This is a story about a piece of glass...

The stage is set as: August of 2020.

A Cabin Trip.

I arrived a day earlier, having rode my motorcycle up in advance of the Party-party consisting of Adam and Noah to arrive thereafter. Carelessly, and against my better judgment and precedent, I walked around barefoot, knowing full well that multiple glasses had been shattered over the many years of drunken revelry around the wood-burning stove.

Then, on my last visit from the couch to the bathroom, it happened, predictably: I stepped on something sharp and cut my foot open. It bled… a lot. I squeezed and picked with tweezer. I applied medicated goo. I searched the floor for the pointy offender, be it a glass shard or a carpet tack, and all were fruitless for foreign bodies.

The next day, Adam and Noah arrived, and we went golfing. It might have been Noah’s last golf game – hopefully not, as none of us did very well – but it was my first, and I limped around the course. I still had fun. I wanted to golf again as soon as my foot healed up. Noah was to be my Bill Murray-esque golf guru.

Upon return to San Francisco, the X-rays were negative. “Must be scar tissue.” Healing seemed on schedule. Days turned to weeks.

As often happens, the pain slowly subsided until I was able to ignore it completely and go about my normal routine of walking, running, jumping and generally meandering about. I barely even noticed it for a year. Sometimes, if I stepped wrong, I felt a twinge. But by the time Noah died, it was more or less a distant memory, though he is not.

A little after the new year clocked in at 2022 years status-post Christ, a bit more of a year without the corporeal version of Noah on this pale blue dot, I took a step off a curb with sandwich in hand to go devour it in my windowless box of an office when I felt a sharp pain. It worsened over the next several days until once again I limped about, so much so that the imbalance made my back and ankles hurt.

Aging sucks. I knew what it was though. It was the same pain as that day on the golf course.

I asked them to re-order the MRI. There, I stayed very still. No metal allowed. Earplugs instead of music via headphones like at the dentist. I went back to the podiatrist. He had transferred to a different office, and She took his place. In the wake of his aloofness, she had curiosity and interest.

This is not a sex story; this is a story about a piece of glass.

The MRI showed years of degeneration from all the dumb skating, jumping, MMA-ing, running, etc. But I knew about all that. It did NOT show a thing stuck in there.

Doc suspected that the not-at-all-there foreign body was surrounded by a mass of scar tissue and had been long-dissolved. It probably was a piece of wood from the fireplace. She could feel the hard mass that had developed (see the sentence a paragraph above, please). The MRI was negative, as the X-ray a year before it. She stuck a needle through my foot from the top and injected cortisone. On the next visit, she carved some flesh away and dug in with a scalpel for a bit. She theorized that perhaps it was a hair-like fiber and assured me it was now gone.

Noah was frustrating at times. Tales were told at his memorial of his relentless positivity and do-goodedness. He was usually smiling and always willing to laugh. He was generous to a fault. There was probably no way he could possibly pass from this mortal coil to the Great Beyond without it being a giant pain in the ass. And so it was: another taste of bitterness to the holiday season henceforth.

Golf lessons, by the way, are really expensive!

I will always miss him. Sometimes when I’m walking by the bay or watching Star Wars I can feel his love out there, from Somewhere. If nothing else, Noah was a being of relentless love.

He was my close friend, and one I made when I was already knee-deep in a period when it is known to be difficult to cultivate them. We dudes tend to carry the ones from the exact right time throughout the rest of our lives until one of us loses the death pool. It was an honor to have cultivated his friendship.

That said, I blamed Noah for the pain in my foot resurfacing a year out from his passing. Especially when like three weeks after the scalpel procedure, the pain came right back, right before I was supposed to go walk around New Orleans for the better part of a week.

The night before the departing flight, I took a tweezer to a rough part of the slowly healing scab on the bottom of my foot, the scab healing from the doctor’s work. And from it I pulled out a shard of glass, one that multiple medical professionals, WHO WE GENERALLY SHOULD LISTEN TO ABOVE OUR DUMB INSTINCTS, said didn’t exist. I’ve got the picture to prove this.

There’s no real moral to this tale. Frank Herbert once said that Dune is a book about worms. And this wasn’t that.

This was a story about a piece of glass.