This week, I got the okay from my orthopedic surgeon to ditch the crutches and walk on my boot. Being able to walk the last few days, even with a cane, has come with one of the strongest feelings of liberation I've felt in my life. I can do things for myself. I can get up off the couch and get myself a glass of water or warm up my coffee. I can do our cat's litter. I can put down his water bowl without spilling half of it. My armpits aren't chafed any more from crutch use, my knees don't look like an elephant's from crawling, and I don't have to drag myself around the apartment. And equally important, I can start getting muscles in my lower leg and ankle back. A little over a week ago, my back and hip were in near-constant pain from movement compensations and tight or strained muscles, and I had shooting pains down my leg, along with a return of a recurring lung infection that comes with wheezing, weird noises when I breathe, and a vibrating feeling in my lungs against my ribs. I was depressed and dejected, hadn't been able to leave the apartment on my own in a month, hadn't seen the sun in about as long, and was in serious need of a happiness infusion. Which is what I got in the form of my parents visiting for a few days to take me out into the world and do things I hadn't been able to do lately. Not only did they bring the sun with them (not just figuratively but literally—the sun shone during their entire visit for the first time I can remember) but they also took me to the Grand Rapids Public Museum, the art museum, a park by the river to walk on my iWalk knee crutch for what was my first real walk in a month, a movie, meals out, and, finally, my doctor's appointment where I got the ok to walk again. It was a good few days.
So now that I've had several days back in the world of being more independent and mobile and am no longer in pain or wheezing, I've been able to look back at my time in crutches (and my ongoing time in the iWalk for boxing purposes since I don't yet have the green light to put weight on my foot during boxing), and I have some observations from the last month, both injury-related and not:
1. The Grand Rapids phenomenon I have dubbed "shopping right-of-way" does not make allowances for the physically disabled or impaired.
There's this thing about people shopping in Grand Rapids that's different from any city I've ever been in. When I first moved here and experienced it for the first time, I thought it was an isolated occurrence. Then it happened again and again, and my husband even commented on it. In the months we've been here it's become a running joke between us because it's so common and so ridiculous: When one person is standing in an aisle looking at an item and another person is approaching (with or without a cart), and when there is plenty of room to simply go around the person standing, the person on the move nevertheless stops in their path and says, "Excuse me" rather than take two steps to their side to go around the person standing. The person standing is always expected to take the steps to the side so that the person walking can continue in a straight path without having to move left or right. It plays like something in a broad comedy film, and I'm always too stunned and in awe of the person who can't simply go around me to say anything to them. And now I've learned that even when I'm on crutches or, as is the case now, walking with a cane, I'm still expected to get out of the way of an oncoming shopper rather than them simply going around me. It's amazing. I don't understand it. And it's only in stores. Anywhere else people clear a path for me like I'm the plague and open doors for me. One of life's unsolvable mysteries, I suppose.
2. The Grand Rapids Public Museum is great.
I mean, this museum has pinball machines. Where else can you say you're going to a museum and then play pinball and design a roller coaster?
3. The Grand Rapids Art Museum is...umm...not. I was expecting paintings from famous artists and movements throughout the centuries and instead was disappointed to find it's almost exclusively a modern art museum. At least the decaying fruit on display had a description of what it was supposed to mean. Most of the items that most needed an explanation had none. Including this one:
However, they do have motorized scooters available for rental, and that was a definite highlight of the past month. I even managed not to run into any sculptures, including the crystal-imbedded rug that exists for a reason I have not yet figured out.
4. Christian Bale is an incredible actor.
This qualifies as a "Broken Foot Observation" because the movie my parents took me to see was Ford vs. Ferrari, which floored me with Bale's acting. I grew up knowing him as Laurie in Little Women, and then he became Bruce Wayne/Batman, and though I love all those movies, it had never once occurred to me that he was the kind of actor capable of transforming himself so completely that his face and body are merely vessels for another character to inhabit, carrying no physical or vocal mannerisms with him. The state of movies and entertainment is such right now that I don't think a performance in a film like Ford vs. Ferrari could ever win an Oscar no matter how good it is; the performance is too subtle and the film too blatantly entertaining and socially, culturally, and politically irrelevant in Hollywood's eyes, but in my book, a performance that illuminates a side of humanity and embodies it so completely that I teared up during the film and cried at the end is always relevant, so my vote for the performance of the year goes to Christian Bale as Ken Miles. There's a speech in the film, delivered by Matt Damon's Carroll Shelby, that mentions the oft-repeated notion that people who find something they love to do never have to work a day in their lives... but the film takes it a step further by identifying the two main characters as people who in contrast have found something they have to do, "something that if they can't do it, it's gonna drive them clean out of their mind." I have a difficult time sometimes explaining the distinction to people—even other dancers who love to dance—who don't understand what dance is to me and can't conceive of so deeply needing to do something, so to see that represented on film not only in words but so fully and completely in Miles's character filled me up in a way that reminded me why I fell in love with movies and their power and magic in the first place. So I say if you see one movie from 2019, make it Ford vs. Ferrari. But bring the Kleenex.
5. People find their inspiration in the small and mundane and selfish as much as in the grand and impressive and purposefully good.
Yesterday after boxing class, first a man who I had noticed watching me several times during class came up to me and told me it was inspiring watching me box in my iWalk, and then a woman came up to me and said, "You're my hero for doing this in that," nodding at my iWalk. I told her boxing is what's kept me sane since I broke my foot, and we started talking. We quickly found a common bond—while I'm a dancer who has to dance, she's an avid and very passionate runner who has to run, and twice during the conversation she said, "I've wondered what I would do..." trailing off rather than finishing the sentence with the dreaded but clearly indicated words "if I couldn't run," and she repeated that I was her hero for boxing in the iWalk. It was a statement that bounced around in my head all day, especially because, still in a Christian Bale mood, that evening I watched The Dark Knight Rises with my husband, where Batman's final line, delivered to Jim Gordan, is "A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended." As small as that action might have been to Gordan and might be in contrast with Batman's overt acts of heroism, it nevertheless was still an action intended to do good. It was a selfless act for someone else. Me boxing on my iWalk rather than staying home is 100% selfish. I do it for the sole reason that it makes me feel better. I'm not being brave. I'm not thinking of anyone else's needs or wants. I'm not doing anything other than literally putting one foot in front of the other in what is, compared to so many others like my uncle who lost his legs and has lived with the life-changing pain of it for decades, a minor blip in my life. And yet at least half a dozen strangers have gone out of their way in the last several weeks to tell me it inspires them to watch me do it. Maybe sometimes we don't need a Batman, or even a Jim Gordan, to feel better. Sometimes we need to see someone else, in a situation we fear happening to us, just being ordinary—someone simply choosing to continue doing things for themselves, choosing to stay active, choosing to feel good, choosing to be completely and totally normal, even in a selfish way, so that we know we too are capable of handling what they're handling if we ever wind up in their shoes. Maybe in an ordinary time, we draw inspiration from those we can see ourselves in the most, especially if they're facing something we fear and handling it in a way that is reassuringly and comfortingly boring.
6. Parents are the best. And moms know from a phone call exactly when they need to come be mom.
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