CATEGORY: PORT TOWNSEND

What a downer it is to have a back that keeps slipping around like an errant husband, even going out in the middle of the night.  Last week it was canes and crutches and a creaking voice. This week it is casts and bandages and ropes and pulleys, bolts and glue and bailing wire and twine.

So I have no choice but to lie here on my bed of pain, to which I have become attached as to a surrogate mother, while Back goes on with his little game.  This, even though I speak to him most severely.

“Now, Back”! I say, “If you don’t straighten up, it’s going to be the tail end for you”!  Or, knowing that every back secretly wants to be a front, “Do you want to take the back seat and be given the cold shoulder all your life?  If you ever want to get a HEAD, you’ve got to have some front bone”!

Or sometimes I get all the little vertebrae together in the locker room and give them a good pep talk.  “Now if we want to WIN, we’ve got to stay in line today fellows.  Look at a picket fence!  Loot at the buttons on a sailors pants! Look at Jimmy Carter’s teeth!  If they can do it, YOU can do it!  It’s the BACK that holds the front UP!  If it weren’t for backs, there wouldn’t BE a front (I hit them below the belt with that one) Jayne Mansfield and Elvis Presley could never have EXISTED!  So get out there and SHAKE A LEG”!

Etc. etc. etc. etc.  But all to no avail.  Old Back is not so dumb.  It knows which end is down.