Broken Foot Brigade

July 9, 2009

On my way out the door to meet Deborah for dinner last night, I passed a woman in our courtyard. A rather short, middle-aged woman with tight. frizzy, black curls. She saw me on my crutches and beamed a smile. "Hi," she said in such a familiar way that I thought we must've met before. "What happened to you, poor thing?"

"Broke my foot," I said, while my mind raced to place her face.

"Your ankle or your foot?"

"My foot."

I pointed to the corresponding bone in my hand to illustrate where the break was, and told her how it had to be screwed together.

"Oh dear, how did it happen?"

"Motorcycle accident."

She gave me a look that was part schoolmarm, part concerned mother. "Are you okay?" she asked. She seemed so earnest, as if my being okay wasn't just important to her, but to the entire city, the whole country, the very world itself. "I mean, you're okay, right?"

"Yeah, I'm okay. That's it, just my foot."

"You can't put weight in it, right?"

"Right."

Then she pointed to her own foot, and that's when I noticed that she was wearing a removable cast, not unlike my own, only hers was black, and taller than mine, with a couple of additional velcro closures.

"Oh, hey," I said. "I didn't even notice. What did you do?"

She flinched as if shocked by static electricity and then looked at me as if I had just asked her how old she was or how much she weighed. She turned and, from the corner of her mouth, said, "Something different than you." Then she walked away with a barely perceptible limp.

"That was weird, " I thought. " Maybe she was run over by a motorcycle. " But then I thought about how concerned she was about my being okay, that maybe she herself wasn't okay. Maybe her foot was somehow related to a more serious condition, and I had inadvertently insulted the gravity of her situation by focusing on the least of her problems. Or maybe she was just a big phony in the middle of an insurance scam, and my recent crash course in foot anatomy made her leery of trying to bullshit me. Who knows?

In any case, I continued on my way, struggling through our building's front gate, and onto the sidewalk where I was suddenly face to face with another broken foot -- or leg or ankle. A guy on crutches, being helped by his girlfriend or wife, had just gotten out of a car and was making his way to the gate. He had a fiberglass non-removable cast that ran from his knee to his toes and was so perfectly clean he may very well have been coming home from the hospital. We looked at each other and laughed. "Howzit going?" he said, somewhat sheepishly.

"Oh, pretty good, I guess. Howzitgoing with you?"

"Meh."

My car was waiting and I was running late so there wasn't time to trade war stories — he didn't appear interested in chit chat anyway — but regardless, as I got in the car, I couldn't help laughing at such a funny coincidence. Three people in the same apartment building, each with a broken foot, and all of us coming and going at the same time.

Must be the season.

When I met Deborah, I told her about the impromptu meeting of the broken foot brigade. "It's hard to judge by just a cast," I said, "but the guy looked worse off than me. He had one of those fiberglass jobs that went all the way to his knee."

"Maybe he broke a bunch of bones," said Deborah.

"Maybe."

"I know I keep saying it,” she said, “but you're lucky."

"What's today, Wednesday? Did you buy a lottery ticket today?"

"As a matter of fact, I did."

"Oh, good. We'll see how lucky I am."

“I think you mean, how generous I am.”