This memoir of mine appeared in The Examined Life
The Ghost and the Machine
The air is crisp and the morning sun is blinding. Five of us unpack our tennis bags by the net post on the court at this neighborhood park. We are going to play doubles. Frank has set up a folding chair for himself and leans back against the chain link fence. Beyond him, on the other side, two kids lazily shoot baskets.
“How are we going to do this?” Dave asks. Five players, but only four play at a time. “Rotate after each game?”
“No,” Frank says. “Brad and I will rotate. We have knee issues.”
My eyes settle on wide black braces fastened around both of Frank’s knees. I half-listen as he explains the particulars, recent history where one knee gave out during play. I hear a hollow canyon in his voice, the awe and helplessness we feel when the body we take for granted fails to report for duty. It’s an interesting canyon. Everyone hears the echo, but it resonates more deeply for those of us in our sixties.
“What’s wrong with your knee?” someone asks Brad. Brad points to the scar up the front of his leg that looks like a zipper on a giant’s britches.
“Oh,” Dave says, laughing. “You got a new knee. How is it?”
“The knee’s great. The question is whether I can bend it.”
Brad explains the artificial joint is strong, but stiff. A painful part of rehab is trying to force the knee to bend.
“If it just won’t bend, there’s another operation where they knock you out and doctor just bends it like this.” He makes a cracking sound, acts like he’s breaking a stick over his knee, and laughs, macabre humor making light of his pain.
Knee replacements are not my fate, not yet. But next week I’ll have a cataract removed from my left eye and an outlet created behind it to drain fluid to relieve my glaucoma. It’s routine procedure (the drainage part, not as much), outpatient, and I shouldn’t worry. But it’s my eye, a vulnerable part of the body, so I covertly nurse anxiety. I push thoughts of my impending procedure out of my mind. I flex my spine, expand and contract my muscles to summon vigor, as if smearing blood on the doorpost of my body to ward off death.
We begin to play. Every three games Brad and Frank switch, one sitting, the other playing. The nice thing for older players about doubles is there’s less court to cover. With the knee issues, Brad can’t cross the backcourt to return a ball lobbed over his partner’s head, and Frank can’t dash from the baseline to the net for a drop shot, but nobody’s hitting those kinds of shots on purpose. What’s the fun in that? In the race against bodily decay, we’re all on the same team.
#
When I first agreed to the cataract operation, I thought it was just lasering off a growth that obscured my vision, like having a wart removed. Only later did I realize that an artificial lens would replace the lens I was born with, and drainage for the glaucoma is accomplished by implanting a titanium stint behind my eye. Two foreign objects would become part of my body.
Now I’m flat on my back in one of the prep rooms before surgery. A nurse inserts a needle in a vein above my right wrist to create the IV, and then gives me a shot of another anesthetic to relax me. Meanwhile, a second nurse is bathing my eye with drops to dilate and drops to anesthetize. Drops, then daub, drops, then daub. The anesthesiologist steps in, tells me I won’t be knocked out completely during the operation “because we don’t want you moving around.” I don’t understand. Isn’t knocking me out the way to make sure I don’t move around?
I’ve worried about how my eye will stay still, imagining a vice will hold my eyeball or the doctor will say don’t move as he pokes my eye with an instrument resembling a soldering iron. “I don’t have to do anything, do I?” The anesthesiologist says no.
The nurse resumes drops, then daub, drops, then daub, but the pace quickens, repeating over what feels like a long time. Then the curtains slide open. More people enter. They grab the sides of my bed, and roll me down the hall. All I feel is the cushiony vibration of wheels bouncing against the floor. I cannot form thoughts. I surrender to my fate, whatever it is.
In the operating room, new people introduce themselves to me. They examine my eye, discuss dilating more, aestheticizing more, add drops. Finally I hear my doctor’s voice, remember that when I first met him I thought he looked like a teenager. A device is positioned over my face. A bright light shines in my eye. I observe the light systematically pulverizing the cataract from changing angles. He’s trying to get it all because if a piece breaks off I will need a second operation. The light is insanely bright, but I don’t feel pain. The doctor announces he’s gotten the cataract and is moving on to the “harder” part of the operation. I don’t feel alarmed. I’m an impartial observer recording an operation during which the thought of “me” is an abstraction. This changes for a moment when I feel something like a wire enter through my cornea and go around (or through?) my eye. There’s a little pain, but it’s over quickly. Anesthesia is an amazing thing.
#
Two weeks later, I still take steroid drops in my eyes twice a day. My eye doesn’t feel “normal,” but I read eye charts better than I could before the operation.
I’m cleared for normal activities. Per my doctor’s instructions, I wear protective goggles when I play tennis. I explain why to the other players. Some say the goggles are cool, make look “intimidating.” I think they make me look like the cartoon character Fearless Fly. Regardless, I’m now officially part of the bionic Baby Boomers, except it’s not like on TV. We aren’t Cyborgs with superpowers. We’re lawyers with double hip-replacements from too many years of sitting, half-ass tennis players with heart stents, members of AARP cobbled together like Frankenstein wannabes. And there’s no operation or implant that forestalls the decline in energy that comes with age. Time will tell whether I have the self-discipline to do yoga, lift weights, and take other steps to slow loss of bodily vigor I’ve taken for granted my entire life.
