Departing Big Sky Montana, the voyage down the mountain to Bozeman then eastward alongside the Yellowstone River provides quite pleasant scenery when returning to North Dakota. I have similarly enjoyed our vehicle’s average gas mileage along the way – if I remember to reset the readout as we start off. The gradual drop in altitude aids fuel economy readings that hide more cruel realities. If only downhill tricks were available to disguise retirement’s other truths.

Following my leg-weakening neuropathy diagnosis in 2013, Rita and I attended a gathering at a relative’s home. I was sent to retrieve something from the garage. The landing just outside their kitchen door led to eight steps down toward the garage floor.

With denial of Mayo’s recent analysis firmly in mind, I recall thinking, My legs are ok. I can glide down these stairs just like I used to do – each foot slipping rapidly over the edge of the next step, one after the other. With confidence of a descent down as Fred Astaire would have done it, I mumbled, “Watch this…” then slid my left foot over the top edge and started down. Somewhere between the first and second steps, down took on a different meaning.

Loss of altitude this time mimicked a stunt-double’s tryout for Duane Johnson’s next action movie. Motionless in a big pile at the foot of the steps, I wondered how many teeth were lost and bones broken. Back inside, the item I was sent to find was delivered without saying a word about what happened. The attempted Astaire routine was just too stupid to admit to. Later, I told Rita about it – since my stupidity is reported to be much more transparent to her anyway.

More recently a different challenge came along- to join others in the orchestra pit playing violin for the Western Plains Opera Company in a production of George Bizet’s, “Carmen.” Considering 47 seasons fiddling with the Minot Symphony, I was confident fingers could slip down (and up) the neck of my violin as well as they ever had despite the fact that my type of neuropathy isn’t limited to legs. Before the first rehearsal, I locked myself in our basement for multiple hours, sawing through 58 pages of music overloaded with sixteenth-notes embellished by six sharps or flats and a plethora of accidentals. Just to make things interesting, symbols used for accidental markings were practically indistinguishable to the naked eye. The group’s first practice rekindled memory of the stunt-double tryout ten years earlier.

First, hoping first to avoid “the garage incident,” I recruited someone to carry my instrument both up and down 20 steps, to and from the orchestra pit. Not doing so might well have brought fiddle strings wound around my neck along with splinters from 1872 wood jutting out my torso- following rapid descent of the staircase. There might also have been a bow through my head like the arrow through Steve Martin’s while playing “One Wild and Crazy Guy” as I lay comatose in a new big pile. Moreover, denial of how neuropathy affects legs blossomed into similar denial about fingers. By the end of the first practice, it seemed most of my digits were in their own pile on the orchestra pit floor. I wondered how many notes also lay dead with them.

I’m thankful that in addition to life itself, a wonderful family and loving wife (Rita insisted I add understanding and beautiful here), the Good Lord opted to anoint me with a modest gift or two. If only He might have been more generous with the sprinkling of musical ability – similar to that given Itzhak Perlman or Isaac Stern, perhaps. As it is, I better understand my mother-in-law’s hesitation to climb behind the wheel after broadsiding a city bus and totaling her car at age 84. That first night of practice, I came very dangerously close to single-handedly totaling “Carmen.” Turns out, overcoming retirement’s realities requires more work than just resetting a simple dashboard device.