BEWARE THE VOLCANOE

Age, it seems, has caught me once again.

In the past, I had fleeting moments of feeling my mortality, and this usually came about when I played sports. But over the years, an aging body and diminishing free time has drastically cut my sports participation.

Over the last couple of years, I have limited my sporting life each year to a single season of softball. And while softball used to be one of the leading causes of severe injury to me, I have reduced my injured reserve time by a couple of very simple decisions: (a) I no longer slide and (b) I think long and hard before taking one for the team.

These may seem like silly little additions, but I can attest that they have kept me intact during the past few seasons. Sliding may not seem like a big deal, but most softball fields, so far as I can tell, are actually asphalt fields with a thin coating of dirt on them. Sliding into second may seem like a grand idea, but the truth of the matter is it will peel the skin off your leg like it's an overripe banana.

And as for no longer taking one for the team, I still give my all when I'm out there. But I am not going to sacrifice well being for a game that, in the grand scheme of things, has as much consequence to the world as a "Rocky" marathon. There was once a time when I thought nothing of staring down a shortstop as he was looking to turn a double play, running straight at him, willing to take a softball to the mug to ensure that the double play could not be completed. Now, if I'm on first and a groundball means potential double play, you can bet I will quickly hit the dirt. There is no glory in my getting creamed in the face by a softball.

So, I had been fairly successful at staying healthy. And then the other day happened. As my wife can attest, I was overcome with the kind of pain that, I am fairly sure, was millennia beyond that of childbirth.

It was late in the evening when the pain began to overtake me. It was one of those throbbing muscle pains that only comes from extensive physical exertion. My legs and back were hurting to grave degrees, as I told my wife every few minutes.

ME: Honey, I am REALLY hurting.

HER: So I hear.

ME: No, I mean REALLY REALLY hurting.

HER: Have you taken some medicine?

ME: Ordinary medicine can't cure this. I'm REALLY hurting.

HER: Well, maybe you shouldn't do push-ups with your children on your back.

And thus I knew that she had linked my severe pain with my severe lack of judgment. I had been playing with my kids earlier in the day, and we were engaging in some of our standard, child-enrichment games, most of which involve lots of growling and tackling. (For some reason, my wife does not join in our games.)

So at one point during a particularly rambunctious round of Earthquake (Dad lies down on his stomach, kids get on Dad's back, and Dad commences to simulate an earthquake until the children go flying), when I decided to take the game to the next level. I screamed, "VOLCANO!" and began to rise up, doing what I now admit was a series of ill-advised push-ups. My children, even combined, do not weight that much, so it was by no means a Herculean effort (also, they fell off pretty quickly). But not having done so much as a single push-up in about a decade meant that I was utilizing muscles that had been dormant for a while.

Eventually, I caved to my wife and admitted that poor judgment on my part was ultimately to blame for my current pain. I told her that I was still deserving of gobs and gobs of sympathy, a point she quickly rebuked. After several days of intense therapy (lots of ibuprofen and complaining), the pain was starting to subside. I am sure I will once rebound from this most serious injury, and will learn a lesson from it. The lesson, of course, is not to let my wife see me playing Volcano.

Contact Michael Gibbons at mgibbons