Brakes Is Gone
It snowed much of yesterday, nothing significant, just periods of near-whiteout with the wind tossing around those little Styrofoam pellet-looking bits and scooping them into interesting patterns on the ground. I wiggle my numb toes and look to the skies and think of spring weather. A rare green comet is supposed to be visible these days in the early morning sky. I keep forgetting to find out where I can look for it and to go outside before sunrise to gaze up into the realm of stars, that place that has enchanted me since I was a small boy.
This is the first year I can remember that I did not buy a copy of the Old Farmer’s Almanac. The last few years has seen a trend of making the hoary old publication into a rustic version of Women’s Wear Daily. Time was, the articles were almost all written by men who had actual dirt-under-the-fingernails experience with raising crops and animals and distilling their years of experience into punchy, short articles. They gave the editorship to a female some years back, and the change in tone and focus has been more than noticeable. The articles now focus on frothy, glib things like how to sew cute curtains for your chicken coop, crap like that. Couple of years back, the kids in Texas gave me a subscription to a small stock journal I used to enjoy. I hadn’t read it in a few years and was very pleased with the gift. When I received the first issue, I was horrified to see the same trend in their publication. 90% of the articles written by young women… light, even silly topics all penned in the same chirpy, breathless voice. The few articles written by men (two per issue, on the average) were substantive and helpful, but it was clear that they’re on the way out. I did enjoy having the almanac’s daily astronomical and historical readings on the month pages, as well as main entries for the Church calendar, but the rest of it now gives me the hives. Even the mini-essay for each month is radically feminized now. Before the change, those little essays were quiet, meditative pieces, like a Robert Frost poem. Now they’re, well, chirpy. I won’t have it. I won’t pay almost ten bucks for a girl’s magazine and grumble my way through it for a year. If I really want to read something from the Old Farmer’s Almanac, they have a website. So I hear. And yes, you kids really need to stay off my lawn.
**
As long as I’m in cranky old man mode, I must say that whatever I did to my back that day when I rescued Dixee from the spotted twins, I really did it good. I’m moderately sore and stiff in the mornings, but as the day progresses, I find myself bending farther towards the earth and moving incrementally more slowly. The pain doesn’t radiate down my legs like a nerve thing or a sciatica thing (“I’m all eat up with the sy-atta kee!” the codger croaked) but it really doesn’t feel like a muscle thing, either. It’s a deep, burning pain. There is tenderness along my spinal erector muscles, but the majority of the discomfort is in the bone across the very low portion of my back. It aches like a bad tooth much of the time, and when I sit in certain positions for a while, it intensifies enough to make me stifle a moan. Keeps me humble, I suppose. I hope.
**
The gray tabby cat that’s been nosing around the farm just walked by the glass door where I’m sitting. That’s probably what had Jinx all tore up this morning when he was outside in the predawn darkness. If said cat would take up residence in the barn and stay away from the dogs, it would be fine by me. A little rodent control would be most welcome.
**
Last night while my beloved was taking her bath, I did something I haven’t done in a while. I lit a candle and sat before it in quiet meditation. I didn’t pray, didn’t try to “empty my mind” or anything esoteric like that. I just sat and enjoyed the stillness. An unquiet mind is a grinding, corrosive thing, and this little ritual seemed to help a bit. So many of the rituals I used to follow are no longer truly helpful for me, but I do cling to most of them anyway, for my own sense of purpose and normalcy. What a world we live in, and what a time to be witnessing all this mess.
**
I was thinking today about something that happened many years ago when I worked with mentally ill adults. I was tasked with walking a group of about a dozen folks around the park inside the hospital’s campus, a lovely place with huge pecan trees and an oval of lush grass. The group convinced me to let them walk a bit outside of the park area, on the sidewalk around the perimeter of the hospital grounds. It was a gorgeous spring day, I wanted to prolong the outing, and so I said yes. One of the patients was a morbidly obese man named Harold, and he was wheelchair bound. Harold was not what we would call a paragon of upper body strength, and he was having great difficulty navigating the gentle slopes of the sidewalk route, so I decided to help by pushing him. I figured I would get a good full-body workout out of the deal and spare Harold from a myocardial infarction.
Near the end of our stroll, the sidewalk dipped down pretty sharply. I was chatting with another hospital employee who was walking with us, and I pulled back on the wheelchair handles to slow us down. Now it needs to be said that Harold’s wheelchair was not exactly one of those fancy-dancy ones. It was probably purchased at a thrift shop, and was well-worn. The handle grips were exactly like the ones we had on our bikes when I was ten years old, yellowed white rubber ones with finger indentations.
While I was pulling back on the chair and continuing my chat with the other staff member, I heard a curious sound. The sound would best be described as a quick double-pop. “Pop-pop!” That’s odd, I thought. And then I realized that my arms were feeling suddenly very relaxed. I looked down at the back of Harold’s head, but his head was no longer there. In fact, none of Harold was there. Harold was busy hurtling down the hill at about 20 mph, and I was holding the grips from his wheelchair handles. Like something in a Tex Avery cartoon, I stared at the grips in my hands, looked at the other staff member, and screamed. He screamed as well. We screamed and screamed. As I recall, Harold was screaming, too…but his screams seemed far away, like a dream in a Terrance Malick movie. I tossed the grips aside and sprinted down the hill to try and catch up to Harold before he crashed through the flimsy little silt fence and into a culvert that was about 20 feet deep, with a busy highway beyond.
I managed to catch up with Harold about fifteen yards from the fence and grabbed the bare handles. I dug in my heels, and smoke began to billow from the heels of my Reeboks as I tried to act as brake for Runaway Harold. I finally gathered my wits and thought to lower my center of gravity by doing a deep knee bend, which did the trick, and I got the wheelchair under control. Once we were stopped, I stood there, bent forward at the waist, hands on knees, gasping for air. The other staff member caught up with us and asked if we were okay. Harold turned and glared at me with his face all scrunched down into a mask of rage, and said, “That wasn’t funny, S.K.”
The other staff member just laffed and laffed and laffed. And he told everyone else on the staff about it. For me, it reminded me of the old Little Rascals episode where a car backfires and frightens the mule Buckwheat and Alfalfa are driving at the head of a cart. The mule bolts and runs, completely out of control.
“Put on the brakes!” shrieks a panicked Alfalfa.
“Brakes is gone!” replies Buckwheat. “We’s freewheelin!”
Nothing like exercise to set a body right. Except for the salves, ointments, and unguents one can apply to one’s skin. Thus, I am adorned with Old Man Smell. I’m so grateful I have a loving and loyal wife.
My back hurts, so I’m going to rub something cold and gelatinous on it.
Freewheelin’
~ S. K. Orr