Forty years ago I slipped and tore ligaments along the side of my right foot and partway up my right leg. The damage could’ve been far worse, but I needed crutches for a month and limped for more than a year. Eventually, the ligaments healed and I went on with my life, of course. However… recently, my foot has been aching where the tear was at its worst. It is an old wound, a very old wound, but apparently, it isn’t done with me yet.
There is a story to the injury which is unimportant at the moment, yet here is another fragment of a different story: A commentator on the news a few weeks back described the national mood as one of melancholy. And as soon as he said it, I thought to myself, yes. Yes, melancholy. That feels exactly right.
*
It annoys me that pain has returned to my right foot. Then again, it is one more point of pain in a collection of points of pain that will remain unresolved until we are beyond our pandemic restrictions. The annoyance is this: I am doing my best to increase my daily hall-walking. In fact, I have more than doubled it, managing 30 minutes in the morning or at noontime and another 30 minutes in the evening, usually three hours before I go to sleep. I don’t always walk as quickly as I once might have, though I do my “route” up and down the hallway at a reasonably brisk clip.
To be frank, I have committed myself to this less-than-ideal exercise with a determination that surprises me. I feel as if walking will keep me from losing my grip, a desire no doubt echoed around the world by others still living indoors even as we attempt to create and sustain routines that simulate an acceptable reality.
Since daily walking was part of my routine for decades, resurrecting it in any form feels comforting. And comfort (these days) is key. Besides, it helps to rein in eating too much or eating unhealthy foods too easily ordered for “contactless drop-off.” And given the pandemic pounds I must lose, knowing that exercise is the only way to achieve it, even a small measure of self-imposed structure is, for me, a necessity.
*
I was texting with an old friend the other day and she is baking as a means to do something productive these days. More than that, she finds this activity both calming and comforting. (She is skilled at so many things and having tasted her kitchen wizardry, I admit to salivating when she describes her latest confections.) In her most recent text, she tells me she is taking up meditation — nothing extreme — but she is finding it helps in general and it helps with anxiety.
“I’ve never been able to meditate,” I text back. “The closest thing I have is walking.”
“Isn’t that a sort of meditation?” she asks.
I send a thumbs-up emoticon in response. Indeed.
*
When walking, I am both observant of the details around me (especially pleasant when outside, of course) and strangely unaware of my “usual” preoccupations. With steady movement, my mind is set free – set free to review the films of my life, to solve creative challenges, to project ahead into pursuing dreams, to plan for a fulfilling future, and to find words. Or rather, for words to find me. For years, I wrote in my head while walking. And those were years before smartphones you could carry in a pocket, whip out in full stride, and speak into in order to capture your thoughts. In fact, I have clear recollections of walking my old neighborhood with scraps of paper and a small pen shoved in my jeans pocket and stopping briefly to jot down a phrase or a sentence — noting the fuchsia azaleas, the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, or the texture of the tarry road beneath my feet.
Naturally, walking a cluttered hallway does not unleash the wonder of words. Not cheery ones, certainly. Rather, I am likely to revisit those old films, seemingly stuck and stubbornly looping. Often those old films, in our melancholic nation and our melancholic worlds, land on old wounds.
So it is that I revisit who I may have hurt and who has hurt me; I second-guess poor choices and chide myself for terrible decisions; I wonder why I stayed so long in destructive relationships, costing me dearly in years better spent rebuilding a stronger self. I wonder about my sons and what I could have done to have been a better parent (and how to be a better parent even now). I wonder about my mother and why she wasn’t a better parent, as if I could’ve done something to shield myself from her narcissism and manipulation; I wonder who I might have been had the wounds inflicted been acknowledged before her death; I wonder who I might have been were I stronger, tougher, less impressionable, more self-possessed.
I am vulnerable — we are all vulnerable these days — but I am not a child. I will not be a victim. I loathe the victim mentality. I must own my actions, who I am, what I become, how to change.
*
As I age and begin to resemble my mother, perhaps it is inevitable that I see myself in her, and that I contemplate the power of a parent’s love to gift, to uplift, and also to wound, indelibly. These are not mutually exclusive elements of our emotional inheritance. Still, I try to decipher the riddle of the woman who bore me. I try to right and rewrite the imbalance.
*
We are past the afternoons of snowfall at its prettiest; instead, winter persists in producing dreary days of drifts that won’t melt away, ice storms that snap limbs, and sullen skies letting loose freezing rain.
Occasionally, the clouds break, and pools of sunshine flood my front room. I park myself by the window in an overstuffed chair, I wrap my fingers around a mug of French Roast, and however fleeting for now, I bask in the light.
*
Hall-walking continues as a significant element in combating the extent to which I am growing stir crazy. Still, I long to feel physically weary in a way that I currently do not. Despite the exercise, I feel weary all the time. Or more precisely, melancholic. So I push myself to go longer, faster, harder. In the past week, 30 minutes in the morning has expanded to 45; likewise, the evening walks are now 40 minutes or more. Given the length of time (and constraints) involved, I am working to set aside the dark films of memory with the assist of my smartphone — I listen to classic movies as I walk, and it’s helping.
Of course, I am left to deal with my nagging right foot, that old wound that brings me back to a youthful self living abroad, and to my glorious plans that were curtailed by a simple accident.
Old wounds are funny that way, aren’t they? Some days they’re triggered in a flash, they open back up, and we relive the hurts that left their mark. Other days, we take note of the butterflies.
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BEAUTIFUL PIECE………..D.A.
HALL WALKING FOR 45 minutes!!!
THAT IS IMPRESSIVE!