Ashes to Ashes

My left foot is fucked up. Actually it's my heel. Achilles tendonitis. As in, my weak spot has a tendency to be fucked up. It's from running. Running too much, running for dear life, running it into the ground. I started running twenty-five years ago. As the joke goes, by now I should be in Cleveland. Twenty five times.

Twenty-five years ago, the longest and hardest I'd ever run (except to get the hell off the Iron Range, where I grew up, or rather, failed to) was to Kenny's on the corner to get a pack of Marlboros before it closed. Two blocks. I almost succumbed. It took me the better part of an evening draped across the bar at Lyle's to recover. This was back in the Old Neighborhood down in The City. Kenny's has since morphed into a smoke-free ice cream/latte parlor, Lyle's into a smoke-free yuppie fern bar, I into a smoke-free* wino runner.

Which brings me to my point.

My mother, in that uncanny way mothers of all stripes have of zeroing in on the crux of a matter, always said to me, "Everything in moderation, dear." Advice I never once heeded in all my long heedless life. She apparently knew something I didn't, and probably still does, though she no longer walks the planet. Or this particular planet, as she would have us believe.

The point being, when it comes to my life and habits, I remain unacquainted with the concept of moderation. Your basic good news/bad news scenario. Due to my running addiction, I'm in pretty good physical shape for a centenarian. Due to various other habits, I should be dead. Or at least not currently walking around on this particular planet.

When I was a wee tyke, or so the story goes, my mother devised a way of shutting me up while she dealt with my critically-ill baby sister. According to my grandmother, a Story in Herself, whenever I cried, my mother would insert my thumb into my mouth, a sort of organic plug, and it worked. I became quiet as a corpse. Problem being, I never took it out. Figuratively speaking. I grew used to the comfort of said plug, and when, after a certain age, thumb-sucking was deemed social-suicide, I embarked on a lifelong Vision Quest to find a replacement. Need I say more? Use your imagination. I certainly have.

The moral of the story being, it's my grandmother's fault. For not putting the kibosh on the whole sordid affair from the outset. For not pulling the plug, as it were.

But knowing myself as I do, my penchant for auto-amusement, I can safely say it ain't nobody's fault but my own. I have no doubt I was fully capable, even at the tender age of two years and change, of finding surcease from all my worldly troubles by way of whatever was handy. No pun intended.

After all, Great Aunt Helen from Tennessee, or so the story goes, was Flabbergasted, y'all! to discover Yours Truly reading a storybook in my crib at the ripe old age of 18 months, a tale she repeated at family gatherings until her premature death from excessive Southern drawling. No matter the storybook was upside down, it was the stuff of legend. This being the same Great Aunt who once informed me The Devil was under my bed in order to keep me in it when she was left to babysit one long ago summer night. Who was also the sister of the aforementioned faulty grandmother, a Story in Herself. It's a wonder I survived such a brutal childhood.

All of which is to explain why I rise from bed each morning, a phoenix from the ashes, and limp across the carpeting to the bathroom like Walter Brennan. It takes a busload of ibuprofen to get me walking a straight line these days. Like I ever. These days, my life is a continuum of carefully prescribed movements between fixes, intricately balanced, like an old Bulova. The self-winding kind. Once a thumb-sucker, always a thumb-sucker.

Though it could be worse. At least I have hair. Gina Mestamaki used to pull her eyelashes out in fourth grade and keep them in a little pile on her desk. She's probably bald by now. I just have a deformed thumb. Oh, and a fucked-up foot.





(*Except for those occasional 2 a.m. out-behind-the-barn drunken relapses with my wayward sister-in-law, but don't tell my husband.)