I’m thinking these thoughts when my wife, Bunny, calls me to our front door. She points across the street to a man with white hair, dressed in flannel, looking disheveled. I wonder if it’s a street person or an old drunk who has wandered into our neighborhood. It’s the middle of a humid day and the heat index is triple-digit.
“He’s just sitting there in this heat,” she says. “This can’t be right. I’m going over.”
Bunny walks out the door and heads toward the old man. I grab my shoes and follow. By the time I’ve joined her, Bunny has scoped out the situation. The man’s name is Clyde and he’s a neighbor we’ve never met. He’s sitting in front of his own house. He fell when he went to get the mail. I see letters littering the grass beside his mailbox. Bunny asks him if he tripped. Clyde says he doesn’t know. He just suddenly found himself on the ground. I wonder whether we should call 911.
“Can you try to get up?” Bunny asks. She takes his hands and leans back. I grab his arm and lift from behind. Nothing happens. “Can you straighten your legs?” I ask. He gets that, and is able to straighten his legs, but the result is him leaning backwards at a twenty degree angle against me. Bunny holds his hands and leans in the opposite direction, as if she and Clyde are making a V together. I try to lift and push him forward, but no sense of balance clicks for him. He’s forgotten what standing feels like. I push more and Bunny pulls. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is still leaning. Bunny tells Clyde she’s going to start letting go. I’m holding him by the upper arm, and as my wife very gradually withdraws her support, Clyde leans against me, but he’s more upright than before. It’s taken ten minutes to get him from sitting to standing and we’re all sweating. Now we have get him turned around and walking toward his front door. Again, I wonder whether we should call 911.
“Can you take a step?” Bunny asks.
“I don’t know.”
We watch his feet. Nothing’s happening.
“Try to lift your foot,” I say. I see a little twitch. He’s having trouble finding his feet. He tries again, and lifts his foot half an inch, but immediately it falls back to the ground. Bunny encourages him to try again. With Herculean effort he manages to get the front part of his left foot above the two-inch gap between the public sidewalk and the path to his front door. We help him rotate so he’s perpendicular to, and then almost facing the house. With his weight on the one foot that’s up, together with me lifting from the rear, he manages to get the other foot up.
We proceed in tiny, shuffling steps, an inch at a time, Bunny steadying and me supporting. Clyde stops frequently to rest and wipe sweat from his face. The back of my shirt is soaked and I fight off feeling woozy. Clyde’s heavy, about 230 pounds to my 160. I keep my center of gravity low and secure my grip under his arms. I take the measure of my own vitality and decide it’s enough – if Clyde’s legs buckle, I’ll be able to hold him up. My old vigor will return for this special task.
#
When I was young and practiced martial arts, I remember hearing that a baby’s energy starts in the abdomen, then rolls down into the legs as the baby learns to walk. In old age, the energy rolls back up, returning to the baby stage, the scroll of life winding up after the final reading. A longevity benefit of practicing Tai Chi is it keeps energy flowing between the earth and the legs. I recall this Tai Chi lore when, after we get Clyde back in the house, I quiz him on what happened. He says his legs just stopped supporting him. I think the energy rolled back up to the abdomen. I’ve seen it happen with tennis players, too. Players who once commanded the court become like Clyde, barely shuffling to the next shot, relying on their wits and pro-active defensive tactics to stay in the game. That evening, when I receive an email promoting a new Tai Chi class, I take it as a sign from the universe.
“Want to go for a walk?” Bunny asks.
We amble down neighborhood sidewalks, check out yards, flowers blooming, the condition of houses. I ask Bunny how her knee is – she, too, is bionic. A gel injected in the joint gives relief from what was a crippling condition. We cross paths with a gray-haired dog-walking neighbor. She and Bunny chat about an unusual tree in the neighbor’s yard. Bunny brings up the therapy pool the neighbor and her partner installed behind their six-foot fence.
“It’s nice in this heat. And it’s shaded in the afternoon.”
“So do you still use it for swimming?” Bunny asks. The neighbor nods, mentions her partner has had two knee replacements, adding “and I’ve had two hips replaced, and I have vertebrae fused in the back.” She reaches behind to touch her lower back, as if we can touch it with her. She pauses. “And I’m getting ready for an operation on my foot.”
I contemplate the idea of so many things repaired and replaced. I study my neighbor’s level of vitality, wonder how it feels to walk with two hip replacements and a fused backbone.
Are repairs and replacements actually white flags of surrender sugared-up as face-saving tactical retreats? Is death a choice we made, a boomerang we threw and spent a lifetime waiting for it to return and hit us in the head? Every creature feels life is eternal but every creature knows the body is temporary. Later in life, retired or not, we all get a new job – staying alive. But we aren’t John Travolta shaking his hips to the beat of the Bee Gees. We’re R2-D2 squirting oil in the joints and recharging batteries, looking over our shoulder, hoping the junkyard truck isn’t cresting the hill.
