CARRY ON, SAID THE VULTURE
Ed Barna
When
I was a kid, there was a contest somewhere in the country in which anyone who
could carry a bag of silver dollars for a mile could keep it. At an age when I
was still figuring out the extremes of what the human body could do or not do,
this was fascinating. Any time I had to carry something for a distance-usually
wood for the woodstove-I would think of that contest as my arms began to ache,
and I would suck it up, dig down deep, get a second wind-you can substitute
your favorite locker room phrase-and keep going.
Perhaps
this had something to do with using my right side as the heavy duty carrying
side when I grew into adulthood, for things like lugging five-gallon buckets
full of maple sap, or major stones for a stone wall, or wood for the woodstove.
This happened even though my two brothers and I knew that it was a good idea to
use both sides, whether guiding a pen or a Mars Platter (we were good at
frisbee before the Frisbee came on the market) or a basketball. I'm lefthanded
in basketball, frisbee, and picking things; with my right, I write, throw, and
use hand tools.
Probably
this preference for lugging loads right-handed is why my right hip has
osteoarthritis worse than my left, though X-rays indicate that 2010 should be
the year that both get new clutches, so to speak. Right now, it's 3:44 a.m.;
I'm up to take the medication that controls restless leg syndrome, which the
pain-killer let me sleep through for an amazingly long time, but which finally
won. The right leg of course. The old-timers used to call this condition
"jiggetty leg," and the fact that they went on building this country
despite having no medication for this and other potentially debilitating
conditions, other than hard cider or moonshine or the local beer, has earned my
deepest respect. Lately, during the health care debate, someone suggested that
a lot of illnesses have been created more by terminology than reality, such as,
for example, "restless leg syndrome." I'd like that guy to witness one
of the episodes, in which a small muscle clench becomes a kind of sequential
charliehorse, shaking your leg in a way that you can't sleep through. After
which, I would use that leg to kick him in the ass.
It's
been said by covered bridge experts that a bridge's worst problem is its own
dead load. I never reflected as a kid that I myself would be the biggest load I
would carry, bigger even than the rock I dug out of Robert Frost's old garden
site on his farm in Derry, New Hampshire and lifted to the top of the four-foot
cairn of stones I had removed from the garden, a stone which was big enough so
visitors to the New Hampshire state park can see it in an aerial photo of the
place that includes the garden, taken during the "Back to the Land"s
1970s.
At
that time, in my mid- to late 20s, I weighed about 170 pounds, had a blood
pressure reading of 104 over 58, and had a resting pulse (say after running my
daily two miles) of about 40. A tumor that devastated my endocrine system and
has had profound after-effects changed me into someone who weighs 265 pounds,
with borderline high blood pressure and a pulse so weak it takes a stethoscope
to hear it.
On
their White Album, the Beatles lugubriously intone and keep repeating
"Boy, you're going to carry that weight, carry that weight a long
time." I'll try. My hip bones just knocked twice for good luck.
Comments