Comet's Tale by Steven Wolf

and yelled, “Come in!”
    Dan and Charlotte, a retired married couple, lived across the street and were the neighborhood eyes and ears. I had given Dan a key to my house in case of emergencies, and now he stood over me shaking his head as if this was exactly what he had expected.
    â€œI knew something was wrong when your newspaper was still in the driveway,” he said.
    â€œCan you let Comet out?” was my instant request.
    As the greyhound relieved herself in the proper locale, Dan guided me to the couch and handed me the Gatorade that had escaped in the night.
    â€œShould I take you to the hospital?”
    â€œNo, thanks. There’s nothing anybody can do about a broken rib. By tomorrow I’ll be able to get around again. I’ve got enough painkillers to get me over the hump.”
    No more than a week had passed when, as I was walking Comet on a nearby trail, a desert lizard took a bite out of my big toe (with midwestern hubris I had worn open-toed sandals). The accident tally was now at three. When the skin started to turn black, I went to a podiatrist who prescribed a series of antibiotic injections and said, “If we can’t get it under control, we’ll have to consider tissue grafts.”
    Undergoing tissue grafts was a much more pleasant prospect than talking to Freddie, but at this point I knew I had to bring her up to speed. These mishaps were simply bad luck, or so I told myself, but when linked together it sure looked like I wasn’t keeping my promise to her. To soften the blow, I began the conversation with a little light humor. “I always knew there was a good reason why I wouldn’t let the girls have a pet gerbil. They have teeth.”
    â€œSteve, you have to get more help. I mean it! If I have to, I’ll quit my job right now and be on the morning plane. Don’t make jokes. C’est pas drôle ! ”
    Humor had always been my default position when I felt cornered into dealing with my physical woes. It was the only approach I could take, given the way I was raised. My mom and dad both came from large, poor farm families who tilled the glacial soil of Iowa, the birthplace of John Wayne. My father had learned from his own family that when facing illness or injury, silence was a virtue.
    Throughout his youth, Dad’s parents fought to overcome the brutal poverty of the Great Depression by selling grain for rock-bottom prices. There was no money to pay for doctors, and health insurance was a fantasy on the order of buying a brand-new tractor. When Dad’s mother and many of his eight brothers and sisters suffered severe complications from diabetes, including having limbs amputated, they did not talk about it. When some of them died young from the disease, the family bore the losses without complaint. There wasn’t any room in the emotional budget for openly grieving or railing against fate. When my father was diagnosed with diabetes in his midfifties, he carried on the tradition, never expressing fear or discomfort. It was expected that I would do the same. For me to acknowledge vulnerability, even in a self-deprecating joke, was actually an improvement over my father’s seamless stoicism.
    Freddie knew all about my family history and appreciated my attempts at humor, gallows and otherwise. However, the frustration in her voice as she begged me to get with the program told me that the comedy routine was doomed. But if I couldn’t deflect my situation—particularly my physical pain—using denial and jokes, how was I supposed to handle it?
    Chronic pain does more than hurt. It turns you inward and shrinks your life down to a narrow tunnel of endurance. What makes the effort bearable is the hope that someday you might find relief. But although there were specific causes for much of my pain, it had long ago defied simple treatments. Some of my problems could not be directly connected to a specific anatomical defect or