Boning up on lost limbs

We had some unsettling local news last week that had us all contemplating ghoulish fates. A young man was riding a motorcycle that hit a pole and sliced his leg off below the knee.

Everybody read all the papers and asked all the questions: how will he cope? Will he persevere? How will he react to the grueling rehab?

In essence, everyone wanted to know if a de-foot would lead to defeat?

I think not. It’s a terrible result, but he’s lucky to be alive with many productive years ahead of him.

My question was less existential: what did they do with the foot?

I’m vicarious about everything that happens to anyone else. How would I react if the same thing happened to me?

So when I hear that someone loses a foot in a mishap, I put my feet in his shoe.

First of all, I’d want a proprietary say over its disposal.

The assumption is they incinerate it as medical waste, a terribly callous judgement of a body part that’s been with a man or woman every step of the way. Well, I guess every other step.

The thought would have infuriated Capt. Augustus McCrae from “Lonesome Dove.” He woke up after a difficult ordeal in Indian country to find a drunken sawbones had removed and disposed of his blood poisoned leg. 

McCrae was angry because he fancied using the bones for a walking stick, which when you get right down to it is a rather redundant mission for old leg bones.

I’m thinking more in the lines of jewelry.

I think I’d make a necklace out mine. I imagine it would help me win a fortune in bar wagers about my yoga-like boast that I could put my foot around my neck without getting up from my bar stool.

But I could see my family objecting to me showing up at things like church and school assemblies with my neck adorned with my foot.

So that would leave the burial option. I’d find a shady place down by the creek and have a solemn little ceremony praying my foot gets to heaven enough ahead of me that it could save the rest of me a place, assuming, that is, my sole has some soul.

Then for the rest of my life I could commune with it like Union Major General Daniel Sickles did with the amputated leg he lost to a Rebel cannonball at the battle of Gettysburg. After the war he presented the leg bones and the destructive shot to what is now the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. He’d visit them both every year on the anniversary of the amputation and make what I guess would be fascinating small talk.

It’s a pity those visits pre-dated reality TV by about 140 years.

It must be the organ donor in me that brings life to these morbid thoughts. When I die, my entire body -- eyes, heart, kidneys, liver -- the whole shebang will be up for grabs.

(Note: informing friends that they may one day help themselves to one of your vital organs doesn’t make them any more likely to loan you $20.)

I’m hopeful that one day they’ll even be able to reanimate parts of me so that my limbs will be grafted onto the needy.

In fact, this isn’t as far out as it seems.

A friend of mine said body part disposal was no longer what I guess you’d call a knee-jerk reaction among medical professionals. In fact, she said there are more medical donor banks than much of the public realizes.

Besides common blood banks, there are tissue banks, organ banks and even bone banks.

She said bones from accident victims -- spare ribs? -- are being preserved for worthy research purposes.

So now I’ll know not to snicker if I ever hear someone say they’re going make a late night withdrawal from the old bone bank.

My curiosity was piqued and I momentarily thought about calling a bone bank to learn just what kind of ground-breaking work they’re doing.

But I decided against it. They’re probably too busy to deal with my silly questions.

And it’s a sure thing our nation’s bone banks are staffed with skeleton crews.

A rooting fan's guide to baseball playoffs

This, my favorite sports season of the year, is being sullied by love. The four remaining baseball teams representing four cities are each appealing in their own ways.

I have no one to hate.

Despite signs of promise, the The Pittsburgh Pirates for the 19th year in a row have failed to make the playoffs (nostalgia note: it was 51 years ago today that Bucco Bill Mazeroski hit the most famous home run in baseball history to beat the N.Y. Yankees in the World Series!).

So without a home team to root for, I need an artificial reason to cheer for a city that is deserving of riotous celebrations and property damage.

It would be simpler for me if the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs were contending because I could reflexively root for their opponents.

I hate the Red Sox because their fans raced from lovable losers to obnoxious winners in near record time. And I hate the Chicago Cubs for reasons detailed in this 2008 post I deftly titled “I hate the Chicago Cubs.”

The baseball playoffs are down to the St. Louis Cardinals vs. the Milwaukee Brewers, and the Detroit Tigers vs. the Texas Rangers. Let’s break ‘em down:

One of my favorite literary characters, Capt. Augustus McCrae was a Texas Ranger in "Lonesome Dove," so they have that going for them. Plus, most of my favorite music has Texas roots. Joe Ely, Steve Earle, Delbert McClinton, Robert Earl Keen, Ray Wylie Hubbard are all Texas true. But despite his preppy upbringings that always makes me suspect he’s a closet Red Sox fan, so is George W. Bush. If Texas wins, it’ll make Bush happy, so they’re out.

They’re playing the Detroit Tigers. What American doesn’t root for Detroit? Detroit welcomed my fellow Steeler fans with open arms when it hosted our 2006 Super Bowl victory. The retro ballpark, which I’ve been to, is a dandy. If they beat the Rangers, it’s likely they’ll have Bob Seger sing the national anthem and I love Seger. Plus, them winning keeps alive my opportunity to tell the story about how Detroit used represent the USA in the world’s only international tug of war. In what should inspire an Olympic competition, they used to string a stout mile-long rope across the Detroit River between the city and neighboring Windsor. If Detroit wins I promise to share my promotional efforts to organize a trans-Atlantic tug-of-war between America and Europe. Go Detroit!

