The $4,000 Cinch

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Life is Not a Box of Chocolates

It may be true that in life “you never know what you’re gonna get,” but not every bit of it tastes so good, and the pieces that make it up generally exist in some kind of relationship, not segregated into little compartments. You can’t just gobble one down, shrug, and go on your merry way without the raspberry truffle in #7.

So, with respect to Tom Hanks, life is less like a box of chocolates than it is a wobbly Jenga tower threatening to topple from one unidentifiable lynch pin. This is also known as the “for want of a nail” principle (for want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse, the battle, the war… cf. the excellent short story by Mary Robinette Kowal). Small oversight; big consequence. This is becoming a recurring theme in my life, with Shiloh being the most recent example and my broken back the immediate precursor.

The nail, the Jenga piece, I recently discovered related to my own accident was my wünder-cinch. I’d begged for it for my birthday with such unsubtle hints to my husband as sending a link to it handily awaiting checkout in my Amazon cart. TC is an Arabian. He’s shaped weird. His weird shape was making him rub the hair off his elbows on his own cinch (for the equine uninitiated, the cinch is the belly strap that keeps the saddle on and generally keeps riders from dying; it is usually shaped in a straight line, ────). Enter the 26” felt Total Saddle Fit Shoulder Relief cinch. It is shaped like the Wonder Woman “W” if Wonder Woman were German and in fact were a Vünder Voman sporting a “V” instead, ─v─.

I tried it on him right away. Then he was a dorkus and put himself on bed rest before I could ride in it (unrelated). Fast forward two months, and he’s finally got the go ahead from the vet for walking straight lines under saddle. Yay! On goes the saddle with the new vünder-cinch, answer to all his prayers for hairy elbows. On goes the excited, ride-deprived Janna, and then, just as quickly, off comes a less excited, but also ride-deprived Janna, because ─── and ─v─ are patently different. ─v─, it turns out, is not a T’Challa approved shape. The shape somebody dreamed up to solve one problem created a new one: it felt weird, uncomfortable, different enough to try to outrun it at escape velocity.

I discovered this seven weeks later, as my back brace is finally coming off, and excited, ride-deprived Janna is dreaming of the saddle again. Lunging (making him run around in circles without me riding) in the vünder cinch? Bucking bronco. Lunging in the old straight cinch? Distinguished gentleman, bald elbows and all.

Jenga. Things rise and fall together just so. And one piece can hold the key to the difference between the two. The shape of a cinch, for example, can be an unexpected load-bearer.

Putting the tower together is maybe my favorite part of the game, the satisfying pattern of three on three in a tight, ascending, perpendicular grid. The fall is exhilarating, maddening, anxiety-rending, and maybe rebuilding time and again does get wearisome, but you can drive yourself to distraction second-guessing which pieces are load-bearing, and which superfluous to physics. This particular one is a mistake I’m not likely to make again in a hurry, having discovered the world’s most expensive cinch ($4,000 in bills the bastard insurance company – Aetna – won’t pay). But you can’t just put the piece right back in again. It’s a misjudgement made.

Our life Jengas are something infinitely more complex than a single tower. It’s like some kind of Alhambra Jenga, with multiple palaces, chambers, arches, vaulted ceilings, courtyards, mocarabes, a network of structure and space. One piece doesn’t necessarily topple the whole architecture. A supporting wall comes down over here, but the rest remains standing. You rebuild, but invariably it will take a different shape because you are new and it is new.

My oldest, for example, won’t be doing the dog project in 4-H again, at least not this year. Shiloh was her lynch-pin, her cornerstone, her reason. It wasn’t for the sake of the activity, but for the sake of the partnership, that partnership, the love of that one dog. It’s a room, a wing, of her life that came down. How she’ll rebuild or not, I don’t know, but that the rest of the building stands, I do.

It’s one of those realizations from tragedy: that we are composed of many things that hold each other up, whether strongly or weakly, that we sustain damage in more areas than one when they go missing, that we are more than the sum of their parts, and that healing doesn’t mean things need to take the same shape they did before. Reconstruction is a creative process. There is nothing that will fill a Shiloh-shaped hole or decompress my vertebra. Maybe that room is now a courtyard, a space to reflect and honor. Maybe that proud tower can serve well as a humble grotto.