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How I Found a Cure for Bone Cancer

Last night I cured bone cancer.
Today, so far, I have done the dishes.
Let me tell you about the bone cancer.

A couple of days ago, I began to notice an ache in my legs; particularly my right leg.  That is the one sent through a medical meat grinder so that the doctor could implant a replacement hip.  His assistant told me what a chore it is to saw everything up and put in replacement pieces from Ace Hardware.  I have come to believe her:  ever since I have had the sense that small pieces of what I used to call muscle have been trying to find each other and glue themselves together somehow, in a kind of trial and error process.

It had come to this:  everywhere I touched my leg, in front, it hurt.  Lying in bed was not a comfort.  Wriggling my toes induced a process something like Northern Lights on my legs, without the light.  Just for fun, I would poke myself tentatively, just to ascertain that the end was near.  I finally settled on bone cancer, rationally aware that it would be the first case of titanium and polypropylene cancer.

How would I tell Mari?  I knew it would be difficult because I had stayed up late watching an episode of Henning Mankel's "Kurt Wallander" series.  Wallander had come to have to admit that he had Alzheimer's Disease, and was afraid to tell his daughter because he feared she would abandon him to solitary madness.  So I knew it would be difficult to tell Mari that I had bone cancer, and that I might have to move to Sweden where people understood gray weather and depression.

The people who know me best--the people I try to avoid--know that I am easily the unlikeliest candidate to happen upon a cure for cancer of the artificial hip, but it came to me in the night:  cowboy boots!  A few days ago I had worn cowboy boots all day!  I like cowboy boots.  I especially like a pair I bought in Wichita, Kansas at Shepler's.  I do not wear them often; only when I recognize that Alzheimer's is causing me to forget that I live in Tucson.  Then I put on my Luccheses, and I know that life is Let's Pretend, anyway, and it all comes back to me:  born of Scandinavian stock expelled from Norway, once a parish priest, then a heretic, a personality like a wire brush, and now suffering from terminal bone cancer of the titanium hip!

And that cured my bone cancer!  Just pure, rational thought and a pair of cowboy boots!  Every muscle in my lower body was howling in complaint at having had to wear high heeled shoes all day, several days ago.  A million small muscle tears caused by standing tall when the time came, when I had almost completely forgotten that I lived in Tucson, and what had happened every time I wore cowboy boots, and I no longer had bone cancer!  

You can laugh, and I hope that you do, so that you can get it out of your system, but those of us who trace our lineage back to Kurt Wallander and Kristin Lavransdatter and Harald Bluetooth know something about living in fog.  We know that the sun does not rise every day:  sometimes it has to decide whether it will come back, so when it does, we do not laugh at it.   Sometimes we cannot remember what it is, but we do not laugh.



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