leg raze i was sure from the way he was hoisting up his hind leg that he'd broken it. he held it aloft like something he thought might turn to ash if it touched the ground. leaning on the limbs he knew were still strong enough to keep him standing. altering his movement to work around what he no longer trusted. and i thought: no. not this again. i don't want to watch another friend die this way. but the next day he was putting weight on that leg again and only limping a little. and the day after that he was good_as_new. what i mistook for the beginning of the end was only his way of healing. there's a larger lesson here, i think, about how hard it is to avoid pressing on the parts that hurt. they aren't always scrapes or sprains we're nursing. sometimes they're people. sometimes they're places we know we shouldn't go. pockets of a pockmarked past life threatening to swallow us whole. i can hop around on one foot better than most people can walk on two of those terminal things. watch me now. 251211 ... ovenbird My grandfather’s leg was wizened and bruised, like a rotten avocado collapsing into its own flesh, like a stick of petrified wood. He lived out the years of his protracted death, from multiple myeloma and diabetes, in the embrace of a reclining chair in the living room. He ate there, and slept there, and woke there, and watched the television that sat across the room, and occasionally he would press the button on the side that would get the chair’s mechanisms whirring and it would raise him almost to standing so he could take hold of his walker and make his way to the bathroom, never putting weight on the bad leg. I’m not sure we ever had a conversation. The only thing I can truly recall him saying to me was “watch the leg!” I was as careful as a child can be but inevitably my brother or I would bump the foot that sat on the extended ledge of the recliner and that would send excruciating pain up through the leg and into his cancer eaten hip and he would hold in a scream and pain would write itself all over his face. In many ways I didn’t know my grandfather but I knew his leg and I knew his pain. I knew the white tablets of OxyContin that he swallowed down with water sucked through a mouldy straw. I knew that suffering lived in the limb that hung useless from his hip joint and kept him confined to a small upholstered island in a smoke stained, wood panelled room. Towards the end the leg was amputated but by then the suffering had moved to other parts of his body. The last time I saw him was on a Christmas Day more than twenty years ago. He was in the hospital but was brought home by a team of paramedics who wheeled him in on a stretcher so he could watch his family eat brussels_sprouts and mashed potatoes. “We have a gift for you!” the paramedics announced with great cheer and they deposited my grandfather in the living room next to the tree. His offending leg was long gone but so was the rest of him. He didn’t stand. Not then, by the blinking lights of the Christmas tree, not ever again. And I didn’t think that was a gift at all. I crossed my own legs under me and ate my turkey from a paper plate on my lap. I couldn’t look my grandfather in the eye. And that’s what I carry in place of good bye. 251221 what's it to you? who go blather from