Polar Navigation, or How Mama Sled Got Her Ass Back

Three days of hysteria peaked as the D.C. area began to see precipitation overnight. The Federal government closed.  Householders hugged their hoards of toilet paper (I know, that sounds like Saxon alliterative verse, it just came out that way: “Bogwulf”).

Mama Sled got out her poles.

I have been skimming over the glacial progress of rehab on The Leg I Nearly Killed, because the only thing more boring than watching a mud puddle dry up is someone else’s moment-to-moment coverage of a mud puddle drying up. But we are at an encouraging place; since a six-mile push through the sound barrier connected with getting my car greased, just after Valentine’s Day, I’ve been good for a decent hill cruise a couple of times a week, so long as I use the poles. These things are boffo. I know, every time I bring them up, I rave about them. They’re like full-body orthotics, recalling millennia of four-limbed gait while bracing the upright human creature firmly in a locomotor cycle pivoting on the exact center of gravity. Stand and park your thumbs atop the bony prominences that define the widest part of your hip articulation, the trochanter femur major, which is where your ass hooks onto your legs pretty much, and draw an imaginary horizontal line between them; it will cross as close to your fulcrum of movement as no matter, part way down the sacral bone. When your hands, holding the walking poles, swing through this line on either side as you walk, that’s when the poles hit the ground and propel you forward, adding juice to the rotation around your vertical axis that is the crux of a good long stride.

I see people every day walking from their hip joints, not their back and waist: the end point of this is the hobbling, shuffling gait of old age, which reminds me of someone carrying a tureen of soup and struggling not to spill it. Really walking calls for butt-swing and hip flexion, and a churning that shakes up your chitterlings and pumps your breath. Funnily enough you can carry a load on your head while doing it, as long as you don’t have to dodge traffic (we won’t discuss how I know this).

The alleged snow was spitting down, in fact almost sideways, in big succulent globs like half-frozen bird poop, only not so gross. It was hard to tell if it was mixed with rain as such or if the globs were just ejecting smaller droplets as they hit trees and signs on the way down. The footing was perfectly good, though, and about one mile out I was swinging along as fast as I ever could before I bitched up the leg: I still limp without the poles, but with them, I am a threat. Ponds interrupted the sidewalk: there is going to be hell to pay when some of this freezes solid, especially the icy marsh that occupied the entire row of crip spaces outside the Goodwill store by the time I passed it.

When I swung north along the road that constitutes Arlington’s main axis of longitude I realized how keen the wind actually was — a big frost-giant hand pushing at my face and thighs. I got about two-thirds of the way to the highway interchange and bombed in the front door of Dr. Bill’s chiropractic office.

Dr. Bill leases first-floor space in an apartment block that also houses an insurance agency, a beauty parlor, a hearing-aid distributor, a tailor and the local Republican headquarters; each storefront looks more yellowed and desiderate than the next, breathing a 1950′s air of dingy paint, chipping window decals and balky Venetian blinds. The HVAC in the place heaves and labors but belches forth a fine baking downdraft from the overhead conduits. When Dr. Bill emerged, perplexed, from the rear of the office — I got the feeling all his patients had cancelled for the day and he had been driven to adjusting Mrs. Bill to keep his hand in — I was in the middle of the waiting area, holding my saturated hat and gloves on the end of the poles up at ceiling level where dragon-breath from the grille in the ductwork could hit them directly.

He asked me hopefully if I could use an adjustment today. It was tempting but I couldn’t feature getting back into my wet fugs. I keep trying to turn him on to the poles, but he always says things like “I’m not even used to cell phones yet.”

I left him in 1959 and came home for some hot soup. Nothing makes hot soup taste quite so celestial as three or four miles of being pelted by flying slush. This is going to stiffen up a little, but every excursion pushes back the limits. It’s good to have an ass to swing again; it makes everything seem more alive and hopeful. Congress should try this.

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Massaging The Minotaur

Every so often the Minotaur who manages my gym — three hundred pounds of beef who routinely locks out four hundred pounds of weight over his head — goes into training for another competition, and books Friday night appointments three or four weeks in a row. I have to put extenders on the table for this motherfucker. Seriously: they make side pieces for massage tables that slot into the frame, adjusting a bit toward the head or foot as needed. People asked me, back in the day, why I was ordering them when I bought my stationary table. “You know where I hang out, right?” I said.

