Parts is parts…

Looks like more knee surgery is on the horizon.  Turns out, if it is “broke”, you do have to fix it.  Pondering the impending surgery this morning had me thinking that it would be super cool if I had a great story to tell as to how it got “broke” in the first place…

Something along these lines:

*Back in the 80’s, I wrenched my knee on a pole during my career as a famous exotic dancer.  It was brutal, yet I managed to finish the routine despite the pain.

*I crashed into Susi Chaffee in 1979 during one of our downhill races in the mountains of Washington state.  Unfortunately, I lost the race.

*I was rescuing several kittens from a burning building in Pasadena in the early 90’s and had to jump from a second story window.  All kittens survived, thanks to my personal sacrifice.

Yeah.  Those stories would probably be good ones, yet what struck me is that my own stories aren’t so lame:

*I worked as a bartender in a 5-star restaurant in La Jolla in the late 90’s and bounded up and down four flights of stairs from the wine cellar to the bar carrying cases of beer and wine.  I was in such good shape that I could do this many times a shift.  On one occasion, I made the trip to the cellar to get a particular wine requested by Sammy Hagar.  And, I got to serve him said wine.  Now, that IS cool.

*I spent weeks on end painting the outside of the very first house I owned in Columbia, MO.  I did the entire house by myself, and though my knee swelled to the size of a small child’s head from all the time on the ladder, the paint job was a success.

*I’ve lugged, hauled, lifted, and sculpted large hunks of walnut and alabaster over the years into groovy pieces of art.  All the while, standing on a concrete floor.

In the long run, it doesn’t matter how or why my knee is wrecked and needs to be fixed.  It doesn’t matter!  What matters is that it is so very cool that I did all this stuff in the first place.  That I have knees, or legs, or a back, or arms!  All these parts, and the related stories, are of me, yet they don’t define me.  Gratefully, I am more than my parts.

So, in the end, I will simply have another story to tell… how cool is that?