"Your doctor called to follow up on your foot," said my wife as I walked through the door after work.

"I’ll call him back," I said.

"Don’t bother, I already talked to him," she said.

"What do you mean? Shouldn’t I be the one talking to my own doctor?"

"I told him you hadn’t been staying off it," she said.

True, I hadn’t. Two weeks before I’d been loping across the yard when I landed hard on the side of my foot. For a week, I thought I had a terrible sprain. Then an x-ray revealed a fracture on my 5th metatarsal.

The doctor told me to stay off it.

"That’s it?"

"That’s all you need," he said. "Don’t bend your foot. Wear hard sole shoes."

"Hard sole?"

"The ones you wear to church," he said. "Got any wingtips?"

"Wingtips are my wedding shoes," I said. "My church shoes are soft soled."

"What about job interview shoes? Are they hard soled?" asked the doctor.

"All right, all right," I said. "What about a cast? I thought with a fracture, you got a cast?"

"If you stay off it, it should heal," he said.

I work at an ad agency with creative people. I was already imagining their drawings with Sharpie markers on the cast.

I stayed off it . . . for a couple of hours. But without a cast or brace to humble me, I simply hobbled around, dragging the club foot beside me as if it were a wooden peg.

Surprise: The foot didn’t feel a bit better and in fact, within a week of cavalier hobbling around, smarted pretty badly.

My wife passed the doctor’s scolding along to me. "He said that he would have put a cast on a kid because kids can’t help but jump around. Adults he doesn’t have problems with."

A beat passed.

"Till now," she added.

"Okay, I’ll stay off of it," I said, meaning it.

The mystic in me believed that God wanted me to slow down my life so He inflicted a benign injury that would render me temporarily immobile. I’d have to sit on the couch, read and relax. Finish a novel. Read to my daughters without getting up. Listen to autumn breezes rustle through the hardening leaves. Be still.

Good God, what a colossal ego I've got.

...that God would grind to a halt the 24/7 conveyer belt of petitions for cures, world peace and, from Texas, high school football victories. So I spend too much time chauffeuring the kids to gymnastics. So I’m a little pokey moving through that Bellow novel.

WWGC.

Why Would God Care?

Ah, but He does care. He’s counted the hairs on my head. What we consider multi-tasking doesn't even blip the Divine Chump Change radar screen. He can handle all the petitions, plus puppeteer a minor foot fracture, all while he's shaving and dictating a letter.

But if I still have God's attention, with all due respect I have to say the plan isn't working. In fact, it works the opposite for me. If told to sit and do nothing, I crave to clean the garage. But if I have time to clean the garage, I can think of nothing but reading the paper till I fall asleep.

My wife has been nice to me. She said that's only because I, somehow, have been nice myself ever since I hurt the foot.

Astounding. I thought for sure I'd been the same incorrigible crab all along. I wondered in what other ways I'd been slipping.

I noticed, too, that my 9-year-old daughter took special delight in being nice to me, especially in church. She reached out to help me kneel. She tucked her arm under mine when it was time to rise. Only after we left God's house did she revert to her default Lucy Van Pelt temper.

"Just because you left His house doesn't mean you're out of His sight," I said in the car.

"Arrrggghhh!" she cried. "I'm soooooooooo uncomfortable in these clothes."

At work, the people with imagination compliment my cane. The others resort to sniggering "hiya gimp" remarks that make Don Rickles seem like Pulitzer Prize finalist.

I'm finding it very difficult to sit still. How long have I been this jumpy? Months? Years? Was I lurching every three minutes because I'm on modem speed? Or is the Saul Bellow novel merely a snore? If the book has a lousy reputation, I could find out in seconds on the internet.

That's the problem. Too much information at my fingers. I had the same problem when I visited my first university library. I plucked books off the shelves till my arms ached, then sat down and flipped hungrily through them all. I gave short shrift to them, but -- like papa Von Trapp at bedtime --- gave a little attention to each.

I started going to my small hometown library around 1970, when I was nine, I'd like to say that life was slower, but to my 75-year-old neighbor, who reached adulthood before World War I and the golden age of radio, life was pretty rapidfire in that year after men landed on the moon. But for me, the days were slow enough and the small town distractions few. Technology hadn't yet intruded upon our lives. If we were wired, it was because we drank too much Kool-Aid

There I had my first job. I was twelve or thirteen. I washed the windows and removed the trash each weekend. They gave me a key. I held it up to my bedroom light. The university library amazed me. The web astounded me. But that key, my own key, to the library illuminated me with light that touched corners that had always before been dark.

Now I sit on the couch with my foot up, and I can think of a million reasons to get up and do other things. Nearly thirty years ago, that key gave me access to a five-room hometown library, closed on Sundays to everyone but me, where nothing could pull me away from the page in front of me.