THIS AND THAT WHILE I WAIT FOR JUDGE CHUTKIN TO RULE

One of the often overlooked benefits of television advertisements is their ability to reassure one that one’s physical inadequacies are widely shared. For example, as I approach my 90^th birthday, I have more and more difficulty putting on and taking off my socks, thanks to the fact that I continually lose flexibility. Even in a Continuing Care Retirement Community like the one in which I live, these problems are not the subject of casual conversation so that would be easy to suppose that they afflict me alone. But then I see an advertisement for a device that is designed to help put one socks on, and I realize that if it is worth advertising this gadget than the problem must be widespread. Curiously, that is reassuring.

 

I was not always thus. Seventy-five years ago, when I was a teenager at Forest Hills high school, I was actually a member of something called the Captain’s Corps.  We had special uniforms (long red pants and a T-shirt) and during gym did simple gymnastics exercises on the parallel bars and such like. In those days, I could actually press up into a handstand and walk about on my hands, accomplishments which, though not very impressive, strike me now is incomprehensible. Indeed, it was while showing off my gymnastic abilities that I suffered my one bone fracture. I was doing a handstand at a party on the arms of an easy chair and when I came down I banged my right foot on a wooden chair, cracking a bone in my big toe.  My uncle Anoch, who was an orthopedic surgeon, put a big cast on my foot, forcing me to stay home for several weeks while the toe healed. Having nothing better to do while I sat on a chair with my foot on a hassock, I spent the time learning trigonometry, and managed to pass the Regents examination at the end of the semester, thereby excusing me from taking the course on the subject.