I limped off to school on the following Monday, without so much as a cane. I was an exceptionally good walker, but walking was the only thing of consequence I ever accomplished on the leg. I no longer went places in a dashing hurry, and either I or the leg stayed home when long hikes, or fishing in the creek, were the attractions of the day.

Although Grandma sighed her pleasure and said, "She looks like a little lady now. We may even be able to marry her off when she grows up," to me, the only tangible advantage of the leg was that I had my arms free. When I swatted a baseball, I was able to put much more umph into it than I had on the more restraining crutches. However, I now suffered the indignity of having someone run bases for me. The attachment was superbly adapted to volley ball which requires little active leg work but lots of aeria defense.

Whenever a new child showed up at grammar school I startled him goggle-eyed by pushing thumb-tacks into my leg. (Mother refused to let me use nails and a hammer. After all, the leg represented a substantial investment of about one hundred and twenty-five dollars.) I could also slip my stump out of the leg's socket and twine the leg around my neck. This was good box office, and I often did a routine of grotesque contortions that passed in my social circle for very accomplished eccentric dancing.

For a while the new leg accentuated to the point of real discomfort my "phantom limb." This is a curious sensation that most amputees experience in various degrees. The stimulation of the sensory nerves in the stump results in the sensation that the amputated member is still there.

I was in the hospital when I first felt the phantom limb. It didn't, however, astonish me in the least. I had just recently made a prayerful suggestion to Jesus, whom I knew by reputation to be very good at miracles and tremendously compassionate of even a poor small sparrow's suffering. I thought He might oblige by doing a small job for me along the line of spontaneous regeneration. When I felt my toes under the sheets - somewhat numb and prickly as if they'd been sat on too long but nevertheless there - I rang for the nurse. I asked her to pull back the blankets for me to see.

"My leg just grew back," I announced without taxing my faith a whit. After all, this wasn't anywhere near as big a job as bringing back Lazarus.

"Poor, poor little dear - no," she said.

"Oh, yes," I assured her. "Jesus did it."

That was when I learned about the phantom limb and revised my expectations for divine intervention.

Off and on, I felt it in varying degrees. It usually accompanied fatigue, and I could also feel it merely by thinking about my missing extremity. The sensation was almost constant, however, during the first few weeks I wore the new leg. It was so realistic that, without thinking, I frequently leaned down and scratched my prickly pseudo-toes.

In a very short time this uncomfortable phase passed, and the new limb gave me neither psychological nor physical distress of any kind. I can still summon my specter, but it rarely comes uncalled.

In other ways the leg was well behaved. Nothing mechanical went wrong that a screw driver or an oil can couldn't promptly remedy.

Then, after only three months, my mother noticed that my right shoulder was sagging. It wasn't the leg's fault. I was growing - and like a weed apparently. Off we went to Oakland, where I was once more measured carefully. We left the leg to be lengthened. Even for adult users, it is a great advantage to live in a city large enough to support an artificial-leg shop where quick and efficient service is always available for repairs and adjustments.

The leg was in Oakland three weeks, during which interim I went back to the more lively crutches. This was the first step in my reversion. When the leg returned by express I gave it a rather frosty welcome, but I donned it again.

The lengthening had been done in the shank only, and a solid- rather than a hollow piece had been in-serted. The result was a much heavier load than I was accustomed to. Also, as a consequence of extending only the lower leg, the over-all device wasn't quite properly proportioned aesthetically to my natural leg. I wasn't satisfied, but I wore it.

In a few months, my posture was once more beginning to show mild distortion. The local shoemaker helped me temporarily by putting a slight raise on the right shoe sole. But Nature being as one-tracked as she is, I kept right on growing.

When another alteration was again inevitable, Father decided after consultation with factory experts that I'd better have a completely new leg. The family budget had to be revised to accommodate itself to two legs a year instead of one. Father was an ill-paid social worker. I know that both he and Mother went without new winter coats to compensate for this added expense, but they never admitted it nor begrudged it. They would have mortgaged our house gladly, I am sure, so that I could luxuriate in new legs.

Two weeks in Oakland appealed to me much more than the prospect of sporting the new model. The handwriting was already on the wall but we were all too stubbornly attached to our preconceived notions to read it.

For another year the warfare waged between my physical growth and my leg's inelasticity - with my active athletic ambitions throwing their weight in with my physical growth. With each lapse in use, during the leg's necessary absences in Oakland for repairs or lengthening, I grew more attached to my crutches. Finally, I pleaded with my parents to let me abandon the appliance completely. They agreed, and we hung it on a nail in the garage, not knowing the proper disposal of a defunct leg. There it stayed for years - coming into prominence only on very rare occasions when we children used it as a prop in some macabre bits of imaginative play.

It was indispensable in a "mystifying" magic performance in which I was a full financial partner with a little tow-headed boy, Chadwick Augustus Barnes, named for an admirable relative on his mother's side who happened to own a bank. Chadwick's friends called him Gus and his enemies called him Fish Face. He looked like the banker. Gus was the brains of our corporation. He wore a big black mustache and did card tricks inherited from his father, a famous parlor bore. He also turned water into unpalatable wine, with the help of a Junior Chemical Set, presented to him one Christmas by his aunt who lived in Detroit, well removed from the foul smells her generosity stirred up in California. It was during the high point of Gus's Houdini buffoonery that I figured and earned my half of the pins and pennies. This was a modest variation of the sawing of the beautiful damsel in twain. Gus sawed off my leg - or at any rate he made sawing motions, accompanied by an effective buzzing noise--which, in his cleverness, he could accomplish without moving his mouth. He then effected the severance. Of course, this never fooled our audience any more than the card tricks fooled them, but they always savored the savage artistry of Gus's technique and my own dramatic contribution which consisted of anguished groans and wails.

My mother didn't exactly condone this hanky-panky but she tolerated it in the name of harmless childish fun. However, she drew a firm line and withdrew the leg from its promising theatrical career following another little drama in which it was featured.

There was a bad three-car smashup on the highway south of town one afternoon. Although I was perishing to run down there and get a glimpse of the gore, I was not permitted to. Mother had the strange aberration that such things weren't proper sights for a nice little girl. The aberration, of course, was that I was a nice little girl.

"You just never let me have any fun, Mama," I complained.

"You have plenty of fun," Mother said.

Goodness! I did too. By the end of the day I had had so much fun, I took my spanking stoically and still figured I'd had the best of the bargain.

Several of the brighter boys on our block outwitted their parents and did get a look at the demolished cars. Regrettably, the bodies, both live and dead, had been removed. These delightful little lads came back from the wreck with their imaginative scheme. It was heautiful and appealed thoroughly to my fine, sensitive nature.

We worked in Father's respectable garage performing our grim task. We dressed my leg in an old white stocking and shoe. We borrowed a bottle of catsup from Mother, without a by-her-leave, and splattered it liberally over the stocking. Then we stowed this charming "souvenir of the accident" into a carton and lugged it around the neighborhood, displaying it as something we just happened to see lying by the road-side at the scene of the crash.

Of course, my leg was fairly prominent locally, but even so, on this occasion it invariably brought forth a feminine scream and a double-take before it was recognized. Several slightly neurotic ladies were somewhat upset over the proceedings and made their disquietude known to my mother.

The only irony in this story is that I was the only participant who was spanked. No matter what trouble that leg ever got itself into, I had to take the rap.