No one believes I am athletic.

I am banged up, with a seriously swollen digit, a kneecap that after four weeks is still annoyed with me for allowing a foot to kiss it and there is an upside-down, wheel-less bicycle in my living room.

Yet still, people snicker at my claims of athleticism.

The truth is, while I am fit, I am not currently what anyone would consider athletic. All my life, I have had an aversion (read: bottomless insecurity) to team sports. In high school, I was tall, painfully thin and awkward. I was, literally, the last one picked. And then I stood from the ball as possible. My attempts were feeble, and ducking my best move.

The fact that I am now involved in a weekly child/parent kickball game is a feat that few can truly understand.

The fact that I have actually caught the ball, scoring an automatic out, is a mini miracle. But my high school self apparently wants me back in line, and off the field. She was the one who caught the ball more than two weeks ago, moving her finger precisely so that the ball jammed it.

It was my pinkie.

It hurt. And I whined and showed it to a fellow player. At that point, it looked minor. The next day, half my hand was swollen and colorful with purple and blue bruises.

When I still couldn't bend my pinkie two weeks later, I became alarmed. And secretly, thrilled. Never in my life have I suffered a broken bone. At 42, playing my first team sport, it was time. Such an injury would make me an athlete, a member of the sacred club for which I have never passed muster.

The X-ray showed no fractures. I was keenly disappointed.

But the doctor acknowledged it would not heal without some special attention. Nothing so glorious as a cast, or even an anti-inflammatory. Medication, while not as good as a break, would underline the seriousness of the whole affair. Instead, she advised me to stop by Walgreen's and pick up a finger splint.

The splint is a large, vertical piece of shiny, silver metal with a split at the bottom. Cushioned by a thick pad of spongy material, the finger slides neatly inside the splint. The instructions - all of two sentences - suggested taping it for added security. Untaped, it comes off with a pull. That seemed far too simple for my sports injury. Tape. Definitely tape.

I tried Scotch. Then I decided that looked worse than nothing, and pried it off.

Tape or no tape, the splint did the trick. Finally, people noticed. People wanted to talk to me about my finger. I was elated - until I saw their reactions.

The clerk at Wal-Mart brightened when she saw the splint. Here was a conversation piece! A breath of fresh air from the constant weather patter!

"What happened?" she asked, furrowing her brow with concern.

"Oh," I said, my tone carefully nonchalant. "I jammed it."

"How?" Now she sounded alarmed.

"Kickball," I said.

"Oh." Her tone was suddenly flat, the sweet note of sympathy now absent.

I tried to redeem myself.

"It happened two weeks ago, and still wasn't healing right," I said.

She was silent.

"That's a long time," I added.

Now she looked annoyed, anxious to be ride of me.

"Yeah," she said, handing me the receipt, her eyes and dull now as they'd been before she'd spied my splint. "Well, take care."

And so it went. At the gas station. The grocery store. An outing downtown with friends.

Raised brows followed by rolled eyes.

I tried to spice the story up with a little humor. "No one told me you were supposed to use your feet in kickball," I'd throw in brightly. The smiles that elicited were merely polite.

Why, I wondered, was a fracture worth so much more emotion than a sprain? I felt like Rodney Dangerfield.

Saturday, I apparently made one last, subconscious attempt to stake a claim on athleticism. I fell off my bike.

It was a gorgeous day and I'd set out from home with the intent to ride for about an hour. Ten minutes into the ride, a strong wind came up, blowing sand into my eyes and making it generally tough to ride. This was not part of my planned interlude. I turned around. On the way back, I cut through the parking lot of an empty office building. It was beautifully constructed, with multi-colored tiles leading the way to the entrance. I rode around the front, admiring it, and looked up too late to see that the tiles were not all on one level.

My feet were securely fastened into my clipless pedals. (Clipless pedals -- now clearly that's an indication of an athlete, right?!) I didn't even try to escape them. Instead, I watched myself fall. Down, sideways and off. My thigh broke part of my fall, my splint the rest. I reached out for the sidewalk, and the splint absorbed some of the shock that would otherwise surely have ripped up my arm!

I dusted myself off and looked at my hand. The shiny silver splint now bore a series of scratches.

At that day's holiday picnic, I displayed the splint to the first person who asked. "What did you do?"

I spoke without thinking. "I jammed it playing kickball and then I dinged up the splint when I fell of my bike this morning. Amazing, huh?"

He looked at me with poorly disguised pity with an aftertaste of disgust. Too late, I realized how incredibly clumsy the whole thing made me sound.

"Yeah," he said, trying to hide an eye roll as he turned away. "That would be the word."

This is another story from the past, but unlike the last entry, this one has never been committed to paper - or cyberspace. But I thought of it the other day and realized it would be a crime not to share it.

I call this The Mystery of the Thong.

It was May, 2003. The day I was sealing the door on the packed U-Haul and, after 13 years in the High Country, moving to Colorado Springs.

All that remained to be done was to pick up a check from my last pet-sitting client. During 10 of those 13 years in Summit County, I operated a pet-sitting business. One that thrived so well I sometimes brought home more cash per month from it than I grossed from my full-time career reporting job.

It was the first time I had pet sat for this couple, an early 50-something pair who took off for a week someplace tropical. It wasn't the first time I did laundry at a client's house.

