Things Fall Apart, The Center Cannot Hold

In the last three months my body has shown more signs of age than in the last 20 years. A trend seems to have begun where things are starting to fall out.

In February, while eating broccoli and watching American Idle, I bit down on the tine of a fork, leaving a small hollow in the enamel, kind of like a tunnel in the side of a mountain. It would only take a small train emerging to complete the picture. This metaphor may be a more apt expression of my horror than of the damage itself. At the dentist, I was given a choice: a lesser of two evils kind of deal. I could have the indentation filled at the risk of it falling out again or have it filed down, leaving one gimp tooth that was slightly shorter than all the others. Pardon the sports allusion, but it would be like the Mugsy Bogues of my mouth. For those of you who don't know, Mugsy Bogues is a tiny Basketball player. Honestly, I don't like being given choices by any medical practitioner; it is his job after all! Luckily, when he was out of the room, the hygenist nudged me in the direction of the filling, which seems to have stayed in ever since. Out of the whole affair, the most horrifying moment was the sensation of my tooth giving way to metal. Without even biting down very hard, it just started to crumble. The dentist informed me that this was perfectly normal; that at "my age," (said he, as if I were 80) the edges of my teeth are bound to grow brittle.

The other part of my body that's been falling out lately is a bone in my lower back. According to my physical therapist, my sacrum (the bone connecting the pelvic bone to the spine) was lodged in a forward position. Now I have to enlist Jen to place pressure on the back of my leg in order to "knock my sacrum back" as we've taken to calling it. And she's gained leverage in our relationship by being able to say, "you better shape up, or I won't knock your sacrum back later tonight." The only upside to this is the fact that I now have a "trick back." Though it isn't quite as cool as in the movies when it takes a complex wrestling hold to restore a character's posture. I vaguely remember something like this from an old Jean-Claude Van Damme film. But I like to think that those back popping maneuvers are just exagerations of my own. Sort of like the way JC's muscles are just more swollen versions of my own.

All in all, I feel as if I'm falling to pieces. It makes me think of the line, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold" from Yeats's "The Second Coming." Of course, in this version, the "beast" won't be "slouching to Bethlehem" because his doctor recommended that he stand up straight.