Another break

The days start and end dark now, even after falling back. When the light comes up strong, it still slides in from a fall sun that seems already on its way back down into evening. October and November were mainly a sum of routines (apart from a few wonderful occasions that I'll return to some other time), the new ones from September now old and idling in the lower part of out brains.

Here's a non-routine thing that happened, though. As I mentioned a while back, my son broke his arm for the third time over the summer. Turns out he wasn't the only one with a bone that needed fixing.

I starting playing basketball again last winter after something like a twenty-year hiatus. These were solid pickup games with some other dads around the same age as me. Back in May, I went up for a shot, got undercut in the air, and took a hard fall. I caught myself with my hands and, as it turned out, made the shot but popped a small bone* in my left wrist.

Like nearly everyone (the Internet now tells me), I thought I sprained my hand, and after a few weeks of wrapping and icing, I didn't think much about it. We went to the beach, traveled a bit, had as normal of a summer as we could with a broken-armed son. I even kept playing basketball.

I don't like going to doctors — never have — but after another, smaller fall, three months of persistent pain, and insistence by my usually correct wife, I decided to see a wrist guy. My appointment was on a Wednesday. After looking over my bones, he suggested surgery the Friday just two days away, which I agreed to and underwent.

I could tell you about the early morning check-in for surgery that began with an Applebee's-style beeper, or about how weeks later the doctor pulled the two pins from my wrist with a regulation pair of pliers, the red-rubber-handled kind that could've come from a truck-bed toolbox. I could mention how the ligament he also fixed in surgery has slipped a bit out of alignment, which may mean new cuts and screws and casts later on. I could tell you about how I have seen myself as doctors do, as a body to which consciousness is remotely and tenuously fixed, even though I know better.

But I find myself unsure why I make a show of telling you anything. Perhaps seeing a crease in one's own bone — in my hand, my main hinge with the world — is just the kind of thing people find themselves talking about. Or perhaps I've gotten used to telling strangers quick stories when they ask about my cast and tell me back their memories of injury, ostensibly as a comfort.

Most likely in even this short telling I can convert an explanation of silence into an excuse for not writing, for no longer being young.

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*More precisely and in doctor talk, that would be my left scaphoid.