The pandemic lockdown was fun in a lot of ways* and one way was that I took my recent widowhood and snuggled into the small apartment I shared with my teenage son and decided not to leave my bed very much, because both my grief therapy and my job (thank the Unitarian gods) were able to pivot almost completely from in-person to online.
* Ha ha no it was not
I took care of business, such as it was (answering email, compiling a thin monthly newsletter, using an app on my phone that masked my personal number and fooled civilians into thinking I was bravely/stupidly still in the office) from beneath a mound of quilts, surrounded by two soft, sleepy cats and one soft, middle-aged, nap-loving dog.
After about six months of this, the soles of my feet became tender, and the backs of my heels ached. When I told Alice about my achy soles and heels she said, ME, TOO, WHY IS THIS. When I complained to my therapist, it turned out she also had the foot pains, but unlike me she was not treading water in her own ignorance, she looked it up and found an article that said many people confined at home had foot pains, we all got it from walking around barefoot. It seemed a bit WALL-E to me; how could we all have come so quickly to the point where our feet couldn’t function without the artificial support of shoes?
I’m not a hoarder but I am sentimental, and after Jack died I may have held onto just a little more stuff than we needed. Jackson and I had to move from a six-room house to a three-room apartment, and this apartment was so small you could make it from one end to the other in six long strides. I had already sold and dumped and culled so much of what we owned, I thought I was at the bare minimum of things we truly needed, and boy was I wrong. Our apartment was packed — packed, floor to ceiling, with art, tables, chairs, bookshelves, a metal rack full of pots and pans, boxes of Christmas ornaments, photos and photo albums, hundreds of record albums, crates of Jack’s business records, all of his musical equipment, sofas, beds, dressers, coffee tables, file cabinets.
But I left enough space at the end of my bed to roll out a 2’ x 6’ yoga mat**.
I started doing yoga in my room in the afternoons, toward the end of my pandemic “work” days, around 3:30 PM. It felt like I was cheating my job a little, since we were all technically supposed to be available from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, but it wasn’t a job where someone monitored my mouse clicks or insisted I be on Zoom so they could watch me sit there and stew. They trusted that I’d take care of my work responsibilities, and I did.
And then I broke my toe.
I smashed it against the frame of a painting that was leaning against the wall in our extremely crowded apartment hallway. We had a lot of art that I’d saved from the Great Purge of 2019, but this apartment didn’t have enough space to either store or hang Jack’s paintings, or Jack’s father’s paintings, or our friends’ paintings, or etc., so I just stacked the extras against the wall in the hallway.
Clearly I wasn’t walking around in shoes, but did I not own slippers? I guess not, and I could say it’s because we were poor, but it was the kind of poor that let me have a good used car and spend my government stimulus checks on tattoos, so we weren’t that poor.
But since I did not spend my days wearing shoes or slippers, the conditions were ripe for me to smash my bare toe against the edge of a painting that was leaning against the wall in a crowded and narrow hallway.
Honestly, “smash” is the wrong word — if I were made of Beanie Baby stuffing, that toe would have torn clean off. I yelled and limped back to my bed and watched the toe turn purple over the course of several days. I did not move the paintings or do anything to make the hallway more safe, and yet it still came as a surprise when a week later I smashed the exact same toe once again, except when I smashed insulted tore off hit my already-broken toe against the exact same picture frame, the experience was excruciatingly worse. For some reason the gods wanted this toe to break more and turn into a numb, purple lump.
There’s not much, in my experience, you can do with a broken toe but wait for it to heal. And we were in the pre-vaccine phase of a deadly pandemic, so I sure as fuck wasn’t going to the emergency room. I was going to wait this out, like I’d waited out broken toes*** before.
Yoga with a broken toe isn’t ideal. It makes standing poses difficult because balance requires the cooperation of the entire foot. Sitting poses were either less or more painful, depending. So I took a week off, and then one more, and then I stopped doing yoga altogether from June of 2020 until January of 2023.
New Year’s Day! New year, new me! I’m going to do a little yoga, I thought, feeling energized and blindly optimistic that very little had changed about my body during all that time off in my very late 50s, an age known for its twin blessings of effortless strength and flexibility.
I unrolled my mat in our new, spacious family room, in our house that was no longer an apartment crammed with stuff, and stood on two feet with no broken toes, and promptly tore the meniscus of my right knee.
** I used to wonder if a prison cell would give me enough room to do yoga. I didn’t wonder what I did that landed me in prison, but I did worry about having a cellmate who mocked me every time I practiced. This cellmate was so bored and paid such close attention to me that she learned all the names of the poses in both English and Sanskrit and then tormented me by laughing when I did Camel and Upside-down Tree and Little Thunderbolt. But then slowly she’d evolve from That can’t possibly feel good to Hey, does that actually feel good? So I’d teach her a few poses and she’d start getting the hang of it, and then she’d start getting really good and begin teaching the other prisoners (unlike me, she’s very comfortable in a leadership position; she’s a people person.). Unfortunately, an undiagnosed vascular condition would cause her to stroke out and die of a brain aneurysm while she was upside down demonstrating sirsasana, and everyone would blame me, like I was jealous of her popularity and I’d come up with this elaborate way to kill her using yoga, and the judge would go BANG and I’d go to Death Row. The hardest part of all of that would be having to explain all this to Jackson through plexiglass using a greasy old phone handset.
*** One from playing barefoot soccer, and one from tripping, also barefoot, over a crack in the cement on a sidewalk in Mexico on my honeymoon. Could walking barefoot be the source of this problem? Hmmm?