Michael Chabon's father's Final Frontier

I recently subscribed to The New Yorker, and in a recent copy was a “personal history” by Michael Chabon entitled, The Final Frontier.  There is a drawing of his sitting in a hospital room, a Kindle or Notebook in his lap.  He is looking over at his father in a hospital bed.  In the window is the outline of the Starship Enterprise.  The “Final Frontier” in this personal history is obviously the death of his father.  The father is lying there with an expression of discomfort, if not pain.  In what ought to be his reflection in the window is an outline of Spock.  

I looked up Chabon in Wikipedia:  “Chabon is on the writing staff of “Star Trek: Picard, a new Star Trek series starring Patrick Stewart, and was named showrunner in July 2019.^[95] In November 2018, a Star Trek: Short Treks short co-written by Chabon, titled "Calypso", was released.^”  So he is presumably in this “personal history” drawing on parallels between his screen writing and the death of his father . . . anyway . . . Chabon is about the same age as my son who would conceivably be sitting next to my hospital bed if I were in one dying; which I have no intention of doing.  I am working hard with weights, not to avoid dying (something I don’t think about) but to enable me to walk better and thus avoid falling again, especially when I am on hikes. 

My son has told me that he would love it if I were able to jog in to my next meeting with the orthopedic surgeon (who told me I wouldn’t be able to hike, walk normally, or walk at all without a prosthesis).   I thought of that and added a new exercise to my regimen: “slow stationary double time.”  I did 50 of them for the first time a few minutes ago and was encouraged by noting that weight on my bad leg didn’t bother me.   Earlier in the day I added another exercise: partial squats with a ten-pound dumbbell in each hand.  Those didn’t bother me either.  I don’t see why these exercises won’t enhance my ability to hike without falling over.  ;-)  I have established as a milestone the ability to walk up my stairs using my full weight on my bad leg – in other words, using the right leg in the same way I’m using the left.  At present I must step up using my left leg and the “drag” (so to speak) my right leg up to the next step without using it to climb there. 

   

And, it goes without saying that Michael Chabon’s father was a wimp.  ;-)