Big Bang Memory Poem by Kim Barney

There are some advantages. When I clip my finger nails, I only have to clip eight of them! People always ask me how I messed up my hand. Now I can just refer them to this poem and not have to go through the whole story for each person. I was a young missionary serving an L.D.S. mission in Novo Hamburgo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. I had just received a transfer. I was supposed to go to Londrina, Paraná, and become the companion to Elder James Smith, who had been one of the 'Mormon Melodaires', a quartet that had traveled around the mission entertaining people and introducing them to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I was excited about the transfer, because I love to sing and was sure that Elder Smith would still have his guitar with him. As I packed to get ready to travel, I came across a little glass bottle of powder from firecrackers. Brazilian firecrackers back in 1963 had a built-in match, so all you had to do was strike the match and the firecracker was lit. I don't know if they are still that way today, and have no desire to find out. My companion and I had been having fun by opening the firecrackers and removing the powder, then frightening the maid with our dud firecrackers which we would light and then throw on the floor near her feet. She would scream and run from the room, and then they would never go off. Being just big 20-year old children, we thought that was great fun. I didn't want anybody to get hurt by leaving the powder behind, so I thought I had better detonate it before I left, but I had no fuse. I tried to make a chain of matches by breaking them off at different lengths and having the match heads touch each other, but the tallest match was too far down inside the bottle for me to light it before my lighted match would go out. Finally I decided that I would just dump the powder down the toilet (what I should have done to begin with) . I waited for what I thought was more than plenty of time, in case the top of the bottle had become hot from trying to light my makeshift fuse. I swear I waited for more than ten minutes, but it wasn't enough. I went over and picked up the bottle and the rest is history. I often wonder if that first hospital really did have no doctors, or if they just didn't want to take the responsibility to operate on an American, because at the second hospital, they didn't want to take me, either. We had at least a half hour wait there before they finally wheeled me into the room that said 'cirurgia'. I think the doctor finally decided that I was going to die if he didn't do something, so he went ahead and closed me up the best he could. I was flown later that night to São Paulo, where I was put in a big hospital (don't remember the name) under the care of a plastic surgeon. His name I do remember, it was O. Mennegazzo. Over a period of a couple of months, he took several patches of skin from my leg and transplanted them on different parts of my palm in an attempt to get the mangled hand to open wider. These efforts were partially successful. As the result of having leg skin on my palm, I am probably the only person you will ever meet who has hair growing on the palm of his hand.