Fortunately there was another dime in my pocket, because the one I dropped was infinitely beyond reach, on the floor, from whence I stood incapable of picking it up. The bus driver noted my look of dismay, had kneeled the bus for me so I could creep aboard and said, “You’re good.”

I thanked him and placed the other dime in the meter and off to work I went.

Once at work, an environment I have long been accustomed to excel in, a place where I have always been at least the second most productive out of approximately 100 employees per location, I am now unable to retrieve the spinning cup of Yoplait strawberry cheesecake yogurt from the floor. In years gone by the hand would not have dropped it, but the hand is a mechanical failure. That was expected after 7 breaks and countless battering and sprains.

But to have the entire superstructure fail, to be a teetering, pot-bellied top, to be a handicapped worker in need of help, where I was once ever the helpful one, this is crushing.

The pain is exhausting and I have writing aspirations that preclude the muscle relaxers I used to get through this last winter. Doing the trigonometry of decay in my mind I looked upon January, the month I had agreed to work through to train Steevo, as unthinkably distant.

Larry could tell, when he saw me in the morning, that I was hurting and I told him, that I would work up to Christmas Eve and was done. This was partially calibrated, in that I know that the last week of the year is slow.

I’ll never feel good about not being able to make this commitment.

But the night I hurt my hip again, taking a simple step, another hoodrat tried to get me. I’m looking like a doable target, an old, short white guy with a cane and I will not be taken down by one of these creatures, which means if one of these guys fails to get the read on his pending evisceration, that I am going to be in jail, or prison, or the news, for the committing the unthinkable urban crime of Caucasian self-defense.

So I have experienced the long, wretched fall from top to bottom, from best to worst, from strongest to weakest.

At this point, I can only diminish what I was by hanging round and further reduce my self-image.

In September 1981 I walked into this business.

In December 2017, I limped out, not having enough left for a dignified departure.

Tag: Winter in a Dying City