Funambulism
I have written before about my “word of the day” that comes in my email every day. One day last week the word was Funambulism.
Okay so I admit I had no idea what this word meant, but it looked like a really fun word.
Right?
Fun…ambulism.
So, I knew what “fun” was…I mean I do, I can be fun sometimes.
And then I looked up “ambulism,” and learned that meant “a disorder involving walking.”
Ah okay, I thought, having trouble walking after having too much fun, that makes sense to me.
Fun-ambulism.
Even I may have funambulated once or twice before in my life.
But then, to my disappointment, I got deeper into my email and learned the word wasn’t funambulism at all, it was funambulism pronounced fyoo-NAM-byə-lizm.
And this funambulism meant “the art of walking on a tightrope.”
Back in November, I was repairing a picnic table the kids used on the playground at the church by replacing the top and benches with pressure-treated wood after the original plastic parts had broken.
During the process of attaching one of the boards, I hit my left thumb with my hammer just below the thumbnail.
Even though I was at church, I reacted pretty much as you might expect anyone who has hit their left thumb with a hammer to react.
Only I asked for forgiveness after.
Anyway, I finished the table and after the pain went away, I forgot about the incident with my thumb and the hammer.
Until one day, as my thumbnail began to grow, the blood blistery kind of thing that shows up under your nail after you hit it with a hammer began to take shape.
Sitting at the bar of the Hard Rock Café at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on New Year’s Day as we ate dinner while preparing to go watch the Steelers versus the Ravens game at M & T Bank Stadium, I realized I had something very unusual looking on my thumb.
“Kim,” I said, “look at my thumb…who does that look like to you?
“Oh my gosh,” she said, “Donald Trump! You have Donald Trump on your thumb!”
I did.
I had a caricature of Donald Trump, blood blistered tattooed on my thumbnail!
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
But I realized that to share this remarkable occurrence, was kind of like funambulism!
Because let’s face it, there are a lot of people out there I am sure, and some might even be reading this, that would probably like to tell me where to stick that thumb with the Donald Trump image on it!
But I would have to decline because that’s not nice and I need that thumb, and in fact, that might cause some of that ambulism I was discussing earlier since it would be hard to walk like that.
And the sad thing is, trying to write something that mentions Donald Trump, or anything political, or anything that might mention the differences we might have with one another really is kind of like funambulism.
It is like the art of walking a tightrope.
And that’s too bad.