St. Louis is one of the few great American cities I’ve never been to. But my very good friend, Angelo Cammerata has. He’s the world’s longest serving bartender and the folks at Anheuser-Busch rolled out the red carpet for him 2007. They gave him box seats at a Cardinal game and introduced him to the roaring crowd on the Jumbotron. I like it when a city showers the people I care about with cheer and warmth.

But I like it even better when they do that with me. And that’s what happened in Milwaukee. In the fall of 2008, the whole state of Wisconsin treated me like I was Big Cheese -- and that’s something that really matters there. I was there on a travel story (recap here). Over six nights I played golf at all the state’s finest courses (Whistling Straits and Erin Hills) and was wined and dined at all their top restaurants. On my own, I found an outstanding Milwaukee bar that treated me so well I actually considered relocating my family just to be within stumbling distance. It’s Sobelmans. They didn’t even know I was a travel writer and thus felt no unnatural obligation to shower me with warmth and freebies. They were just naturally nice. If I’m ever within 250 miles of Sobelmans I’m automatically going back. Milwaukee also has one of my favorite offbeat tourist attractions, the Bronz Fonz. So I want Milwaukee to beat the Cardinals.

That pits Milwaukee vs. Detroit in my World Series.

This upsets my friends who hate the Brewers for beating up on the Pirates, but I have to root for Milwaukee to win it all. I just met so many friendly people in Wisconsin and had so much free, fine fun. Everyone was just so nice.

So take note, Boston: I can be bought. Prepare the finest hotels, alert the golf courses and start the lobster pots a boilin’.

Chicago, don’t even bother. I think we all need to hang onto at least a little hate.

I wouldn’t want people to start confusing me with Wisconsin.

The real reason gay marriage is a bad idea

I am outraged by the recklessness of the New York state legislature. They have committed an obscenity against those of us who revere moral behavior.

Gays in New York are now allowed to legally marry. It’s disgraceful and ought to be reversed immediately.

Only then we can take steps to make traditional opposite sex marriage illegal.

Eliminating marriage would reduce domestic crime, unhappiness and render unemployable scores of leech-like divorce attorneys. It would slash exorbitant health care expenditures as men and women were given sexual incentive to stay fit throughout their lives.

People of all ages would be much more particular about diet and exercise if they knew something better could come along -- and they were within their rights to joyfully jump their bones.

More marriage?

America has too many marriages and not enough love.

The virtues of the same sex marriage argument obscures the fact that marriage between any two people who don’t enjoy bowling together is an historically bad idea.

People don’t need laws assisting them in getting together. Zoo creatures have more refined mating customs.

What we need are easier ways to pry us all apart.

A good start would be to outlaw binding marriage.

I just spent about an hour in the presence of a miserably married man who’s been betrothed to the same woman for nearly 30 years. They have two wonderful adult children, a comfortable living and peer respect of all who know them.

And they hate each other.

I’ve been shrewdly able to discern this because he told me, “She hates me. She thinks I’m lazy, I drink too much and never do anything around the house.”

For a moment I grew alarmed he was married to my wife. That’s straight from the pages of her script.

Then he resorted to one of the most telling indicators of a loveless marriage: spousal mimicry.

I’ve never seen marital love survive when one spouse becomes so consumed with hate that he or she turns Frank Caliendo in trying to portray just how awful their spouse has become.

No matter how lovely the woman, how mellifluous her voice, the mimic makes her sound like some hag parrot with a cracker caught in her throat.

“You’re a bum! You’re always burpin’ beer! You’re bald! Bald! Squawk! Squawk!”

If the two of them had not been so matrimonially shackled, he’d have probably said in a reasonable voice, “Yeah, the old lady and I are splitting up. We had a good run, two good kids, but the magic’s gone. Thirty years, that’s enough.”

Instead, the two will remain married and miserable. It’s a terribly sad situation for all involved.

Except for me, of course.

It just cracks me up to a see any guy get all bug-eyed and cartoon sounding whenever he wants to describe what his wife perceives are his shortcomings.

I wonder if his wife is somewhere adopting an ape-like demeanor to convey in guttural grunts what she sees as his flaws.

And these were two people once so madly in love they looked soulfully into each others’ eyes and said, “Honey, let’s get married! We’ll live happily ever after!”

My wife and I have been together since 1990. We dated for two years, lived together for four and have been married since 1996 (I think that adds up).

But as Augustus McCrae told the young cowboys in “Lonesome Dove,” “What’s good for me ain’t necessarily good for the weak-minded.”

I expect we’re in it for the long haul. We love each other, laugh together and still enjoy each other’s company.

Ours is a marital bliss that will endure forever.

It had better.

I don’t do imitations.

And I’m usually too lazy and too drunk to put together a really compelling puppet show.