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August 09, 2006
WANTED: One fashionable electric scooter with significant lumbar support, preferably in yellow.
My mom is retired!
Actually, that should read: My mom is retired. Because she’s not the good kind of retired with twilight cruises and bingo games. She’s the bad kind of retired, on permanent disability for a spine that curves like Route 66. But she’s very excited about it, so I suppose that’s all that matters.
She walks funny. That’s what this post is really about. She walks with a distinctive gate that it will be nearly impossible to recreate here. But I will try.
Its like a gorilla is holding on to her hips. No, no. Its like she’s in a dog sled race, and someone has a rope wrapped around her midsection and is just being dragged along behind her. She walks utterly doubled over, pumping her clenched fists at double time as if to start some sort of steam powered back-up system that she has stored in at the base of her abominably crooked spine.
Sometimes she starts to feel confident, and its as though someone has attached a rip line to her nose and is reeling her in to her destination. I can see her thinking “If my nose can just get there…the rest of me is bound to follow suit.”
When we walk around town, she sees people she knows sitting in cafes or on park benches, and she stops to talk to them, leaning on one arm as though really interested in what they have to say. People always comment on my mom’s charismatic personality. If only they knew it isn’t charisma, but a gesture to keep her spinal disks from collapsing like a slinky. She’s like the President (G.W.B, folks), with their beady little Texas eyes and their propensity to make up words. George leans on the podium with a cocky air to hide the fact that he’s reading off a script typed like a “See Spot Run” book. While my mom, leans on park benches, also trying to cover her own weakness.
We were in Starbucks the other day and my mother spasmed. She started to buckle and collapse as we placed our order. I, of course, knew this was the sign of a slipped disk and she would need a good leg yanking later in the evening. The poor Coffee Artists, however, thought my mother was having some sort of massive stroke. They looked at me with pleading eyes, betraying their fear that they might be asked to take some measure to save this woman’s life. “Screw CPR!” I nearly screamed. “What this woman needs is a Venti Frappacino!”
It shows me what I have to look forward to. Apparently my mothers brand of scoliosis is pleasantly hereditary.
Posted by vcbailey at August 9, 2006 09:47 AM