I cannot close my hands around the Minotaur’s upper arms. Don’t even try to imagine his thighs. I use fists and elbows, mostly. Up either side of his spine are hummocks that suggest a large mole tunneling under there; he does have a neck, but it takes Filipino finger surgery to distinguish it from the mounds of trapezius that bridge the distance between his skull and shoulders. Both of his hip joints make succulent popping noises and shift tangibly when I traction his legs. We talk a lot of shop while I’m working, which makes me notice that I am breathing hard.

My ripped-up, fascia-torn leg — still going from “no problem” to “God kill me now”  in a regular rhythm — has been playing merry hell with me for over a week, except for the Friday nights that I work on this guy. After an hour and a half of pummeling what feels like Goodyear tire rubber, my hair is coming unpinned, my glasses are sliding down my nose and instead of broadcasting disabling waves of kicked-balls, hot-wire pain into every reach of my body, my leg feels fine, just fine. (Yeah, I realize I have no balls, as such, but I’ve had the pain described to me eloquently, as one which leaves you sucking wind and unable to focus attention on anything else. For the apogee of the misery that engulfs everything from my sacroiliac joint to my ankle when this thing starts to flare, it will do as a simile.)

I don’t dare tell the Minotaur this, even though part of me just wants him to book time every evening until I figure out what is going on here. He pays me the ninety minute fee, considering I can’t get through that vulcanized bulk in any less time, and I need the money.

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Mirror Neurons

Perhaps it is the eerily springlike weather, mild enough that I slept with the window open. Somewhere in the deep gullet of the night I seemed to wake up, and the left leg that has been torturing me for nearly a year — finally resolving to a manageable level of pain — was transparently painless, made new, the leg I had always assumed I had a right to.

Instead, my right leg was reporting in: the dull ache around the trochanter (the bony bit on the side that lots of people think is part of your hip bone but is really thigh, where your entire butt hooks on); the mean sharpness of a spastic adductor drilling well up into the groin. Groggy, I lay there wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do now. The sensations were as vivid as voices.

Later I woke up again and my legs were arranged as I would expect to find them.

Somewhere in between was the kind of demented dream we all have, in which someone wanted me to put on a necklace, and my best massage colleague somehow died and I had to explain to a husband much younger than the one she really has, listing on a whiteboard with a marker the five reasons she died, of which I can remember only (3): Drinking too much water and (5) A Broken Heart.

Actually the leg is much better this last week, and it is largely because this very same fellow professional finally got a crack at it; she trained on my carcass for two years when she was originally qualifying and went straight to the axle of the problem like a guided missile. I think I will be careful about offering her water when we get together again. More than one glass, anyway.

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Just About The Worst Nightmare I Have Ever Had

For starters, I woke up at around three a.m. with my head coming right off. Usually, over the past several months, it has been my leg trying to make a break for it but this time the list of neck, shoulder and jaw muscles that were locked down would give you a headache yourself if you tried to pore through them.* I had the distinct feeling I had been trying to bite through a leather strap in my sleep.

I deal with these things by exterminating trigger points one at a time. On this occasion it was going to take a while; I slipped out of bed, since the Engineer was occupying about two thirds of it and the cats had half the rest. About half an hour later I was able to climb back in and pass out with a tennis ball under my occiput. No, that isn’t rude.

Sometime around first light I had the dream. I was coming back down the hill from a play or movie with the Engineer and some other vague friend, male I think; it was my street and my house, but the vicinity was far more urban, brick paver walks like they have up toward the nearest underground stop and a jigsaw of shops and businesses reminding me of Alexandria, the next town over. It was early evening. We crossed to my side of the street, and there was my front door lying at the curb, off at the hinges, the house standing open. (My front porch, which in real life is screened, seemed to be missing, too, but I think that was just a vagary of dreams.)

Whoever had done it wasn’t inside any longer. But the living room looked denuded. Some things remained, while large tracts of wall were bare; I realized that, most conspicuously, the housebreakers had taken my CDs, the dinky cheap stereo I play them on, the art from the walls, and my books — all of them.

For some reason, it seemed as if the only thing to do at this point was say goodbye to our friend and go to bed.

When I went upstairs it was worse, because I keep a lot of books on the top floor too, and they were gone. All gone. I thought only fleetingly about things like jewelry or checkbooks. We went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep, and presently noises at the curb drew me outside again; there were all my books, packed in boxes, and an unsavory creep who looked a lot like the literate heavy named Wade (a corporate crook’s fixer) in the Babylon 5 series. Go figure.

