could sense Mr. Collin’s presence as I went through the motions of drying off.

“Showered already, Lucas?” he asked.

I turned to look at him. “Yes sir, I already washed up,” I said, which wasn’t entirely a lie.

“Looks like you missed a few spots,” Mr. Collins said, pointing at my leg.

I looked down at the mud smeared from one thigh to my ankle.

“You better get back in there and use soap this time.”

I shrugged and began walking back in the direction of the showers.

“What, are you going to shower in your jockey shorts?” Mr. Collins called after me.

I walked back to my locker and stalled, hoping he would leave.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

I looked up at the man, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ve got a cut I’m not supposed to get wet, so how about if I just towel off at the sink?”

“Son, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. If you want to play sports you better get used to showering with a bunch of guys.”

“It’s not that, honest.” I stared down at my feet for a long time before mumbling, “I’ve got this cut that I can’t get wet.”

Mr. Collins inhaled deeply and looked up at the ceiling. He looked back down at me impatiently. “Look, I don’t like getting the run around, Parker. Unless you have a note from home about this so-called wound, get in there and shower up like everyone else.”

I heard the voices of several boys heading back into the locker room and knew I didn’t have much time. “Okay, I’ll prove it to you.” I turned my right butt cheek toward him, and hiked down my shorts on that side for a quick look. I turned back to Mr. Collins, and stared up at him stone-faced, awaiting his reaction.

His eyes conveyed a bewildered, almost frightened look. “Is that a tattoo?” he asked, clearly trying to make some sense of what he had just witnessed.

“No, it’s my pajamas,” I said.

“Your pajamas,” Mr. Collins repeated blankly.

“Yeah, my New York Giants pajamas — what’s left of them. Y.A. Tittle stuck to the giant strawberry I got when I skidded on the sidewalk.”

Four kids noisily rounded the corner and immediately stopped talking when they saw Mr. Collins standing over me.

Mr. Collins looked at the boys, then back at me. His face changed from anger to confusion, and then seemed to soften just a little.

“What are you guys waiting for? Dry off and get yourselves dressed,” Mr. Collins said to the group of boys. “And you, Mr. Parker,” he said, turning back to me. “You don’t have time to shower up again. Just take your towel and go back to the sink and wash that mud off your leg.”