My geriatric dog tumbled down the stairs last weekend.  She’s been unsteady on her feet for the past few months, courtesy of a balance issue that strikes old pups, but she seemed to have gotten over it— at least until we heard the thumps, the bumps, and my daughter’s cry.

We found her at the bottom of the stairs, trying to get up.  Her back legs couldn’t find purchase, though.  My wife and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thought:

Will the dog survive this one?

The vets weren’t encouraging.  Words were spoken about surgeries, about necessary drugs, about hips that would slip out of place repeatedly.  Still, we took our dog home, her rear hip pushed back into place, her leg cradled in an awkward sling.

We borrowed a dog crate from a friend, gave our canine some more medicine, and prepared for the worst.  Barring a surgery that costs more than we could afford, we were told that amputation was an option, along with…sigh…euthanasia.

Someone forgot to tell our dog.  For the first two days, she resigned herself to the dog crate.  By the third day, though, after we carried her outside to complete her business, she decided that she was better.  So, hobbling on three legs, she staggered down the lawn to greet our neighbor.  We smiled, sighed, and carried her into the house, back to her crate.

She broke out after an hour.

We smiled, put her back into the crate, and blockaded it.

Two hours later, she broke out again, wandered into the dining room, and attempted to sneak past, thumping along with three legs as we were eating dinner.

We put her back into the cage and— yes— she escaped.  She also decided that the bandage was nice, but she really wanted to use her hind leg, so off came the sling.

Last night, after we went to bed, we heard some thumping.  We rushed downstairs, only to find her out of her cage, free of sling, relaxing on the couch.

Today, the vet took another set of x-rays. He said:

Let’s not bind her leg.  The hip’s good.  She’s part greyhound, so it’ll stay in place.  Oh, and sorry about that scrape on her nose.  We tried to put her in a cage while she was with us, but she wouldn’t stay in.

No problem, we said.  You can’t crate determination.

Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.

I’ve been in pain for several months, courtesy of my back.  So I visited my doctor, and after she defined the problem, I gritted my teeth:

No biking or running?

“Not for a while,” she replied.

But you can still walk.

So now I’m walking.  Not that it’s bad, mind you.  I’ve done it all my life.  In elementary school, I would run home, ditch my books, and wander out the back door of our rented house, traipsing toward the overgrown river bank with its brambles, red-winged blackbirds, snakes, and toads.  I was walking, but it was a subcategory of ambling.  I explored— stopping, running, observing.  Could I really cross that fallen tree, the one that spanned the streamlet?  It looked a little mossy, but if I just kept my balance…

In my 20s, newly married, newly fathered, newly graduated, and completely unemployed sans car, I walked the two miles from our apartment to my wife’s college, our daughter strapped to my back.  Sometimes, to surprise the toddler, I would skip for a few steps, her giggles bubbling behind me, the pressure from her legs pushing into my shoulders.  My daughter’s giggles protected me from the yawning monster behind me, the one that whispered about family support, about failure.  The creature couldn’t drown out my daughter’s giggles on our treks.

Eight years later, I was walking again, this time to combat the nausea from radiation.  Those walks, shambling movements down the street, up the hill, around the cracked sidewalk, and back down the potholed macadam— those walks were an assertion.  The cancer wouldn’t keep me inside.

Now, my bike and running shoes forbidden, I pad along the sidewalks one more time.  My back still hurts, but I’ve returned to those half-understood lessons from the past four decades: walking, that most pedestrian of exercises, is about exploration, protection, assertion.

Plus, it gives me more quality time with my dog.

Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.

Sometimes I find myself just a little jealous of you city dwellers.  To be specific, I don’t mean car cities, those modern, diffused communities attached by crowded superhighways.  No, I mean tightly-packed, sidewalk-and-subway metropolises.  Your grocery store is down the street, and because you walk virtually everywhere, you can afford that chocolate gelato in that cool little ice cream shop the next block over.

Do you even worry about car insurance?

And the biking opportunities!  Sure, you have to dodge the cabbies and tourists, but those actions only make the ride more varied.  I envision a super-charged mountain bike ride.

The smells— ahh, the smells.  Yes, there’s the overripe dumpster at the end of the alley, but there’s also that bakery, the one that perfumes the air with the smell of baking bread, the one that draws you in every time you pass.  Or the coffee shop.  Or the Italian place, the one that smells of sautéed garlic at 11 p.m.  And because you walk, you can enjoy that scrumptious pasta dish.

I live in suburbia, a word that translates, in Latin, to “parking lot.”

We drive to the store.  We drive to school.  We drive down the street to the library.  We drive to the movie rental store.  We drive to the grocery store, barber, soccer field, vet, hardware store, film palace.

And because we’re driving, we don’t smell the chocolate, or the coffee, or the bread, or the sautéed garlic.  Biking— yes, it exists.  But because we’re the only non-motorized obstacles, the cars focus on us even more.  Or worse, they don’t focus on us, in spite of our day-glo reflective colors.

