I have a hairline fracture in the sixth rib on my right side. Eve from Adam’s rib: the Genesis writer must have had a great sense of humor.
Rib, v. To joke, tease, make fun with.
My friend Mae painted a clown, used clean rib bones for the ruffs of the clown’s collar. She and Rob had barbecued baby back ribs for dinner. She wanted to remember the fun of that dinner. She turned its remnants into art. She and Rob married, had a son, a daughter, a high-strung dog named Guinness: a life, some high points and some downs.
Ribs, n. Body parts. Bones. Protection for the heart and lungs, ex- cept if they are broken and displaced.
The person taking x-rays needed to take several additional pictures before she was sure that what she saw was even a hairline fracture. I’d hate to find out what a displaced break felt like. The nurse practitioner in charge read me the results. She also told me she had been the nurse who attended the birth of my son. Thirty-five years earlier. She must have been very young.
My obstetrician at that time, she said, had recently died. I do not remember him at the birth itself. I remember him after I miscarried a subsequent pregnancy. During that examination, he said something about reassuring the nuns who ran this Catholic hospital that this miscarriage had not been an abortion.
The labor for Matthew’s birth progressed rapidly. At 5:30 a.m., I was wide awake, picked up the book Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev from next to the bed, read for less than a half hour, then threw the book aside, unable to get engaged in the story, though it was a story I found engaging the night before and though at this early morning I was not having contractions. By 9:00 or shortly thereafter, we were at the hospital. By 10:00 a.m. the nurses decided I was too far along to move to a delivery room. An intern or resident asked me questions to complete a health history. I told him, “You’re bothering me. Go away.”
“Peggy,” Jim said softly, trying to calm me.
One of the nurses, maybe this one who now reappeared in my life, said to both Jim and the intern, “We don’t do health histories at this point.”
This kindly nurse practitioner who gave me the results of the x-rays of my rib, who may or may not have been that nurse, refocused my attention on the present. “Don’t lift anything heavy,” she said.
Women lift heavy things, visible and invisible, all the time. Toddlers with no sense of danger; teens who court danger; housework; the family’s social life; aging parents; commitments to immigrant rights groups, to fair housing, to good political candidates; not to mention for-pay type employment. Sometimes we have help. Sometimes an aching rib. Sometimes we give each other permission to lay our burdens down. Sometimes we lay them down, permission be damned.
Ribbed, adj. Having alternating raised and lowered lines, usually regularly spaced. Some cloth, like corduroy, is ribbed. Furrows in a farm field may have a ribbed effect. Even days can be ribbed. Or poetic style. Even a life.
