We were city visitors hustling along Park Avenue in Manhatten one rainy Saturday when my husband stopped and tilted his foot sideways to look at the sole of his Bass oxford shoe. “My foot’s a little wet,” he commented and I joined him to examine the worn-smooth sole. When he flexed the toe of the shoe the midsole fractured from side to side leaving his tan damp sock visible. He wore those shoes the remainder of the trip and is probable still wearing them these many weeks later. He is largely undisturbed by the minor inconveniences of life like holes in his shoes or shiny threads showing across the wallet pocket of his pants. He does not fret over day to day matters like food and will eat anything including leftover, cold seafood gumbo. Even if a basic item like shampoo is unavailable he will wash his hair with soap and be happy. If his daily clinc work schedule is over booked he will work until it’s done with a smile.
After seventeen years of marriage I thought that he was unshakable until November 22nd when he caught his toe on the top brick of a 2 1/2 foot retaining wall, fell forward and fractured his left wrist. He moaned briefly when it happened and bemoaned the inconvenience of it all the way to the emergency room. The xray confirmed a clean break through the radius, a fracture of the styloid process of the ulna and a dorsal comminution. The orthopedist casted the arm in fiberglass and we returned home.
The first few days of pain and swelling were miserable for him, but he quickly returned to his usual daily activities. As the swelling dwindled, much to my surprise, his annoyance grew. I watched over the weeks as he would stare at the cast, wiggle his fingers and frown. “It is a club,” he would claim. “I might accidentally hit people with it. They should take it off.” Another time he would jab his finger at the middle of the fiberglass and attest, “It itches right here. I can’t scratch it. They should take it off.” For weeks during idle moments he would sit with furrowed brow and use his right thumb nail to flick up the end of the fiberglass wrap as it curled around his forearm. The fiberglass was hard and unyielding. After weeks of prying he could flip up about one centimeter of the edge and with his first smile of the month he found the nearest sharp knife and sawed off the loose corner.
At five weeks the swelling had resolved and his forearm muscles had atrophied enough that the cast would slide an inch up and down his arm. We would lie in bed at night and he would stretch his arm toward the ceiling like a flag pole. After a few minutes of fretful scrutiny he would twist his hand back and forth from pronation to limited supination. In deep concentration he would hold the arm straight up and stretch the fingers wide apart. Then in the last moment of desperation, like a doomed outlaw on a quick draw for his six shooter, he would grasp the middle of the cast with his right hand and twist upward in a vain attempt to slide the cast off of his left hand.
“It won’t come off,” I would fire back.
“It might if I push hard enough,” he would reply through clenched teeth.
“It is narrow at the wrist and it won’t go over your hand,” I would explain with calm equinamity as he continued to pout and push
As we approached the end of the six weeks I asked him the question that had nagged me all along, “How is it that this cast has bothered you so much when a hole in you shoe on a rainy day didn’t worry you at all?”
“I like every day to be different,’ he explained. “On that rainy day I know that a sunny day will come along soon. There will be a change. This same cast is just there, day after day smelling like wet socks. It’s driving me crazy!”
Today, January 2, he got his cast off. It is a day of freedom, scratching and his first shower without a plastic bag over his arm in six weeks. He washed his hair with soap, put on his tennis shoes with the broken laces patched together with knots, loaded trash in the back of the Ford Ranger and drove off to the trash dump. He was waving his left hand and wearing a smile.