Age of the Geek

You're as young as you feel
     A couple weeks ago while covering a county fair, one of the fair workers mistook me for a 4-H student, thinking I had an animal to show.
     I am 30 years old.
     It happens on occasion. Every so often somebody will assume I’m with a school newspaper, or I’ll get carded for buying a lottery ticket. This is especially true if I’ve recently shaved.
     I’m a youthful looking guy. Maybe it’s because of good genes. Perhaps I lucked out in the genetic lotto and was simply fated to age well.
     Or maybe it’s because of the environment. A lifestyle that involves avoiding direct sunlight as often as possible must have some benefits for your skin.
     Then again, maybe it’s just a state of mind. The current pop culture boom enables me to constantly immerse myself in the video games and comic books of my youth. Maybe the secret to staying young is to keep enjoying the things you enjoyed as a kid.
     Whatever the reason, and yes, I am blatantly humble-bragging at this point, I’ve looked pretty much the same for the entirety of my adulthood. I’ve packed on a few more pounds, but otherwise I appear the same as I did when I graduated high school.
     But appearances can be deceiving, and as I discovered last week as I lay crumpled in the middle of the street, unable to stand under my own power, I’m not as young as I used to be.
     It was an otherwise ordinary hop out of the back of a truck. (Yes, the truck was stopped.) The kind of jump I’ve made a hundred times before. Except this time when my left leg hit the ground, I heard a pop. Up until that point I had thought the landing was going rather well. My right leg hit the ground and absorbed the impact without incident.
     My left leg … not so much.
     That “pop” was the sound of my tibia cracking and my ACL tearing.
     Thankfully, a well-timed and incredibly patient member of the Hampton Police Department was close by to drive me to the hospital.
     And I haven’t put weight on my left leg since. Nor will I for a few more weeks.
     Now, I’m not entirely willing to attribute my injury to the inevitable aging process. Lots of people, younger and older, have probably incurred the exact same injury doing the exact same thing.
     But one way or the other, it does appear that my days of jumping around from various heights are over. Not that I’m resigning myself to a life of inaction, just that it’s time to reassess my limits.
     Ironically, if there’s one thing that can make me feel like a kid again, it’s having an immobilized left leg. My youth was largely defined by a series of leg surgeries – I spent the bulk of age 10 and 11 in either a wheelchair or on crutches.
     The next couple months of recovery won’t be anything new for me. I’ve done this a couple times already. In fact, it’s almost nostalgic.
     And unlike 20 years ago, the weeks pass much more quickly from the perspective of an adult than they do for a child. This time around I also have the Internet, which is how I do most of my socializing anyway, so there won’t be much change there.
     Comparatively speaking, recovering from this injury should be a walk in the park. And hopefully it won’t be long before I can actually walk in the park.

 
     Travis Fischer is a newswriter for Mid-America Publishing and is older than he looks, but younger than he feels.