28 AUGUST 2000
Eight o'clock and dusky: no doubt about it, summer is a-goin' fast, goddam. There's a good sized fire about twenty miles north-east of here, and the smoke settled in over us about an hour ago. Makes pretty pastel colors for sunset, but thereÕs nothing unusual about being able to see beauty in destruction.
For the last week or so, I've been extra aware of the frailties of my body. A cynical voice in my head says, "yeah, well, you got away with ignoring it for quite a few years, so donÕt complain."
And I did get away with it for a long time. I was born with an odd bone disease, "osteogenesis imperfecta." O.I. for a medically-approved short form, "brittle bones," for a pop version. Its an inability to get enough collagen formation in my bones. I was the first in my family to get it, as far as anyone knows. My son has it, too. Neither he nor I have really severe cases of O.I.; in fact we have the mildest form, Type I. Still, I have had more fractures of long bones than I can remember, and countless smaller fractures, like compression fractures of different vertebrae. My back is shaped short of like a question mark. Not quite as severe as that, but it is more pronounced than I really like. I tried for years and years to stand as straight as possible, so it wouldn't show. At the same time I was doing that, though, I was acting as if I didn't have a problem with my bones. Trying to act that way, because I did. I went for a long time without any major fractures, but that was fool's luck: it wasn't for want of opportunity. That was when I really messed up my back, playing normal. I lived a vigorous outdoors life: I raised stock, cut firewood, hauled water, bucked hay...
Most of the men I knew had bad backs, so I assumed the pains I acquired and endured were part of the gig. I'd learned some skills at self-medication, pretty early on, back in San Francisco in the Sixties, so I knew how to deal with physical discomfort, pretty much. And, of course, I'd grown up with an annual toll of broken legs and arms, so physical pain was something I was pretty familiar with.
Probably the only reason I didn't cripple myself up worse was because I only roughed it for fifteen years or so; most of my life I was essentially an intellectual, bookish, and someone who's exercise was mild. I'm still a moderately good walker—sort of. Not as good as I can remember being...
In those fifteen years, I did stuff that seems fairly outlandish, given my medical condition. I got OK at running small (D-3 sized) bulldozers and front-end loaders. I learned how to operate a dump truck, three-point hitches on farm tractors, trap bobcat and coyote, hunt, butcher hogs, split and stack firewood, build frame houses and barns, operate a jack-hammer (I was small enough, though, that the jack-hammer bounced me around as much as it slammed the rock), use dynamite, rebuild electrical plants, operate chain-saws, stretch fence, rebuild 4-wheel drives, and other semi-obsolete and arcane skills.
Actually, it was wonderful. I have to be honest: I loved it. As I child I'd heard endless litanies of what I couldn't or wouldn't ever be able to do. I was raised, basically, to be a cripple and an outcast. It was, I learned, essentially a curse from God that I could never overcome, but only, through application of my mind, make enough money to somehow please the Creator of my flimsy body. I was a mild-mannered kid: I wouldn't have dreamed to say "Bullshit" to any of the adults in my family—or anywhere else.
But once I moved to a rural area, and was middle-aged, I said "BullshitÓ"to them—even though by then they were dead—a dozen times a day. That old family stuff just waits and waits for the opportunity to rage through life like flames through a forest.
And, it did. So today, I pay the price for trying to ignore reality. Denial is an expensive process. The result is something I am aware of on a daily basis: sit for ten minutes or more in a chair and get up—pain when I straighten up, pain the first few steps. Stand too long in one place: pain without having to move. Arthritis in most of my joints, particularly the ones where I've had fractures (which is, it sometimes feels, most all of them). I still sigh deeply when I see pictures of myself, all stooped over—that can't be me, part of me wants to say. Get over it, it is me, another part snarls back. In a way, this happens to everybody, as far as I know. Sometimes that is not consoling at all!
There is nothing to do about it, however, but to keep on keeping on. Not only did nobody promise me a rose garden, nobody promised me eternal youth, either. And the idea of being young again, and having to go through learning all the lessons I had to learn....ugh. I will take age and decrepitude, thank you!
Here's a link to a foundation for the study of, and the site of much information, on OI: