The California clan was large, but no one was my age. All my cousins were younger, all my aunts and uncles older. After a week, they didn't know what to do with me. I was too old to take to Disneyland, too young to take to take to nightclubs. The novelty of my presence began to wear off.
The whole family got together for a picnic in Balboa Park. There would have been no picnic if it were not for my visit. I decided then to leave the next morning. Feeling ashamed about chickening out and flying from Chicago, I decided to buy a real pair of shoes and hitchhike back east.
The adults were playing canasta at the picnic tables, and I was playing soccer with my cousins, trying to dazzle them with smooth moves and crafty dodges. I would dribble circles around them, and they would fall down, mostly from laughter. But moccasins from Kmart that were actually bedroom slippers were not the best footwear for soccer. I stepped on the ball to bat it backward, my foot slipped off and came down hard on something not my foot, and I heard a snap, a muffled crack like a twig crushed under a boot, and felt a lightning strike up my leg.
I got to my feet and hobbled over to the picnic tables. No, it’s OK, just need to catch my breath, I told them. But when I rose, I could not put weight on the leg. I sat, and the ankle swelled.
I left the clinic on crutches with a cast – one of those old-fashioned thick plaster things – from my knee to my toes. The broken bones did not worry me as much as how and when I could leave California. Maybe a cast on my leg would be a good lure for rides, but I kept imagining standing along, say, a remote and lonely stretch of road in northern New Mexico, hungry, thirsty, my hands blistered and underarms raw and chafed from crutches, saying to myself over and over again, "You idiot!"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Does this count as bethos?
Sorry, it took me a while to figure out what bethos means. Being an "older gentleman," as some young store clerks have occasionally called me so rudely, my instinct was to look for this word in my unabridged Webster's. (Younger folk automatically Google such things.) But bethos is a new word, even younger than the offending clerks. I assume it's a play on pathos.
Maybe this reaction was bethos. But I'm going to look for better excuses to use this word.
For the uninformed and the old, here is its definition, from the Urban Dictionary:
The inevitable outburst of common sense and brutal honesty that results when intelligence has been pushed beyond tolerence by wholly gratuitous stupidity. A variation of going postal or flaming, except through verbal or text medium and without actual violence. The primary quality is the forthright and unvarnished presentation of reality to the offending party, with the intent to educate as well as excoriate.
(Example) He went bethos on her passive-aggressive, Mary Sue ass.
I was shooting for Bethos in the rhetorical sense... A sudden drop in the tone of a work after a steady and consistent rise... sometimes for comedic effect.
Maybe I have the wrong word...
I can't find it on the internet anywhere, perhaps it does not exist?
Maybe you picked up that word in an alternate universe...
You know some dusty, betweeded types... Certainly, you have someone who teaches literature, criticism, and/or theory?
Post a Comment