heal heel

“Pay attention to the signs,” Roy says. “It was your Achilles heel you ruptured.” Achilles, as in the warrior hero of the Iliad who was invincible because his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx when he was a baby. His only vulnerable spot was the soft tendon that attached his calf to his foot, where she held him to keep him from falling in. And that is precisely where Paris fatally wounded him. I have a bad mental image of that elf dude from The Lord of the Rings shooting Brad Pitt in the heel in last summer’s epic flop, Troy.

My friend Andrea says that Roman soldiers used to slash the enemy’s Achilles heel, in order to immobilize them on the battleground.

If Achilles is watching us from the depths of the Elysian Fields, I wonder how he feels about having given his name to the weakest part of the human body. I wouldn’t like it. “I’m sorry but you’ve injured your Larissa heel. I’m afraid we have to operate.” Nope. No good.

Get me out of this bed. I need to go slay some Trojans.