| Summer 2000 | Volume II, Issue II |
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To An Athlete Dying Young by Will Blythe |
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Every week or so on an asphalt court at Astoria Park in Queens, my buddies and I play a high–spirited if rather gimpy version of pick–up basketball. You would never need to watch our moves in slow motion. Real time, sadly, is desultory enough. After the game, we unwrap our Ace bandages, slide off our knee braces and pat down our own bodies like cops to make sure all the parts are still there.
And that's when the real dramatics begin. That's when we launch into our Homeric chronicles of bodily degeneration. How lovingly we narrate our twinges and spasms, the harrowing sagas of bum knees and frayed rotator cuffs and tender ankles. Like cartographers of the 15th century, we map out whole continents of pain, heretofore unvisited regions of ache and bruise. To listen to us, you'd think we had double–parked our wheelchairs in a spot of sun down in Miami Beach. But it's not just age catching up with us. (Some of us are barely old enough to grow silly goatees.) It's the age. The whole culture is transfixed by the travails of the body. Men used to be pretty stiff–lipped about pain. Our bodies were these dumb pack animals that lugged our lunch pails to the factory or the field and then home again. They weren't very smart but they didn't complain very much either. Now we live in a time where our bodies are—or are supposed to be—temples to Narcissus. There at those well–chiseled altars we beseechingly leave our offerings of Gatorade and Powerbars and creatine. |
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| Contact Information |
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Phone: (250) 721-6997 Fax: (250) 721-6929 Email: mcollis@speakwell.com |
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