Emoji with Tears of Joy

Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn

Last week Oxford Dictionary declared the “face with tears of joy” emoji as the 2015 word of the year. Etymologists are weeping, because emojis are not really words. However they are icons and they have become a new way to express tone over text communication when there is no body and no inflection of voice.

For those of you who read my earlier piece, “Achilles Heel,” I am returning to that work with some fresh insights. In that piece I was writing about the experience of having a heel injury and how it makes you vulnerable to other injuries including emotional ones. Recently I was sitting in my podiatrist’s office. He works with ballerinas, tennis players and, of course, runners. My MRI had returned and I asked him: “What did it show?” He carefully traced the bottom of my foot while saying simply without any large medical terms: “outside tendon injured, inflammation of the ball of the foot, some plantar fasciitis, a sprained ankle at some point, and a more recent heel injury.” I was happy, but also stunned by this road map.

I thought of this imaging as a blueprint not only of my foot, but also of my life. This is my “emoji” and icon for my present life. There is the prolonged and problematic pounding to the middle of the foot from running and New York City walking. Those of us over mid-life can appreciate this problem. Ah the sprained ankle. Was that the traumatic injury in high school trying to compete in girls’ basketball? Or was high school the traumatic injury? And what is going on with the outside tendon of my right ankle? Google medicine has it that it is also probably from the repetitive action of the peroneal tendon in a sport most likely running. All my years of pounding the pavement to stay fit and thin was haunting me in a new way. What about the injury involving the true heel? I think that is due to running over tree roots and a rock in Fort Greene Park. That might be labeled trying to return to quick fitness – the “sprinting” of my youth without the necessary practice and preparation.

Now to our beloved emoji “face with tears of joy.” This emoji is not supposed to be about sadness and I don’t want to paint a picture that my love of running is all in vain. This emoji is rather about laughing so hard that it causes one tears of joy. I am laughing in a way at my youthful foolishness – the thought that I could run and not experience wear and tear.  And then my foolishness that at any point we can just pick the sport back up and it will be there at the level we left it.

It is on this joyous note that I wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving. Some of my best memories of my mother and father and family are “laughing so hard at the dinner table that we were in tears.” My father was a merry prankster and my mother a most worthy subject. He kept small books of her sayings, because no one could remember their spontaneous humor. Here’s one.  My mother talking about trying to reach someone on the phone: “I’m not going to break my fingers off trying to get her.” May their blessed memory live on in our hearts.

Gregory and me, St. Peter’s Church, Lithgow, NY

Happy Thanksgiving