Did I just hit a bag of pork fat?

Last night I was given the esteemed privilege of instructing the yellow and red belts in their sparring drills. Sensei Brewer said he trusted me to be able to work the red belts on one time attack and yellow belts on three time attack.

There weren’t very many of them, two red belts that paired up and three yellow belts. That left me needing to have a partner in order to make things work out, and naturally, Crash was there to fill the void. Everything was going along fine until I tried to coordinate having the red belts do one-time attack while doing three time attack with the yellow belts.

The red belt pairing was Spaz and West-san, so I was keeping one eyeball on them as I counted out for the yellow belts to attack. We got to our third count, and I blocked and countered instinctively, right as I turned my head to look at Crash.

He hit his stance high like he usually does, but since Sensei had given him a hard time for being in a deep stance elected to surprisingly drop about six inches right at the end of the movement. Right into my fist, which was whistling toward his ribs. I opened my hand just a *tad* too late and felt the horrible yet wonderful feeling of hitting a bag of sugar, or pork fat. I could tell by looking at him what I had done, I had rendered his right lung completely worthless for 1d4 minutes. To make matters worse, we were right in front of the lineup of parents. D’oh.

He sputtered around a little and started to cry, so I did the same thing that I had done to me when this happens… I got behind him and straightened him up and told him to breathe. After a minute or two of that, I had him put both of his hands above his head and do some deep breathing exercises to reinflate his lung. He could do this without much trouble, so I am confident nothing was broken, I just scared him a lot. He ended up tentatively finishing the drill. Afterwards, I apologized to him and told him it was a little bit both of our fault. I explained to him what happened with his stance to compound the problem, and he said OSU! and ran off to pee or something.

Either way, I felt terrible about it. Luckily, Sensei Hartman and Sensei Brewer didn’t even see it happen, nor did they care. His grandfather was sitting out in the hallway reading, and when I explained what had happened he said “Eh, no big deal. It’ll toughen him up.” I’m beginning to really like that guy.

Something else interesting happened on the way out last night… Sensei Brewer gave me a pile of papers to bring to the dojo on Thursday, since he and Sensei Hartman aren’t going to be there. We were chatting a little on the way out of the dojo and he stopped and looked at me and said “you know I consider you one and a half seniority around here” then he continued to load his car and leave. This surprised/confused me greatly, so I just said “oh, thank you Sensei!” and headed for my car. As I drove home I thought about it and I was pleased that Sensei appreciates me, but I really couldn’t quite figure out what “one and a half seniority” meant. I’ll consider it a compliment until I hear otherwise.

My plans are to ditch the last night of the Boy’s Club tonight and head out to Mapleton. Sensei Hartman casually mentioned it, so I considered that enough of a direct order when giving a reason to Oedewaldt as to why I wasn’t coming to the Boy’s Club. I’m sure he’ll be blissfully unaware of the situation.