Two large empty vans, with a festive logo on a turquoise ground, were idling at the curb. The door was somehow back in the frame, but with the lock jigsawed out. Wade was apparently waiting for assistance loading all the boxes in the trucks. “What are you doing?  Why?” I wanted to know. He just said that he was going to need help because the haul from my “wealthy lifestyle” (he sneered as he said it) was so copious. Oh right. Somehow I found my cell phone and dialed 911; the person who answered seemed to be a person from a customer service department asking what kind of merchandise I wanted help with. I shouted with mounting frustration, “This is 911! I need the police! I’m calling the police!” At this point the Engineer appeared in the door and I pleaded with him to make a phone call to the fucking police goddammit, but all he could come up with was half of a set of cheap walkie-talkies.

My door isn’t wood, by the way. It’s structural fiberglass, and rotsa ruck trying to get through it with a jigsaw.

Thinking about that made me feel better, sort of, while I came down from clenching my jaw again. And for what it’s worth, my left leg wasn’t singing Credo in un Dio crudel for the first morning I can remember in months. I’ll take what I can get.

_____________________

*If you’re feeling kinda crazy anyway: transverse nuchae, temporalis, zygomaticus, splenius capitus, trapezius, masseter, lateral pterygoid, sternocleidomastoid, scalenus anterior, infraspinatus. I may have missed a couple.

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Stick With Me And You Will Go Places

I used to have a walking stick, a beautifully varnished blackthorn with a brass ferrule, and I can’t think where it went — I haven’t laid hands on it in years; probably I gave it to someone whose need was greater than mine.

This morning I replaced it. This was not a fashion statement. Regular visitors may have noted that I have been posting a bit sparsely the past few months, and possibly that I seemed a bit loopy. I am always beating myself to shit, but 2012 will probably go down as the year I outdid myself. Actually this probably goes back to late 2011, when I wrangled window installers and danced in broken high heels all within the course of a week; my left leg has not really been right since. It went from being a little hitchy on the best days to a point where getting up at night to go to the bathroom had become a peculiar ritual dance of lurching, crawling, staggering and clinging to walls as the left hip tried to go out from under me, and some mornings I woke to find I had semiconsciously lodged a massage ball (they are always at my bedside) under one thigh in a vain attempt to release what seemed to be the Charley Horse From Hell, a travelling carnival that performed nearly anywhere from the core of my left ass to somewhere above the knee. The few times it let up spontaneously, I wondered what the hell I had done right and marveled at the energy I was not using up just getting through the day.

Oh, yes, still doing squats, cranking out massages, and trying for hill mileage, though for the last month I just had to chuck that up; rolling around on the floor wincing is no way to entertain company.

Dr. Bill, my overly gentlemanly chiropractor, has tried his best. The pain would give up for a while and then come back. Do you know that there are seven rotator muscles, two deep flexors, one superficial flexor and four adductor muscles involved with the hip, five if you count a thing called the pectineus that makes you look as if you are performing an indecent act if you rub it? Oh, let’s not forget the lower abdominal obliques. They were all fighting over control of the joint, and I seemed to be losing. Last week I clobbered it with everything I had — adjustment, an extra massage, squat workout (heating up the muscles re-aligned things, temporarily) — and took it out for my hill loop. Fuck. I hope no one recognized me hobbling sidelong through lower Arlington.

Then the Cute Engineer got gung-ho to get tickets to the annual free Shakespeare downtown and take our young mascot — who is reconsidering college, as you would hope of any teenager who thinks Hamlet is Shakespeare’s best comedy. Wonderful idea, except that in that condition sitting for any length of time turned my ass to stone, and on top of it you have to stand in a line for about an hour if you even hope for a ticket. I couldn’t see myself in that picture; I sucked in a breath, went flat on my back on the bed and said “You big husky man, come grab — my ankle and just pull hard and steady and when I give you the high sign, snap.“

He snapped. Did I mention the lad goes about two-fifty in sock feet? It was like pulling a tree out by the roots.

Breath rushed in, I doubled up, hyperventilating, and yelled “Go get me an ice pack from the freezer!” in between Lamaze gasps. (I would never dare do this to anyone else, but if you have often wondered what the vintners buy, this is the kind of thing.) After an hour of profoound coma, my leg bore my weight without seizing or cramping. Best guess, I have been going around for weeks with my left hip half-dislocated anteriorly — the ball still snug in the socket but yawing around its axis — and Dr. Bill just didn’t have the weight or the nerve to reduce it all the way. I felt like a Coke machine that has been kicked to unstick your quarter — stunned, but functional. Everything was a little tender, so on account there was rain in the forecast anyway, I got my largest umbrella and used that to clip along the sidewalk, get up and down in the theater, and otherwise operate without stopping traffic or encouraging muggers. It worked pretty well, but umbrellas are not really meant for this, so I ditty-bopped by my favorite hardware store after this morning’s workout. For whatever reason, they display a splendid selection of these creatures, and I came away with one that I think is the “Hitchhiker.”

