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Enormous black Schäfer on the plaza, his head as long as my forearm and hand, huge triangular ears twitching fore and then aft, his tail near sweeping the ground behind him. He does not trot like Fido but glides, bent-legged, like a visiting spirit keeping a low profile in a wolf suit, a lupine lowrider. It's the gait of hip dysplasia. I question whether I ought to be appreciating its æsthetics, enjoying how deformity makes for an impressive-looking stride. He is not so unlike the long-legged nineteen-year-old now crossing the plaza, satchel over one tanned shoulder, her high shoes making her swing the flat blades of her hips to and fro so that heads turn and watch her pass.

Both of them make me think of a boy I remember whose mild scoliosis made his back a beautiful S-curve from front to back, tipping his hips and his ribcage out of the prosaic straight line most men have. It did not make him girlish, but rather powerful-looking, elastic. I drew him again and again in the margins of my algebra notes

Somewhere I read that the skeletons of Welsh bowmen had been unearthed in Britain. After years of drawing 200-pound bows with one hand, training for war since boyhood, they had built up such muscle on their right arms that it had pulled their growing spines to one side. Nature's symmetry was sacrificed for military effect, for the ability to rain death upon the French at Agincourt. Skeleton after skeleton came to light with the same swayed vertebræ, all speaking of intimate knowledge of bent yew. I wonder if, in life, these young men also had a compelling, unbalanced elegance in the way their shoulders tipped or the way they leaned in doorframes, if people admired their bent frames as a kind of beauty.