This post is not about my ankle.
At some point in my pre-double-digit years, no doubt as I raced through backyard sprinklers while singing this with exquisite abandon, I came down wrong on my foot and with a soft ping, hardly detectable over the happy shrieks of my compatriots, my ankle was ruined. For life.
I remember no one specific instance, only that it happened again and again. During kickball in PE: ping it would go, but off I’d limp to first base. Landing after a hurdle as I ran track: ping! but I’d do my best to sprint mostly on my other leg. Coming down after a block in volleyball1 and PING it would hollar, but I’d tough it out ’til the game was over and I could request a quick tape job, because what kid wants to stop running? What kid wants to admit to being weak, to being less than perfect, less than whole, in front of her peers?
At random intervals I dealt with the ping ’til my twenty-first year, at which point I was in college and inexplicably enrolled in a ballroom dance class2. It was a very great joke to my partner and me that we were asked to do this particular dance, so much so that we gasped with laughter as we polka-ed around the room — until without warning my ankle screamed PING!!!!! and my polka days were through.
If I’d been smarter I would have allowed myself to be transported directly home to spend the day with RICE, but who is smart at twenty-one? Instead I limped back to the dorm for lunch, then treked a half-mile to class, then another half-mile back, then the same distance again for a meeting. And then I went to the bar. And then back home again, where I was bound and determined to experience intercourse for (perhaps) the third time despite the fact that my ankle was bigger than my calf and that it throbbed with his each stroke.
Reader, it never healed. I racked up one belt after the next, never minding the dreadful pings as I smashed into heavy bags (and my opponents). Sometimes I’d dutifully take myself to a doctor, but neither x-rays nor poking turned up anything. No amount of writing letters in the air with my toe, strength training or plain old rest fixed it, and finally, at some point in my thirties, I gave it up as a lost cause. You’re going to have to deal with this for the rest of this life, I told myself. Better make the best of it.
For the most part I have. I’ve learned to work around the movements that set off pings, and some super-charged pain-killers wait in the cabinet for when I can’t, at which point I give myself a small lecture on being more careful and then carry on.
But this isn’t a post about ankles.
Go to the same grocery store for the entire fifteen years you’ve lived in a town and eventually the cashiers recognize you enough to make small talk. This would be annoying if it detracted from the speedy processing of a cart overflowing with goldfish and clementines but one lady, a youngish grandmotherly type, manages to chat while checking with a rapidity that would make a robot hang its head in shame. It was clear from that day’s groceries that I’d shopped specifically for an event; her questions drew out of me that it was for a child’s birthday party which would be attended by relatives both by blood and adoption. She made little supportive comments about my choice of main course3, decor4 and gifts5, dropping in small endearments at intervals regular enough to be charming without being the least bit creepy. “I bet your party will be lovely, honey,” she said as she handed over the receipt, and as I shoved off toward the parking lot a thought popped ping in my mind that man, I bet she’s a great grandmother. And mother.
A thought like this — so simple! — shouldn’t make the drive home one of sobs so aggressive it’s surprising I didn’t throw up. But it did. The good news is that it passed quickly. The injury is old, and I’ve accepted that it’s never going to heal. There’s medicine in the cabinet. I am always careful. And then we just keep on carrying on.
- Aside: Is there any better feeling that putting a nastily spiked ball right back in your opponent’s court? No. No there is not. [↩]
- Even English majors cannot read every second, nor can science minors spend all their time hunched over a Bunsen burner. [↩]
- Lasagna [↩]
- Pumpkins, duh [↩]
- My darling is partial to lipgloss, nail polish and art supplies [↩]
