Running on Empty

The cast is gone, and this week I was rid of the boot. I walk unencumbered, though with a bit of a limp, the latter a result of muscles severely tightened and resistant to flex. I have exercises, and I go to physical therapy three times each week. I don’t know how long that continues—as most good therapists, mine urges me to continue without end. Why not?

The issue now is how to move on. I have to reenter the life I lived before this event occurred. I intend to return to running, sooner rather than later, but later rather than sooner. I intend to get my own cups of coffee, though it was so pleasant to be so well served. I will no longer be focused on the damaged ankle, and hope to begin to focus on other activities and priorities. I want to return with energy to my scholarly, intellectual and academic life. I have begun to study again in the early morning hours.

But I had broken my ankle—lately I like to say that the ankle was fractured—if it was truly broken then it must also be beyond repair. Yet I am now walking evidence that whatever occurred is now restored. Unlike my mother’s vase, my leg is knit almost perfectly. Indeed, my doctor tells me, for a while the bone will even be stronger than it was before I fractured it. And since I had broken it, I can never again be a person who has not had a broken ankle. Every step I now take presses on the ankle that was broken. Every step I take reminds me that once I couldn’t walk.

I have rested, as it were, for six weeks. I, of course, had discovered that I was vulnerable, as if I needed the ankle to remind me of that frailty. But indeed, that had been the case: I have been relatively healthy and unfractured for most of my life. While laid up with the fractured ankle, I could not recall another time when I was ever so incapacitated. In the last thirty years I have not missed running more than four days running, and that when I had undergone a hemerrhoidectomy, and, as a patient etherized upon a table, had had some anal fissures fused.

I discovered that I could rest, and that the world would not fall apart if I could not run. Nor would I gain seven hundred pounds and sink into the comfy chair never to arise again. I didn’t get any more read, but neither did I read any less. I had no more or less profound thoughts, though, as with Prospero, every third thought was of the grave.

Healing Ankles, Frozen Waters

I am sitting at the dining room table with my right foot atop two pillows. On the ankle, no longer broken, but healing, is a full bag of ice—frozen water, my daughter informs me—working assiduously to reduce the swelling. I’ve been in physical therapy for the past 6 days—working aggressively (the therapist’s term) to get me back to my regular running, well, moving, program. I nodded at him anxiously and with a little anxiety.

Can I really just move back into the life that stopped abruptly six weeks ago when I broke my ankle? How can I ever move back into the life without the memory of breaking the ankle? As Dylan writes, “I used to care, but things have changed.” I long for that moment when I can walk unassumingly and without limp. I anticipate the time when I need not calculate every move so as to accomplish my purpose with greatest conservation of energy. I cannot wait to give up my crutches. Well, to do without at least the metal ones on which I stand; the psychic ones, well, we’ll address them another day. Now, I want once again to run on the roads.

But I broke my ankle once, and I cannot live without that memory. I cannot forget. And I am wondering what that might mean to me in my daily life. Certainly, I will be very cautious when I am around ice—frozen water—and will no longer be so cavalier about my steadiness of foot. Certainly, I am now more conscious of the earth’s subtle undulations: I feel the slightest depression.

Perhaps I will enjoy in a new way the movement on the roads when I compare it with the sedentary nature of my present existence. But now, my ankle is very cold from the ice—frozen water—and I am weary and tired.