by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: April 16, 2008

MY ANKLE

Ah, the rude disturbances of mortality! I have a bone chip in my left ankle, a small drift of calcium unmoored from one of the dozens of bones in the human foot. Most likely I will have to have surgery. My therapist tells me that nothing more banal than getting older explains why what was once intact now floats in the cartilage sea of my ankle.

I've had to accommodate myself to its small but large presence. For two weeks my ankle stiffened, locked into place as my body tried to sort out how to work around this intruder. Eventually, it loosened, not with the gunshot immediacy of ice breaking apart in a spring thaw, but more like chilled thick syrup coming to room temperature. I've been getting foot massages twice a week, and every morning when I stand on my pins I test it to see if it's regained its youth; for the first half hour of vertical consciousness it reminds me of its default.

When I say I want my ankle back to normal, I am saying that I want my ankle to have no personality, no distinguishing characteristics, no attitudes, no voice in how I conduct my life. I want my ankle to become a machine again to do my bidding, smoothly functioning with minimal maintenance. I don't want a cranky partner, subject to unforeseen breakdowns. I want to be free to soar, and I can't if the vehicle to carry me aloft becomes balky, inconsistent, whiny.

But I do have this partner now, like it or not. I have to consult it as to how quickly I can charge up or down the stairs, how fast I can make it across the street when the traffic is running like bulls. I now have a sense of bodily geography: there's a fault in my southern latitudes. I now have architectural sensitivity: my foundation needs shoring up. No longer am I the cigarette boat running full-throttled from point A to point B. Instead, I'm a tug boat tacking with the tides, trying to pick my way to port through shifting currents and fickle winds.

In working my ankle back to health, I've had to think about what "health" is. When I was younger, health meant assertion, like the figurehead on the bow of a clipper ship plunging through the seas. As I get older, I see that health has a lot to do with the rigging and how everything must work together to hoist the sails. There is no one way to do that, and maturity at least means knowing how to "jury-rig" when the expected falls apart. So I've made my treaty with my ankle, letting it dictate what I need to do to keep the rigging intact and the sails full. The important

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>