January 7, 2010

• I've Never Broken a Bone

  Good morning, fellow bloggers.

  We are expecting 4-6 inches of snow beginning this afternoon. The sky is ______. There are tiny white flakes of _______falling steadily down on the already fallen tiny white flakes of ________. The temperature outside is (cold.) Today is someone's birthday. My father's mother's, I believe.

  Today is the day of my thirty-second year when I fell in the parking lot at my apartment complex and found myself sitting on my ankle, which was bent--sharply--the wrong way.  I thought to myself, It's probably not broken because I've never broken a bone in my life. (It wasn't.) I thought, I'll just go to bed now and it will be a little swollen but okay when I wake up tomorrow morning.  (It was black and swollen to twice its normal size from my knee to my toes when it woke me up at eleven o'clock that night. I tried to put my weight on it and almost passed out. On the other hand, it really was not broken. "Which is really too bad," the doctor in the ER chirped, "You might have been better off if you had broken it.") I thought, I will have trouble with this ankle for the rest of my natural life. (I don't.) 

  Thoughts I did not think: 1.) It's your right ankle. You can't drive. 2.) Fat girls on crutches do not enhance the overall landscape of humankind. 3.) When the tips of crutches get wet--as often happens around the 7th of January--they tend to skate off to parts unknown. 4.) Any short walk on two feet is a LONG hobble on crutches. 5.) Ice is dangerous enough for the physically agile. 6.) It's a sprain, for heaven's sake. A bad sprain, but a sprain. What sort of physical and emotional mess would you be if you had broken the thing?

  Thoughts I still think: You didn't really get the woman from the upstairs apartment, whom you barely knew, up out of bed at 11pm on a work night to take you to the ER because you decided to ignore the problem at 5:30 when you came home and actually incurred the injury. Yeah, you did. Bless her. In that little black book the angels carry around for each and every one of us, she has, at the very least, one shiny gold star just for not saying, "Are you insane? Go back to bed and call someone you know in the morning."

  When I fell I was wearing a pair of Bass shoes that were popular at the time. The soles were two inches thick, flat along the bottom and brand-stamped, so wherever I went I left the legend Bass....Bass....Bass....behind me as I went. I felt off the sole when I slipped on black parking lot ice. I don't even remember doing it: I just became aware, abruptly, of the fact that I was sitting on my own ankle in the parking lot, and that my ankle should actually have been pointed in the other direction.

  I never wore those shoes again.

  I remember thinking, Wow.

  And I remember thinking, I don't think that ankle is supposed to bend like that.

  And I remember thinking, well it's not broken because I've never broken a bone in my life.

  That was almost 30 years ago. I still have never broken a bone (although today I see that more as a phenomenal streak of luck rather than my entitlement. I also don't say it anywhere near as loudly.)

  The new snow is obliterating the dog tracks in the old snow.

  The dog, in the meantime, went to work. I'm not staying here, Nancy, she said to my partner, she never does anything interesting and she yells at me when I bark. It's my job to bark, you know that, Nancy. I need to go to work with you.

  The sky is still gray. The snow is still falling. It looks like a fairy tale just outside my window. Some fairy tales are cold.

  • 10:15 am
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