How Am I ?

Thanks for asking. Or was that just me wondering out loud in my daily assessment? Considering all the body parts I would give myself a high grade. Of course, some are growing weary and others are sloughing off altogether. Then again I understand a million or more cells have recently been added. Welcome, have a piece of fruit. Don’t ask how many planks in this architecture I’m walking around with.

I just Googled that question and see there are 206 bones and 600 muscles to say nothing of connective tissue and assorted organs humming away. Fortunately they all quietly take their rightful place but some are loudly asking for attention with itches, cramping, inflammation or burning as in the neuropathy in my toes. Others may be silently plotting my overthrow with nefarious deeds. How are you, spleen? Getting enough love? What’s happening kidneys? At least my lungs and kidneys have good company with their twin.

How amazing, this specimen we are!  With the Stay-At-Home order my face is slowly disappearing behind a shrubbery of hair, not only covering the east, west and south of me but, to the north, my eyebrows have now joined the crop on my head. I am now a bushy beast with an opening at the mouth and a protruding proboscis. The hair on my head looks like an untended garden as if I’m a client of Albert Einstein’s barber. What used to be a clean-shaven fallow field is now a bumper crop of random seedlings. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a dandelion sprout up any day now.

Remind again me why are we are upright? Between my several auto-immune disorders and side effects from the medications I'm being brought to my knees. I have a distant memory of walking on all fours. Imagine getting shoes for our hands or gloves for our feet. It would certainly relieve the strain on my back. I’d just have to remember to avoid those gravelly roads. I could even learn to love bananas while swinging from trees.

Admittedly, I’ve never been much of a nature-lover. I’m hopelessly a big-city guy. I don't remember even having any stuffed animals as a child. I never met a tree I felt an impulse to hug though I do admire the spectrum of their dying leaves. Nor do I feel any love for crocodiles or snakes. However, I’m now ready to make amends and proclaim kinship with my furry cousins. There are worse ways to spend my next incarnation.