It just made sense; I suspect I’ll be jamming hips, spraining ankles, and screwing up knees until they sell me for spare parts. So far from encouraging muggers by looking lame, I have to think that the average scumbag would prefer to home in on someone who wasn’t carrying a shillelagh like that. I just hope no one expects me to rap on any enchanted gates.

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Keeping Your Shirt On

The renovations on the dead lady’s house up the street have crossed the line from “extensive” to “epic,” and I have lost count of the succession of skips that have been dropped off, filled with broken wallboard and skanky insulation, and hauled away to be replaced. This afternoon, as I was struggling damply into the black gym baggies and Hanes undershirt that constitute my work uniform, a resonant clang directly in front of the house launched me toward the front window. The skip to eclipse all skips had just been discharged from a roll-off cab directly in front of my curb, large enough to live in, rust-brown and unlovely.

I hurtled out to the front walk barefoot in baggies and sport bra, the black tee shirt flapping off one arm, accosting the truck driver: “Dude! Hey, doesn’t this belong up the street?”

I give the guy cred. He was amiable while explaining that he had to get the laden skip out of the dead lady’s driveway first, before he could leave off the spaceship-sized one that was blocking mine. Two minutes, he promised. Damn if he didn’t live up to it. Good thing because my first client was due.

Actually she had already been by once, as I learned when she pulled into the drive and I pled consternation over the skip while I hurriedly put the sheets on the massage table.

“Yeah, I saw you,” she said.

I love my job. I can run around in my yard half dressed and people still march right in and pull out their check books.

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Feet

I love feet. Along with the remarkable curve of the lumbar spine, the human foot is the marriage of architecture and evolution, raising us above the grass of the savannah, storing the kinetic gift of our vertical posture in the rebound of its arch.

There are detractors. William Peter Blatty, better known for The Exorcist, once penned a regrettably neglected novel about military misfits becalmed in a psychiatric facility; I gather the eventual film underwhelmed audiences, but the book left an impression on me. Manfred Cutshaw, the astronaut who aborted his mission at the last moment, complains:

“… frankly, I hate feet.”
“The way they smell?”
“The way they look. Hud, I cannot stand the sight of them!”
“Does that include your own?”
“Especially my own! How could a wise and beautiful God give us ugly things like feet! Give us padding things like feet! They’re a disgrace! An anomaly! A disaster area, Hud! If God exists, he is a fink!”
“A fink.”
“Or a foot. Yes, a foot. An omniscient, omnipotent Foot! Do you think that is blasphemous?”
“Yes,” said Kane. “I do.”

But poor Kane, like Blatty himself so far as one can tell, is an aspirant to the impossible ideals of Catholic theology. Feet are pretty divine, all things considered. The Earth is a big blue God hurtling in the Galaxy, a God (or Goddess) which we neglect at our peril, and our feet hold us to it.

Cutshaw eventually drifts into the habit of referring to the Supreme Being as “Foot.” At the end, Blatty sends his astronaut hurtling to the stars once more, because, you know, leaving Earth = Heaven = closer to Catholic God.

To each his own. Me, I like Foot.

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Sesamoid Bones

Your kneecap is a sesamoid bone. There are a couple more under your big toe joint, the joint that turns into a bunion if you aren’t lucky; sesamoids are kind of like the block to your tendon’s tackle, reinforcers that help modulate heavy or sustained loads. The ones I have mentioned come standard with the model but actually they can arise anywhere and if you punish your body enough here or there, you will get them. Massage therapists come to expect them, unless we are exclusively doing the kind of ethereal energy work that I am way too crude and ruthless to tune into.

They pop up in my extensor tendons now and then. Sometimes they resorb, possibly because I change my work habits. Today I noticed I had grown a beaut in the tendon of my left ring finger, big enough that it feels a tiny bit bizarre when I flex at the metacarpophalangeal joint, like a friendship bead is tunnelling under the skin of my hand.

I think I should name it. Suggestions?

