Saturday was one of those days people with incipient arthritis dread.
I have the ailment in my lower back, my right hip and my left shoulder. There are days when it hides like a guerrilla fighter. There are days like Saturday, cold and raw--what Melville called "a damp drizzly November in my soul," when the disease is like the Cong during the Tet Offensive. No mercy. No turning the other cheek. And no prisoners taken.
On top of the aches listed above, my "good" shoulder, my right, has a torn rotator cuff. While I have rehabbed it to the point of tolerability, on bad days it is not so good. Sometimes it locks and I wonder if I'll be able to move it at all, or if I'll spend the rest of my days 'hailing a cab.'
Saturday I was also visited by my elder daughter S, her husband R, her Boston Terrier, T, and my two grandsons, J, 3.5 years old and Ri, 1 year old.
For whatever reason and without complaint, when I'm with my grandsons, I am the Santa float in the Macy's parade. They know a soft touch when they see one.
And they can't get enough of me.
There are electrons in nuclear molecules that, on Saturday were up and down and in and out and spinning around less than I.
When my aches of time and tide finally started over-taking me about five years ago, I concocted a fantasy. I would check myself into the Mayo Clinic out in Rochester, Minnesota, a town I visited once because IBM had a server factory out there.
 |
| The Mayo Clinic. Home of the TBR. |
 |
| The Eero Saarinen-designed IBM factory. |
I would check in and demand and operation I made up. A TBR.
I told my wife, who barely tolerates me, I am going to the Mayo Clinic for a TBR.
L looked at me dripping like a carwash not with suds but with disdain.
"A TBR?" she humored.
"A Total Bone Replacement. They tie a string to your toe bone and the other end to a door. Then they slam fast the door and your bones come out at if you're a well-cooked haddock in the hands of a skilled maitre d'.
"Then they replace the aching bones with uncooked pasta."
Last night, as I so often do, I lay in bed and took a quick 12-point inventory of my corpus.
1, 2: Ankles. Pain.
3, 4: Knees. Pain.
5, 6: Hips. Pain.
7: Lower back. Pain.
8, 9: Wrists. Pain.
10, 11: Shoulders. Pain.
12: Neck. Pain.
If I were an Oldsmobile I would have failed inspection and badly.
The author in automotive guise.
For a moment, from sea-side Connecticut, I was transported 3,000 miles and 51 years to Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico.
I am laying in my single bed, alone. Sisto is out somewhere. The A/C was taking the summer off and the ceiling fan mocked me with its languor. It spun as slowly as time passes when you're waiting for a local train in a piss scented subway station.
We had played, in 92-degree heat, 12 games in nine-nights. Two games extra innings. Traveling by bus on long rides when we should have been in feather beds. Eating street enchiladas and churros instead of food.
12 games. 114 innings.
Grounders in your groin and Adam's apple. Your left elbow hit by a pitch. Twice a ball fouled into your front foot. An abdominal muscle strained. A shoulder thrown out trying to throw someone out. Putative dysentery.
I have felt pain in my time.
Who hasn't.
Life is sweat and pain and tears and more sweat and pain and tear.
You lay awake.
You aspirin.
You turn and change positions and hope there's relief in something new but there never is.
The ceiling fan spins like Tycho Brahe's planets mocking the pre-destined fate on an old fat man with more ambition to play with his grand kids than common sense.
There no hope but this:
TBR.
To go with TSR.
Total soul replacement.
