Litbreak Magazine

The year 1974 began with me watching a Marx Brothers movie on WGN in the partially finished basement of our next-door neighbors, the Birdlemans. Hopped up on Pepsi and cocktail wieners, I relished the late-night affair, despite the basement’s dog hair and exposed, asbestos-wrapped plumbing. Mr. and Mrs. Birdleman were upstairs entertaining friends in the manner still reminiscent of the prior decade—stiff drinks, cigarettes, and Polyester knit dresses.

“You walk better than most people I know.”

An insult conveniently wrapped in a compliment. A stinging backhand. The intent was clear: after several years, he finally brandished new ankle-foot orthotics, or AFOs, and given his previous struggles, the comment came from a place of love, of pride.

But it was, in fact, a slight. A slight against his intelligence, for he knew otherwise. That his walking was worse than the average person. That the culmination of aging and the progression of his symptoms would cripple him in various ways, both obvious and subtle. For the sake of being polite, he grit his teeth and smiled.

The soldiers stood looking over a man, in his early twenties, unaware that his blood was being gradually diluted in the thick squelch of mud. His watch that had first alerted the men to his location, glimmered in the moonlight, marking the moment and time of a man who’d fallen.