His left hand was still cramped, but he was unknotting it slowly.
I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body. It is humiliating before others to have a diarrhea from ptomaine poisoning or to vomit from it. But a cramp, he thought of it as a calambre, humiliates oneself especially when one is alone.
If the boy were here he could rub it for me and loosen it down from the forearm, he thought. But it will loosen up.
Everyone's body eventually betrays them. That's what aging and mortality is all about. I can't do stuff that I could easily do ten years ago. Like run long distances or ride roller coasters without throwing up. As the years pass, time slowly chips away at us, carving small and large losses. Those losses remind us that we are still breathing, alive.
I'm on vacation now. I worked for about nine hours today, finishing up loose ends at the library. By the time I left my office, I was really beat. Still am. When I was younger, I could easily stay up until 3 a.m., sleep for a couple hours, get up at 6 a.m., work all day, go home, write a poem, jog a few miles, and stay up to watch reruns of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Not any more.
My life is pretty complicated. I maintain a schedule that can be exhausting. My friends often worry about me and my lack of rest and sleep. I push myself to my limits frequently. On a good night, I probably get, on average, about five solid hours of sleep. On a normal night, between three and four hours. When I am in a blue funk, as I am now, sleep evades me. That doesn't mean I'm not tired. It means, when I put head to pillow, my mind finds 27 topics that need my immediate attention.
But I'm hoping to find moments of rest these next few days. I'm traveling to the Chicago area on Thursday to take my family to Great America. That means many hours in a car followed by many hours trying to avoid a case of vertigo. That upside is that I'm not driving. That means I will have no choice but to relax for almost a full day. Maybe even nap.
And that will be a blessing for Saint Marty's tired old body and mind.
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