Bone Deduction

Bone is a dangerous word. If I think it, I become afraid. But not at first. First it's my nickname, short for Mr.Trombone, what my high school classmates called me after seeing me front row right side in the Lions marching band, halftime of Rider games. I liked the name from the start, and soon worked out a visual signature to go with it: a cartoon bone, with two rounded knobs at each end. It was simple and effective--quite elegant, in fact. If you start pulling the endplugs off the hollow tubes that form the frame of the desks over at Campbell Collegiate, located a half mile east of here, you'll eventually come to certain documents I stuffed in there, all of them signed with Bone (the symbol, not the word).

The other bone is the dangerous one, the one I broke three times as a boy aged 9-13. A cyst in my humerus. Why my parents kept me out of organized sports, I found out years later. The cyst used to "grow back" which is why, we used to say, I kept breaking the arm. And you know how it is for shy kids. They activate fears that few others can detect. They imagine that, for example, the bone is defective, storing and eventually releasing, during the latter decades of the owner's life, clusters of harmful cells that will take the body in one direction only.

This afternoon running I felt my bones haul my body round the lake. At times I could hear them grunting. Occasionally they missed a step. The bones in their plodding sleeves wanted to stop sooner than I let them.

I think I'll show up at that bone reunion, after my friends and I have all passed on. We'll remember from one another's bones.