Loose Leaf Notes

I sprained my ankle this past Saturday night, and since then my mobility has been severely limited. Luckily, it happened after I had just finished dancing for 2 hours to “The Kind” at Whiskers Roadside in Floyd (because I won’t be doing that again for awhile). My husband and I were picking up his teenage nephew at an outdoor party. It was dark and I stumbled down into a drainage ditch, twisting my foot and landing squarely on my left ankle.

After a fretful night’s sleep and a morning becoming familiar with Epson salts and arnica, my husband dug out a cane from somewhere in our cellar. It had a bike horn like the one that Harpo Marx used and a mirror screwed onto it. My husband’s mother made it and others like it as gag gifts for her friends when they retire…a poor woman’s wheel chair, I think she calls them.

But my sprained ankle was no laughing matter, so I made him take the horn and mirror off, leaving only the red and white tape running up and down the length of it, making it look like a candy cane. Would I go out in public with a “candy cane” cane for my scheduled scrabble game later in the day?

This is not the first time I’ve so badly sprained my ankle. I was 7 years old and visiting my grandparents in Hialeah, Florida, when it first happened. Doing some kind of kid stunt, I fell off the arm rest of my grandmother’s couch when the screen door I was leaning on swung open. At the time, I was convinced that screen doors only opened from in to out in Florida, but I later learned that isn’t true.

It’s no fun being 7 on vacation in Florida when you can’t walk because your ankle is sprained. Going to the ocean with my grandparents and cousins saved the day. In the water, I felt buoyantly limber and normal again. I got completely absorbed in water play.

When I got out of the ocean that day, my grandfather and cousins were gone. They forgot me! I panicked and made my way up the beach to find them, first limping, then crawling in the sand. I imagine I looked like a tortured soul stuck in a dessert without water. Eventually, some adults came to my rescue around the same time that my grandparents noticed I wasn’t with them, and we all hooked up. Of course, I was mad that my family had forgotten me, but even then I recognized what good mileage one could get with a story like that and used it later for a school assignment, titled “What did you do on your summer vacation?”

Unfortunately, my latest sprained ankle was still in bad shape on Sunday afternoon, and I had to cancel the scrabble game with friends. But when I hobbled into my writer’s workshop the next night (by this time on aspirin), I got more than a couple of stares, which made me wish I had left the bike horn on the cane so I could have given the group a real hoot (or should that be toot).