Pulse

My hand shakes. Not all the time but enough to drop the occasional lettuce leaf on my lap or spill soup on the way to my mouth. My days as a brain surgeon are done; but I never had that ambition to begin with. I might as well laugh it off and raise it to the level of a metaphorical positive.

Suppose my hand is keeping rhythm with the pulse of the Earth, the music of the spheres. What if it is a sort of Richter Scale registering the small convulsions of the planet? It is a reminder that there are no straight lines in nature. We move from this to that like the grain in wood. We dip with digressions the way tributaries veer off a river. With fits and starts I sleep, I think, I write.

Before World War One the notion of progress had taken hold given the amazing technological advances and breakthroughs in psychology, particle physics, electronics and the arts. The crime against humanity euphemistically called the Great War ended the illusion of straight ahead progression.

Now we regard the chronicle more like a zig-zag; something like my hand movements. In baseball, pitchers routinely throw with a velocity of ninety-five mph but batters find the balls hittable unless they also have movement or spin.  A straight trajectory doesn’t cut the mustard. It has to have a wrinkle.

Some of the small muscles in my hand have become enervated from a peripheral neuropathy. In addition, my doctor calls the unsteadiness an  essential tremor. I wouldn’t go that far as to call it essential, but then again…. The shortest distance between two points, we were told, is a straight line. But we need a ruler to accomplish that. I’ve never held rules or rulers in high esteem. They reek of absolutes. The crooked line is a tribute to the contours of nature.

My shaking hand conforms to my penchant for permeable membranes, porous borders violating categories such as poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, history and geography, sports and entertainment, even science and the imagination.

Maybe my tremor will be an early warning system. If the Chinese chicken salad doesn’t reach my wagging tongue, I’ll let you know.