So we sit in our sealed cars, listening to our canned music, ignoring the people in their respective moving boxes five feet from us.

The city is a Jackson Pollock painting— frenetic energy, not always pretty in a stereotypical way, but powerful all the same.

In contrast, the suburbs sometimes feel like a paint-by-numbers Munch.

City dwellers— please eat a good pasta dish for me.

Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.

A few months ago, I wrote about my first spat with cancer.  Naturally, the next week, I followed that blog with a discourse about… biking.  One of my fellow bloggers, though he enjoyed the cancer column (as much as one can enjoy a discussion about malignant tumors), was nonplussed:

Isn’t there more to the story?

Yes.  But I find that, to do justice to the story, I want to gather my breath again.  More importantly, I want to focus on the men and women who guided me through the imbroglios of malignancy.  Because any true story about cancer must be about more than the cancer fight, which— after all— is a rather prosaic tale.  We move through our lives with silly assumptions about our immortality.  Then some of us hear the word “malignant,” feel the knife or the radiation or the chemo.  Some of us recover slowly, some of us don’t.

But the quietly powerful stories cluster outside those with cancer, which is why it’s taken me a decade to frame this story: I had to learn that my story isn’t really about me.

A year before I taught Cassandra (no, not her real name), she underwent surgery and chemo.  She spent much of her 10th grade riding waves of exhaustion and convalescence as her body healed just enough for her to endure another slope of toxic chemicals.  She started my class with a tired smile and a porkpie hat, one which she didn’t remove until the last month of her junior year.  Her glossy dark hair coiled about her head.

Teachers and students knew about her bravery.  We marveled at her ability to walk into school, the chemicals slowly leaching from her body, the malignancies gone (maybe), the reminders of her mortality with her.

She faces it so well,

we said in our looks and whispers.

The summer after her junior year I argued with cancer for the first time.  During my three weeks of radiation, I thought about Cassandra every day, admiring her poise as I lurched toward the toilet.  My God— she survived a year of drug cocktails, and I was puking after three days of radiation.  She faced the uncertainty of a virulent malignancy, and as long as I could stand the radiation, I faced a strain with lovely survival odds.  How could I call myself a cancer victim?

I told her as much when school started again.

She listened as I stumbled over my words, smiling when I had finished.  She said,

When I was in the cancer ward, one of my friends talked to me after a rough bout.  She said, ‘Remember, we’re fighters.  We’re survivors.  We’re never victims.’

“Never call yourself a victim,” my former student said to me.

Cassandra gave me the gifts of her poise and her words.

So here is my return gift, only a decade late.

Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.

I accomplished a goal that has bedeviled me since fifth grade.  No, not getting chosen first for kickball in Mrs. G’s class.  Sadly, that particular desire never came to fruition.  No, instead I am referring to the evil little puzzle that was maliciously marketed to pre-teens in the early ‘80s, that apparently simple box guaranteeing unending glory should its solution be unlocked, that six color conundrum that inspired frustration and rather unorthodox methods of completion: I am referring to the Rubik’s cube.

Should you not be familiar with the satanic creation, please google it.

It has appeared again in our schools.  Spatial geniuses everywhere are flaunting their abilities to manipulate space and time, earning adoring looks from friends by taking a scrambled cube, twisting it five times, and handing a perfectly organized, completely color-coded puzzle to amazed on-lookers.  These gods walk the halls, flowers and offerings strewn before them like the pages from a calculus book.

It took me over two decades, but I did it.  Admittedly, most of those decades were spent ignoring the puzzle that my parents bought me for my twelfth birthday.  In fact, I actually solved it in one day— approximately one week ago.  Since then, drunken with satisfaction, I have scrambled and solved the cube numerous times.

Of course, I did look up the solution pattern.  Does that count as cheating?  Hey, at least I didn’t break the cube apart and reassemble the bits; that was my solution when younger.  Other inventive solution seekers, I’ve heard, tore the stickers off the faces and pasted them back on in roughly the correct place.  No, last week, I solved the monster by twisting and turning.

So with some bemusement, I thought of my younger self, a twelve-year-old boy who grew increasingly frustrated with a puzzle he couldn’t understand.  My older self knows that I learn best by following patterns and developing a deeper understanding through self-guided repetition.  To understand how to solve the Rubik’s cube, I had to solve it again and again and again.  Others could develop the patterns, either consciously or organically.  Not me.  I follow the steps, developing my understanding by slowly walking the same pathways, seeing the nuances over time.

Yes, I am the anti-genius, the person who does not experience the light bulb popping into existence over his head, but instead builds the light bulb, piece by piece.

Oddly enough, that’s how I build physical skills, too.  Whether I’m mountain biking, kayaking, or yoga-ing, I learn through slow repetition.

Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.