CAT WAS IN THE WAY, SO I ENDED UP WITH A MOUSE

Date: Saturday, May 7, 2005

Dateline: NASHVILLE, Tenn.

I never had a black eye before, and now that I do I discover it has very interesting social consequences. People look at you sideways -- trying to decide, I suppose, whether they should pretend not to notice or whether it would be rude to ask why.

Not rude, as it happens. The only domestic relationship in my life is with the cat, and although she did play a role in the black eye, she is not abusive.

She doesn't even have claws.

See, when I came home from work a week ago Friday, the wheels on my walker . . . oh, wait, I haven't mentioned the walker. A little over a year ago, I had a brief flare-up of gout. Not serious in itself, but I realized that the accommodations I'd been making because my feet were numb and tingly were inconsistent with the ones I needed to make to keep the gout from hurting so much. Hard to walk in that condition.

The problem, it turns out, is that the nerves in my feet don't conduct electricity properly. Of course, that's a symptom, not a cause. I'm sure the nice doctors at Kaiser would tell me the cause, if they knew it.

They sure know a lot of things it isn't. On the other hand, if they can't determine what the problem is, they probably can't do much about it either.

It doesn't mean I can't walk normally -- after all, plenty of people walk around on feet made entirely of metal and plastic, which is even harder.

But balance is a bit tricky, and basically I need to have something to hang on to if I need to cross an open space. So I bought a walker. A sporty metallic purple walker, in fact, since it was purple today or sedate blue in three weeks. Naturally, I would prefer not to need it, but it's handier than you might think.

Last week, I parked it in its usual space and didn't notice that the wheels had rucked up the edge of the carpet. I tripped on the carpet, couldn't keep my balance because the cat was sitting where I needed to put my feet, and I fell and hit my head on the arm of my chair.

Never having had a black eye, or been around anyone who did, I didn't know that they get more spectacular after a couple of days. By Sunday it was spectacular indeed, and I was attending a conference for journalists and I didn't want anybody getting the wrong idea. So I asked for a chance to make a brief announcement, which I did, and it was definitely the right thing to do. I only had to tell the story once, instead of 50 times, and people didn't have to wonder what to say.

And some of them had good stories. One woman told of being in some very public space -- a mall, maybe, or an airport -- and someone, a complete stranger, came up to her and began speaking, in somber and portentous tones, about "relationships" and "issues." She found this puzzling, until the penny dropped, and she said, "Oh, no! I play rugby!" Another woman actually showed me a picture of herself, with a black eye, on the cover of her newspaper's special section on domestic violence. The only violence involved was having a piece of waterlogged ceiling fall on her head, but the photo staff, quick to spot an opportunity, asked if she'd mind being a photo illustration.

The tell-all strategy worked so well that I did it again when I went back to work Monday. One message said, "Darn! Was the cat hurt?" Another colleague offered to let me use the leeches he kept in his desk drawer. I declined, even though I'm sure they were merely figurative leeches. And he said he hoped the chair got the worst of it.

Good grief, no. I'll be fine in a few days, but I had that chair expensively reupholstered not so long ago and I don't want it to come to harm, even though I did buy bloodstain insurance for it.

My last story came from a colleague who was in fact beaten, not domestically, but by a mugger. When she went to replace her driver's license, the clerk kept insisting she had to have ID. Well, that was exactly the problem, wasn't it? Her ID had been stolen. They went around on that a few times, and finally she took off her wraparound sunglasses. The clerk took one horrified look and proceeded to replace the license without further argument.

I'm in Nashville as I write this, scheduled to be on a panel Friday evening in front of 300 conference attendees. Oh, and it's to be taped for local television. Perhaps I've faded enough?