ON SIX FLAGS AND SWOLLEN KNEES

My knee is swelling. I knew it would.

I injured it over a year ago. Like Sonny Bono, I crashed into a tree, although the significant differences being that A) I was snowboarding and B) I fared a little better than he, may he rest in peace. My knee hit the tree directly, my leg elongated and perpendicular, and after the initial agony wore off, I lay there thinking, “So this is what it’s like to break your leg.” I fully expected to see great shards of fractured femur sticking out of flesh and fancy snowboarding pants.

It hurt, but I didn’t fracture the bone, per se. A later MRI would show that I just gave myself a nasty contusion. Really, the most agonizing part was the embarrassment. I was found by a ski instructor, her leading the 6-year olds down the bunny- hill all in a row, like little ducklings, and they just stopped, gaped and stared. I was conscious, and I kept feeling like I should say something, give some sort of moral lesson, so I said

“Yea, so, be careful out there. Um. You could be me. Um. And that’s bad. Um.”

It didn’t end there. I was hurt badly enough to have to be hauled down the rest of the mountain by sled, and usually when this happens, the victim is waylaid completely, covered by a blanket, indicating a real possibility that this may not be an injury, but a corpse. People gape and gawk, rubbernecking and even stopping in their tracks to get a good look. I know. I‘ve done it before. I was awake and sitting upright, meeting their gaze, a feeling a little apologetic that I wasn’t more interestingly injured. I was wishing I had a bottle of ketchup or something to spurt out in intervals, leaving little ‘blood’ slicks in the snow, just to keep it worth their time.

When I returned to school- this snowboarding trip being my spring break vacation- I was limping heavily, and all my students asked why, so I filled them in on the details.

This was a mistake.

It was a Magnet school, and the kids were clever. They also like routine, and so I had to endure one girl asking me daily about how well the tree was faring, after its terrible accident.

Over a year later, I still am having problems with my knee. I can’t really run on it- no soccer, no more mini-triathlons, even biking long distances will cause it to flare up, and I have to wonder if this is it, if I am now permanently damaged. Being of Indian descent, I’m blessed with the type of skin that hides age- and I certainly capitalize on this, acting as if I am still a ripe, young, early twenty-something- but through lack of physical activity and beer consumption, I’ve grown a little paunchy, looking more and more my real age.

My knee is swelling now because I ran on it. It wasn’t my idea. We took all the kids to Six Flags Amusement Park for the big “End of the Year” party. This being private school, we all climbed aboard a chartered bus and parked at the back of the behemoth parking lot. There is a tram that will funnel all the kids to the front gate, and there were TONS of them- apparently every kid in California gets to go to the amusement park come June. We lined ours up in the queue, but there is only so much room, so the math teacher and I elected to walk. Well, I elected to walk. He elected to run.

He is fit, a mean volleyball player, as evidenced by his performance on Field Day*. He decided to race the tram, and I had no choice but to follow up.

It was OK at first- the tram was way behind us, we were shoving past tween-aged couples on the walkway like we were chasing a thief, but as soon as the tram caught up, the catcalling began. I receive the brunt of it, as I am far behind the math teacher, the only visible authority figure scrambling along like- well, like a man wearing a backpack who hasn’t ran in over a year, and is trying to simultaneously maintain his dignity while keeping the backpack from flipping over his head and eyes, blinding him to the point where he runs headlong into a tree and knocks himself out cold. There is no simile that can be applied here.

Our own students were actually cheering me on, yelling “BEAN!BEAN!BEAN!”, but the tram was full with other students from other schools. They were yelling “RUN, Forrest, RUN!” over and over again, and it’s the tram driver I blame for this, the tram being so long and the speed being so close enough to my own that I feel like the Eiffel Tower on a French bus tour. That’s not true. I’m more like a square patch of sidewalk that Kurt Cobain once puked on, such is the novelty value coupled with the grotesque.

As far as the Forrest Gump comments go, I tried to chalk it up to exuberance. Kids say all sorts of odd stuff, and I have to admit, most of the time, it is funny. The type of educators who find the kids’ off-color comments an affront to their dignity probably take themselves far too seriously- this is a friendly way of saying that they entirely lack a sense of humor. Really, you have to just let it roll off your back.

Still though, the tram was slow, and I could keep up; I could even run faster, just by a hair, and I was giving it my all, my tongue wagging out of my mouth like a Golden Retriever, my backpack threatening to fly off into the stratosphere, ambling along with a hackneyed crab-wise scuttle, and my lungs were burning. The kids were all hollering and screaming, and-ours being a small school- the Run Forrest Run kids were clearly out-classing out our own students in terms of volume. I was again feeling a need to apply a lesson, and I wanted to say to them

“Study hard. Make yourself into something. Plan ahead, pick a major, a career, something dignified and important, or you will end up like me, a galloping fool, skittering along solely for the sake of entertaining you. I’m here to make sure you realize your potential, and I’m happy to this; to watch over you, to careen around like an idiot so that you all have a reason to make fun of me later, to mitigate my demands of you in the classroom. You have to know that I can see you, I can hear you, and even though you may not worried about it right now, I want to let you know that I am OK, I’ll live, I’ll get over this embarrassment. But be careful what you ask for in life, and don’t let this lesson go to waste. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a fucked-up situation, running alongside a Six Flags tram, trying desperately to please a car-full of teenagers, and all you can do then is barrel on through, to keep running forever. This is called a career, and I can’t even tell you when you will roll out the other end. I haven’t got there yet.”