This morning I woke up at 6:30 and decided to pick a few weeds. This was before I had coffee to lubricate my joints, but the morning was cool on what promised to be a hot day, and the job needed to get done. So I grabbed one of those plastic grocery bags that I also use to pick up my Dad's dog's poops with, and I headed outdoors, still in my pajamas. My plan was, I would pick weeds, then, once done, my pajamas would go into the hamper, and I would go into the shower.
It almost worked out that way.
I threw out my back on the third weed.
Don't think I'm some kind of 98-pound weakling. I've only just spent the last few days cleaning and polishing the wood floors in our house. That's a lot of bending over and moving heavy furniture around. Why can't my wife like the cheap stuff? It weighs less. And not only that, a few weeks back I had helped a buddy of mine move his family's 2,600 square feet of furniture to a house with only 1,800 square feet. That's a lot of weight that I had to shift from one place to another. He had forty big, heavy rocks in his front and back yards alone that I loaded onto my pick-up truck by myself, and unloaded at his new house. They were nice rocks, but... rocks? More like mini-boulders. Personally, I would have left them behind.
Where I went wrong was I should have done some stretching exercises before I bent over to pick that first weed. I stretch before I lift weights, I stretch before I go jogging, and I stretch before I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders, but who stretches to pick weeds?
I didn't throw my back out completely, though. I just aggravated a vertebrae at the base of my spine, but it hurt just the same. Still, it didn't hurt bad enough for me to stop what I was doing. Maybe it did, but I'm stubborn that way. I get it from my Dad.
I finished what I was doing, threw away the plastic bag stuffed with dead weeds, and I walked inside the house. Ready for some coffee and some sympathy. Mainly the coffee.
"Why are you walking funny?" my wife asked me, one eye on me and one eye surveying the contents of our refrigerator. "You look like your Dad."
"I hurt my back picking weeds," I explained.
"Well," she asked, removing a carton of eggs from the refrigerator, and placing them on the counter next to the stove, "did you get them all?"
That wasn't the kind of sympathy I was looking for.
The thing about a hurt back is that you can't see it. You can show off a stab wound, a broken leg with a bone sticking out, or a missing limb, and you might even get the proper amount of concern for those minor ailments (depending on whom you're married to), but a bad back is usually considered something along the lines of a lie that you've come up with to get out of doing something.
"Of course I did," I told her, with a bit more edge than I intended. "Who do you think you're married to, your first husband?"
That got her to focus both her eyeballs on me.
"Excuse me?" she said, lifting one eyebrow and giving me The Look.
"I hurt my back," I told her again, in case she missed it the first time I told her.
"How did you hurt it?" she asked me suspiciously, but I could see a little bit of her motherly instinct finally kicking in. "You were just picking weeds."
"That's how I did it, picking weeds."
"Why didn't you stretch?" she chastised me, her 20/20 hindsight also kicking in.
"Who stretches to pick weeds?" I asked, which, I thought, was a very reasonable question.
"You can't just go picking weeds first thing in the morning. Your body has to wake up first. You should have stretched."
Yeah, I should have, but knowing what I should have done then was doing me very little good now.
"I know, I know," I agreed. I figure agreeing would get me my coffee that much faster.
"Well, were you at least able to get them all?"
It hurt me to stand, it hurt me to sit, and all my wife wanted to know was if I had gotten all of the weeds? I tell you, since you can't actually see the injury, bad backs get no respect. They are the Rodney Dangerfield of ailments.
I remember one time after church a few years back, I was helping load up a cooler full of bottle water, canned sodas, and ice that the church sold after services as a way to make some extra cash. Actually, it was my cooler. I had lent it to the church, and I needed to load it onto the back of my truck.
A guy was walking by me with his family, a wife and two young daughters. He was pretty young, maybe his early thirties.
I couldn't lift the cooler by myself, so I asked him, "Hey, could you help me lift this onto my truck?"
"Oh, man, I'm sorry," he told me, "but I've got a bad back."
His wife nodded sadly in agreement. Thinking about it now, I guess she was sad because his pain medication was affecting his you-know-what.
"Oh, that's okay," I told him. "If you can't, you can't."
That's what I told him, but what I thought was, "Why you lying sack of... You look perfectly healthy to me." In anger, and out of spite, I lifted the cooler and its contents onto the truck myself with a grunt. I did this in front of the guy and his family, just to show them what I thought of his bad back.
I couldn't believe a healthy young guy like that would lie to me just to get out of a little bit of work, and that's what I thought my wife was thinking about me when I told her that my back was injured.
That's the thing about getting older. These days, by the end of what used to be a good night's sleep, I wake up ready for a nap. How the heck does that happen? I've just gotten a full night's worth of sleep. How can I still be tired?
Not only that, but if I get too much sleep, my back starts to seize up. I'll turn to lay on my other side, and all of a sudden I'm wide awake from the pain of a stiff back. I have to stop and gingerly maneuver myself into the position I want to be in. Maybe I'll fall back to sleep, maybe I won't. It depends on how close I am to dawn.
But it's not just my back. My knees aren't what they used to be either. Neither is my hearing. I can still hear perfectly fine, as long as there are no other competing noises. If I'm on the phone and the TV is on, I have to go into the other room to understand what I'm being told. The competing noises cancel each other out. I've gotten into the habit of saying "ten-four," just like the truckers, when somebody tells me something I didn't quite catch, because it means neither yay or nay. It just means, "I heard you." Well, I did hear them... I just didn't understand them.
I have a cousin who shall remain nameless, but I will tell you he's a few months younger than I am. He was at a football game recently, and he got up to walk down the bleachers to buy a beer or go to the bathroom, probably both, and his knee gave out on him. He fell in what looked like a slow motion scene from The Matrix, crying out, also in slow motion, "Nooooooo!"
Crying out "no" didn't do him any good, and it especially didn't do any good to the people he landed on. He ended up having to have a surgery that didn't work, and now he's going to have to have the same surgery done all over again. I guess the surgeon has two kids he needs to send through college.
But I'm digressing here...
My wife finally comes around.
"Does it hurt?" she asks. When she has to, she can fake sincerity pretty good.
"Only when I breathe," I answer.
"Do you want to go to the doctor?"
"It's Saturday. They're closed,"
"We could go to emergency."
"No," I tell her, bravely. "I'll be fine."
"Do you want me to give you a muscle relaxant?"
"I don't like taking pills," I say. I really don't.
"They'll help you."
"I'll be okay."
My Dad hobbles in about this time, and dang if my wife isn't right. I am walking like my Dad.
He looks at the empty stove, at my wife, and back at the empty stove. Usually, his breakfast feast is already being prepared by this time, but, unfortunately for him, I distracted my wife.
"Good morning, Dad," my wife greets him. I mumble something similar along those lines. "Breakfast will be ready in a little bit."
"Oh, don't worry about me," he tells her. Not a "hello." Not a "good morning." He's just being his usual passive aggressive self. It's hard to believe that when Mom was still alive, he wasn't above fixing himself his own breakfast. Now, he doesn't even know what a spatula is. "You keep talking. I can wait."
I get up, and walk over to where the coffee maker is. Now that my Dad is up and waiting for his breakfast, I know my morning cup of gourmet coffee will be second on the list of things my wife is going to do that morning.
I hobble stiffly over to the coffee maker. My wife sees me, and lets out a cute giggle.
"Are you making fun of me?" my Dad asks.
Raising My Father
RaisingMyFather.blogspot.com
jimduchene.blogspot.com Fifty Shades of Funny
@JimDuchene
@JimDuchene
No comments:
Post a Comment