Ankling for Attention

 

 


I have an ankle. "So what?", you must be thinking. "So do I. So does everybody." But, you see, I have only just realized after 49 and three-quarter years that not only do I have an ankle but that it is an essential and hitherto unrecognized part of my (and your, whether you know it or not) being.

This realization has been growing for about 18 months. It all started one bright summer's morning in my home town in the northeast of England. I had been staying with my mother, ostensibly so that I could take care of her while she underwent an operation to remove a cancerous lung. In fact, however, for most of my five-month stay (the part before the surgeon did his job), I was the one being taken care of.

Since I left for college at the tender age of 18, I had rarely spent more than ten consecutive days "at home". Always the prodigal daughter, my homecoming had always been time for celebration. For my mother that means cooking and baking. The fact that I was home for an extended period mattered little as she set about making me everything I could least resist. The food of my childhood: yorkshire puddings, gravy, beef stew, deep-fried cod with home-made batter. Worst of all though were the "sweets", which she baked fresh every week like clockwork just as she had when I and my five brothers and sisters were kids. There were scones, with and without raisins, with and without cheese; apple pies, apple and bramble pies, apple and raspberry pies; and cakes (cupcakes), especially butterfly cakes, the tops carefully removed, the space filled with buttercream and the top, cut in two to resemble butterfly wings, replaced and sprinkled with powdered sugar. How could I resist? 

Needless to say, all of this love and affection quickly became apparent on my late forties frame. And rather than deprive my mother (and myself) of this long postponed pleasure, I decided that exercise was the answer. Having no work schedule to conform to, I decided to revert to my habits of earlier years and take up running. Summer in England is a perfect time and place to run. I would get up and leave my mother's about 7:30 and run the short 2.5 mile circuit I had discovered that took in sites of my earliest childhood days (past the site of the church hall my grandmother used to take us to for a benefit supper of pork pie and mushy peas) past the area where my father had an allotment and grew vegetables for the family table, and along the river that as a child more resembled a sewer than a freshwater source. Because the riverfront is now a park with concrete walkways and strategically placed bridges, it was a favorite haunt of every resident dog-owner. Fortunately the dogs were all well-schooled and their owners friendly.

And so we come to that day in August, when I got home from my run to find my mother having breakfast. I joined her and we chatted over the breakfast table about the inconsequential things that substitute for conversation with those we see daily. It was almost nine, and time for me to take a shower. That's when it happened. I got up to carry my breakfast bowl to the sink, when suddenly, unexpectedly, my ankle decided to launch a strong and painful protest. I was shocked! How could this ankle that had carried me uncomplainingly for 48 years, suddenly give out. Why had it not done so while I was in full jogging rhythm? To this day I do not know. But since then I have been almost permanently aware that, well, that I have an ankle. It may be the first signs of arthritis. The doctor of sports medicine didn't know and couldn't find anything from the X-ray. For me, I know that it is simply a message from my body, saying "Time is running out. You are no more immortal than your dead ancestors. It may not be lung cancer that gets you, but something surely will." That's when I started to feel that I could no longer put off a latent desire to see those far-off places that I have long dreamed of.

I have an ankle and so I had better get to Samarkand and Doshanbe, Harare and Johannesburg, Buenos Aires and Santiago, before the knee and the hip and who knows what else make their presence felt! 

Jan Bates (© 1999)
 


Updated March 31, 2002