Backache to the future…
People say it\’s unwise to joke about death. In my family, even the barest mention of somebody dying prompts demands to \”Bite your tongue.\” And it\’s meant literally; put your tongue between your teeth and squeeze.
But while death gets all the attention, it\’s jokes about old age you really have to worry about. I\’ve discovered this in the last few weeks; a while back, I wrote about mistakenly getting an AARP membership card. Innocently (I thought), I quipped that it would be funny to go around pretending to be old. Oh, how the poor night clerk at the Days Inn would quake with confusion! He\’s got a old-people card, but he\’s not old…whaaaa?!
The mistake I made was not biting my tongue, literally or otherwise, after I wrote that. Now, the universe is adjusting itself in the form of a karmic backache.
It starts just above my hips (or love-handles, depending on how well you know me) in the center of my back. Then it fans out as it goes down my lower back, and continues on down my left and right butt-cheek, finishing at my hamstrings.
However painful biting my tongue would have been, that pain is dwarfed by the twisting jabs that leave my back muscles feeling they\’ve been slammed in a car door. What\’s worse is that the pain only comes with certain movements, so as long as I leave my body in one peculiar position, I\’m OK. Any deviation from that posture and I have to throw my body to the ground to end the spasms.
My mom gives me advice: \”Everyone in your family has a bad back. Didn\’t you know you had to be careful?\”
On second thought, that sounds more like goading than advice. Of course I knew I had to be careful. Just like Houdini knew he had to be careful when he went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
But how careful could I have been? I\’m Houdini. My life is the falls. My back is the barrel. I may make it, but my back\’s chances were never good.
At least, that\’s the way she made it sound. But I know my posterior isn\’t paining me because of some gene that has plagued the family for centuries. I know it\’s because I made fun of old people. So now I am suffering the indignities of premature old age.
And what indignities they are! I have to put one arm on my hip when I bend over to pick things up. I groan when I stand, when I sit, when I walk. I have not tied or untied my shoes for days; the knots are growing moldy from disuse.
TV infomercials for products I used to find ridiculous now look sensible and appealing. There is now a very real possibility that I will fall and not be able to get back up, and as far as I can tell, The Clapper is the best and most economical product on the market to allay my fears (Wait, I\’m not sure that\’s right. I think The Clapper just turned lights on and off).
I know, I know, it\’s too soon to give up. I am, after all, only 22 years old. Half a millennium ago I would have been at the doorstep of agedness. But today people are living healthy lives well into their 70s and 80s, why should a little spinal-cord cat\’s cradle frighten me?
I\’ll stretch! I\’ll do yoga! I\’ll get acupuncture! I\’ll do all those things and more. But most of all, I will desist my tasteless, disrespectful derision of the elderly, for I know now the cruelty of their fate. I will bite my tongue and bite again should such a remark slip out the pursed crease of my humorless lips.
I can only hope my condition will improve. But even if it doesn\’t, I won\’t again mock those who decades can be counted in the wrinkles around their eyes. Even if I find myself helpless on the floor, a victim of another karmic back-attack, I won\’t shout out \”Damned fogies!\”
I\’ll just bite my tongue, lift my two hands to the sky, and clap twice. Clap on. Clap off. The Clapper.
And then I will lie there under the blinking lights, hoping my neighbors – both of them octogenarians – will notice and rescue me.