I made my own, very personal July 4th fireworks yesterday when I slammed my finger in a window. I’ve never seen so many stars.

We were just about to sit down to dinner last night and I wanted to open a couple windows to let the evening breeze in. One of the windows opens with a crank, so the chances I could hurt myself on that one were almost nil, although I’m sure that, given enough time and an appropriate distraction, I could manage it. The other window is a bipass, the kind that has one pane that slides past the other like a patio door. In the summer we leave the bipass windows open a crack at night cool off the house, so like most people I lay a piece of lumber in the track to keep the axe murderer from getting in at night. Even though the axe murderer does his work with one of those huge double-edged lumberjack axes, he’s always considerate enough to look for an open window to climb through and, if he can’t find one, just goes away and makes a note to come back later.

I opened the window all the way in the usual manner, hooking the end of the piece of lumber with my pointer finger, but I was in kind of a hurry last night and yanked the window open at the same time. Up until now I’ve been coordinated enough to get the piece of wood out of the way of the sliding window, but last night my reserves of coordination must have completely run dry because I didn’t get the stick up far enough to avoid mashing my finger between the end of the stick and the window frame. Wowzers, that hurt.

Bled like a stuck pig, too. I didn’t just mash it, I cut the pad of my finger open, and the cut’s right across the part of the pad that presses down on the keys as I type. To judge from the number of times I wince as I type, I think the index finger is probably one of the most-used typing fingers. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

(Weirdly, I don’t have to use my injured finger to type the word “Ouch.”)