Freedom to Fly

This morning as I was on my way to work, driving down through Central Park in a cab, I saw a woman in a child's play area on a swing. Back and forth she went, pumping the air, wind streaming behind her. She flew high up, into the blue of the sky, and I could remember what that felt like, so exhilarating and free. I envied her on that swing, her ability to seize the simple joy of a spring morning. I wanted to get out the taxi and join her, but instead I headed to my job, where the first order of the day was a meeting that left me with a wild, almost inconsolable desire to flee this steel and glass prison and run for that soaring swing.

What I'm feeling in this moment calls back the words to a song I once fell in love with. It was a haunting Marianne Faithful song called "The Hawk" and the words in part went like this:

Gotta make your own rules, child.

Got to break your own chains.

The dreams that possess you

Can blossom and bless you

Or run you insane...

Storm on the mountain

Stars in the sky

Running for glory

Freedom to fly.

Born to Run

The cab I took to work this morning drove down through Central Park. It was a crystalline cold morning, with sunlight falling like watercolors through the lacy branches of trees, the snow still covering the rolling lawns and fields, ice floes still drifting in the steel gray water of the rowing lake. Along the cleared paths, men and women with toned bodies and furrowed concentrated faces ran with long easy strides. I couldn't help watching them, marveling at the precision with which they moved their bodies, at the way their limbs seemed to follow effortlessly their mental commands.

My body no longer does that. I can no longer run. My right knee joint has now deteriorated to the point that I am limping, in constant jeopardy of falling. It feels like bone against bone, as if the cartilage is all gone, the ligaments like loose elastic, no longer holding the connection firm. I have to set my foot down just so when I walk, so that the knee doesn't buckle under me, so that it doesn't send me sprawling or draw me up short with a flash of pain. I try to disguise it, because even though I know this ruined knee is not the result of my excess weight, but the result of an injury and arthritis and the hyper-extension of my knee joints that I inherited from my mother, I still know that people will silently tsk, if they notice me limping, and think disapprovingly, Well, why doesn't she just lose the weight?

Yes, losing the weight would certainly help. But if it were a matter of "just" losing it, of course I would have done that long ago. My mother has been slender all her life, and still her knees did what my right knee is doing, from her forties on. She eventually had both knees replaced with prosthetics, which I actually consider doing, except I am far too young for prosthetics, and besides, I couldn't afford to take the time off from my job that would be required for such surgery and recovery.

But I have to do something. I can't put off investigating the pain any longer. I wonder if doctors realize that fat people don't make appointments to see them because we are embarrassed, ashamed to take off our clothes, tired of being told to "just" lose the weight. No matter. Tomorrow I will make an appointment with my internist, and go from there.

I'm too young to stop running.

The Crew

My two are first and third from the right. The rest are five of my nephews, who with their parents were visiting us from Florida and Virginia this weekend. Soccer in Central Park. Lake views from Belvedere Castle. Sunset on the Great Lawn. 

We have always loved traveling en masse with this crew, like the time we spent a week on an Assiniboine Sioux rez in Montana, and slept in a huge and wonderful tee pee during their annual pow wow. I remember someone said, "What is wrong with this picture? The Indians are sleeping in tents made in China and the Jamaicans are sleeping in a tee pee." My cousin in law, whose rez it was, was determined that his Jamaican family would have an authentic native experience. Late that night, as we all settled down in sleeping bags on ground covered by fluffy comforters, we could see the stars through the opening at the top of the tee pee and hear the drummers still beating their skins across the meadow. There was something magical and otherworldly about the experience, as if we'd gone back in time. 

We went from the pow wow to South Dakota, where we pitched our own tents made in China in a public campground and ventured out to national monuments by day. The Crazy Horse Memorial was a highlight. So was the steak we ate that night at the campground, best we ever tasted, cooked over an open flame by the son of the campground owners. 

Pictured above are seven of the ten children who were with us on that 20-person vacation in the summer of 2003. We traveled in two rented vans and joked that we looked like a church outing. I love these people!