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Away Games

I have been doing outcalls for a lady with a broken leg. I hate driving. So far as I can tell, most people on the roads, at least in the National Capital Area, consider themselves too important to cut a second’s slack for anyone else, so I always have my heart in my throat wondering when someone is just going to ram my car or cut me off irrespective of potential damage to their own vehicle. Halfway to the appointment today I was clenching the wheel in bloodless fingers, intoning over and over “Just let me go home, just let me go home.”

I kept reminding myself that I was at least not the one with five screws in my femur, for the moment anyway, and my showing up was really making a difference to her. Appointments like that are a genuine treat — you can see the good you are doing — even on days like today, when my arrival overlapped the engagement of a gentleman who was cleaning all the upholstery in the living room with a rather loud apparatus. “I thought he would be done an hour ago.” apologized my client, who has almost reached the point of forsaking her Zimmer frame.

I tried to pretend it was a Zen fountain.

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Shopping

1. Rock Star

I am a sucker for pottery — if I had another life I would take up the art form — and had been saving the date of a student sale at a favorite artist’s shopfront. If you are not queer for the form it is a little difficult to explain the leap of the blood at the sight of a glaze or a shape that appears to be crying out to be taken home; it’s like all the heartwarming stories you read about shelter adoptions, without the spaying.

Student crock, currently holding cotton balls in my studio

This one has a silky glaze that offsets the incised patterns. It’s a fondler, like most of the mugs in my collection. You don’t want to know how many mugs I own.

Next door to the studio is a little shop that sells local craftsmens’ work on consignment, another dangerous place for me though usually so overpriced that I treat it more as a museum. It was simply and sordidly pissing down rain — the kind that feels like it is refrigerating you with intent — and no one was in there but a young woman who looked as if she was counting the minutes till closing time.

In the general blather of retail politesse I mentioned I had been next door looking at the student show, she shivered all up and down her cute-little-blonde-Gen-X-er frame and said she loved pottery, just loved it, and we agreed that we both would like to learn how to make it and I remarked that after twenty five years as a massage therapist it would probably feel very natural.

Her eyes got big and round. “You’re a massage therapist?” Um, yes m’am. Honest Injun. “Where– where– ” she stammered. I was digging out a card and saying “middle of Arlington” when she managed to ask “Where did you train? I’m starting in a few weeks,” and named the school where I learned the trade in the 80s.

The Cute Engineer, who had been driving through this frigid blue-gray Sunday, discreetly went off and looked at a lot of hooked rugs with dog images on them. Sometimes I realize that I underestimate his devotion.

Never have I witnessed anyone so visibly exhilarated by the mere intelligence of my occupation. Perhaps it was the hope implicit in that quarter-century mark. I felt called on to speak in the voice of a Seasoned Old Hand and rambled from tales of the place where every guy had a groin injury (moral: leave “spas” where all the customers are guys with groin injuries) to recommendations about first jobs. Somehow in all the excitement I bought two wine glasses decorated with silver wire and iridescent lozenges, the only dead-out bargains I have ever seen in that place. As I remember, we clasped hands twice before I left.

“You’re a rock star,” said the Engineer, and I did feel a little like this:

2. Next Time Can I Request Sondheim?

We just wanted a little bread and cheese with a salad for dinner and stopped off for a loaf at a bakery with the disturbing name of Best Buns. Almost nobody was in there either; the downpour had even discouraged the kind of people who get hot coffee or cocoa and some tarty thing. We wanted a loaf of pane rustico; one girl reached it down from the rack while a toothsome lad of twenty-odd leapt to ring it up. “Anything else?” he asked.

“That’ll do us,” I said.

“How about a song?”

Why not? I raised both hands, supinated in a bring-it-on beckon. Beardless Youth launched, with acceptable pitch though no great body of tone, into Memories from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, a charming performance even though the title was the only word he knew and he was obliged to dum-da-dum the rest of the melody, like the drunk in the sing-with-the-band jokes. Actually, the song doesn’t start with the word “memories,” it starts with “Touch me,” and after he tapered off I belted out the first couple of lines myself:

it’s so easy to leave me
all alone with my memories
of my days in the sun..,.

Disclaimer: someone gave me the DVD of the musical a couple of birthdays ago, or I would never have been able to get even that far. It isn’t quite a belter’s song, but I gave it all I had. By this time the few people in there with cups of coffee and tarty things were applauding us raggedly. The Engineer paid and got me out of there; it’s one way to get a guy to pull out his wallet.

It’s a good thing I only go shopping now and then.

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