THIS OLD BONE HOUSE

Herkimer the skeleton dangled from a hook in Mrs. Milliken’s ninth-grade science classroom. If she thought his jaunty name would get us pumped for the anatomy unit, she thought wrong. Herkimer gave me the creeps. He was the Halloween ghoul inside me, awaiting his moment for the Big Boo. No matter what became of the zit on my nose or who deigned to sit with me at lunch, Herkimer would one day expose the real me: a lipless grin, a heap of bones.

My body was not my friend. I hardly knew it anymore. It sprouted hair in unfamiliar places, bled onto the back of my skirt and made me wear the badge of shame down the corridor. I wanted a more pleasing fleshly container for the dreams that pulsed in my head. I felt uniquely cursed, unaware that my classmates did too. A fourteen-year-old body is nobody’s friend. Breasts jiggle or haven’t had the good grace to show up. The penis develops a mind of its own. In that classroom we all dangled from the hook of bodily embarrassment.

Mrs. Milliken was tied with her husband, who taught Latin, for most beloved teacher in our school. Unconcerned with beauty or fashion, she let her hair frizz and her stomach bulge, a rare liberty in the heyday of girdles. She radiated tender bemusement at our foibles. When some wag asked her, “What’s the dirtiest part of your body?”, kids chuckled and smirked. Mrs. Milliken would never say, “Butt hole.” She’d use the correct anatomical term. Until she did, we thrilled to the unspeakable truth.

All questions mattered to Mrs. Milliken. “The mouth,” she said, as if she’d just been asked the number of bones in a body. I was not among those who were already French-kissing, and telling the tale at slumber parties. After the French kiss, forbidden pleasures happened “down there.” No boy had ever kissed me. Would my turn ever come? Yes, the mouth sounded right.

What fine bodies we had then, even gym-class failures like me. We walked as long and as far as we desired. We stooped, reached and jumped out of chairs to run for the phone. Rolled on the grass, then rose to our feet in a fluid motion. Slept the luxuriant sleep of the exhausted. We didn’t have to think about any of this. A healthy young body is like a solid house with all the hot water you could want and a furnace that keeps you warm.

You might wish you had a house fit for Architectural Digest, but the one you’ve got is pretty damned amazing. Trouble is, you don’t notice. Until, inexorably, it becomes a fixer-upper that sputters and creaks and will never be quite as it was despite the best efforts of the pros. You hardly know the place anymore.

***

As my dog and I rounded a familiar corner not long before Halloween, a giant ghost loomed before us, waving its inflatable arms. Casey has a firm sense of The Way Things Ought to Be, and it doesn’t include giant ghosts that shimmy above his head. He reared up and sent me flying. I lay facedown on the sidewalk, leash tangled around one leg. There I remained, both knees throbbing with pain, until two women came by and helped me to my feet. Younger than I but not by much, they looked at me with pity, as if I’d been fool enough to attempt a backside ollie on a skateboard instead of Casey’s walk. “Strong dog you’ve got there,” said one (meaning: too strong for someone your age).

This was not at all The Way Things Ought to Be. But much as I hated to admit it, I’d been heading this way for some time. The human body wasn’t built to last.

More than half a century ago, when my body carried me from party to party on a wave of intoxicants, I studied the first poets in our language. The people they consoled and entertained led short lives under constant threat of death — sailing into the unknown on “the whale road,” braving “the shield wall” to defend their turf. Of all pithy coinages from Old English verse, my favorite described the body: “bone house.” Those anonymous poets knew their audience. They told the truth about where we all live and what we’ll leave behind.

Let’s take a quick tour of my bone house. Crooked spine that used to hold me up without complaint, but now gives me hell if I reach too quickly for a bath towel. Knees okay except when they’re not. Both feet knotted with lumps and bumps, like an old tree. My father, who had the same feet, spent his last years in a wheelchair. When pain gets the better of me, I ask myself, “How much worse will this get?” If there’s a more dispiriting question, I can’t imagine what it might be.

Sometimes the absence of pain shocks me into gratitude. I savor those moments with Casey when my feet push off with ease against the ground and my hips roll me forward as they did before I knew that the working body is a marvel. The leash sways, a starling rides the air on a fury of wingbeats. The oldest maple in the neighborhood spreads its canopy. Blight dots the leaves, yet from a distance all I see is green. I could swear this place has been waiting for my footsteps, or maybe it’s my footsteps that have waited to arrive precisely here. I hold onto this feeling while it lasts, then let it go until the next visitation. I ask, “What’s still mine to enjoy?”

When Joni Mitchell was a musical princess on the rise, I saw her perform in a green velvet gown at the Mariposa Folk Festival. Performances stretched behind and before her, as far as anyone could imagine. Last week from my desk I watched Joni’s return to the Newport Folk Festival, a dauntless queen of 78, back against all predictions from a catastrophic brain aneurysm in 2015. She had to teach herself to play the guitar all over again but there she was in her hard-won glory. “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” she sang, words that never rang so true. And then she laughed at the astonishment of it all. Still hers to enjoy, and ours.

Painting: Paul Delvaux, “Skeletons in an Office.” Boss, underling, job applicant…they’re all the same under the skin.