I spent my last 18 months of mountain residency in a drafty cabin with no washer and dryer - a truly evil little house but we shall save that story for another time. I saw no sense in dragging my dirty laundry to a laundromat, or to friends' homes, when all my pet-sitting customers had perfectly good washers and dryers. I suppose it would have been easier, and more honest, to simply ask their permission. But it seemed an offbeat request, so instead, I went ahead and did it, always checking every nook and cranny of both machines to ensure nothing was left behind. No one ever asked any questions or seemingly suspected a thing.

That final morning, I drove to the couple's home to pick up the check.

The man, a lean, gray-haired, sophisticated-seeming fellow, greeted me at the door. He smiled, an expression I assumed was genuine. In retrospect, I suspect it was rather a thin stretch of the lips. But I had no reason to suspect anything was amiss.

"Let's go downstairs," he said. "We have something for you."

He said "we" but his wife was not home.

I smiled again, a bit of an 'aw shucks' sort of thing. It was not uncommon for people to bring back a small, typically cheesy, gift from their exotic vacation spot for their petsitter. I hoped it was a coffee mug, or a useful object along those lines, not a miniature depiction of a leaping dolphin or some other dust magnet.

The man, whom we'll call Dick for simplicity's sake, motioned for me to sit down at a round wooden table in their remodeled basement. A small brown bag, its top curled downward into a little fist, sat innocently on the table. A tiny alert went off in my brain. Odd packaging, I thought, for a gift.

"Go ahead," Dick said. "Open it." His tone was somber, setting off another small alarm. But I paid it no mind; I was too anxious to see what treasure they had bought for me.

I uncurled the top and reached in, surprised when my hand closed around a wispy piece of cotton. I pulled it out into full display. It was a thong. A extremely tiny thong. With a pair of big, red lips on the only piece of fabric large enough to accommodate them. It was my thong.

"We found this on the floor in the hallway," he said.

I looked up. His eyes were dark and hard. I felt my face reddening, felt the first wave of humiliation crashing into my brain.

"It's dirty," he added.

I looked at him, my mouth gaping. I had not looked inside it. But clearly, he had.

Disbelief joined embarrassment. And then, anger made its appearance.

This man had set me up for this moment. Even worse, he had looked at my underwear. Suddenly, his crime seemed far worse to me than my own.

"How did it get here?" he asked.

Still more embarrassed than anything, I stumbled.
"I don't know," I said.

"Did you do laundry here?" the dick, I mean Dick, asked.

It would have been easiest to have confessed the simple truth. But he had me against a wall, and I panicked.

"No," I said."All I can think is that it must have gotten stuck inside my jeans last time I did laundry, and it fell out while I was walking in your house."

A clever answer, I thought, although it still did not address the little detail about the thong's dirty state.

He waited for more, but I had nothing else to say. Looking back, I should have said something cutting that would have turned the tables and made him see how utterly ridiculous a game he was playing. But I was stunned and my mind was set on only one thing: Escape.

Dick handed me a check. I took it, tossed the thong back into its brown bag, stood and exited the garden level door. I suppose I said thanks, since that would be my typical response to receiving a check, but I hope not.

I was only a block away when I began to laugh. First at myself, and then at Dick.

I realized I had left him with only one conclusion: I had had sex in his house. Somewhere. Perhaps on the washing machine. Maybe on the floor. Or could it have been ... in the master bed? I suddenly envisioned Dick stripping the bed, perhaps not only that bed but not knowing where the deed had occurred, every one in the house,

The truth was so pedestrian. The vision I had left him with so perverse. Precisely what he deserved.

I drove from there to a local diner where I met a few friends for a farewell brunch. We laughed about it until we cried. I did not show them the thong.

I expected to leave Summit County with relief. I had overstayed my time there by several years, and was chomping at the bit to start the next chapter in my life. Instead, I left with a delirious grin on my face, and a dirty thong by my side.

In a May 3 Denver Post editorial, columnist Pius Kamau manages to do exactly what he claims to abhor.

Kamau's editorial, "Dealing with mental illness," does nothing to enlighten the public about such disorders. Instead, it instills further fear among those ignorant of the subject and enhances a stale but still wildly raging stereotype.

"By not supporting vigorous research into mental illness, we perpetuate our ignorance and demonize the mentally ill," he writes.

Sounds good, right? But before and after that sentence, Kamau does an astonishingly job of just that: perpetuating and demonizing. He refers to Virginia Tech shooter Cho, along with Columbine's Harris and Klebold as examples of the mentally ill. "Before the next Columbine or Virginia Tech," America needs to step up to the plate and "intelligently evaluate and treat tomorrow's mass murderers" to "abort future killing rampages."

Thanks, Kamau. Because clearly, Cho, Harris and Klebold are accurate representations of the mentally ill, aren't they?

Did they slip through the cracks? Yes. Are these horrible events lessons for the future? Will they help society give others the help they need before headlines are made? Yes.

But Kamau's depiction paints all the mentally ill with the same broad and dangerous brush.

It is in the people he features. It is in the phrases and words he chooses. "We have been poor caretakers of the weak and vulnerable among us." Ironic, since some of the strongest people I know battle emotional disorders. Kamau points out that mental illness is of "epidemic proportions." The word "epidemic" does not induce compassion in the average reader; instead, it summons up images of a contagious disease, something we should fear and from which we should run.

He notes that 10 to 15 percent of prisoners suffer from "severe mental illness". A valid point but again, one that hardly softens the heart or reduces needless fear.

Kamau fails to mention the vast majority of mentally ill Americans. Those who work, play, raise children, maintain successful marriages and whose disorder passes unnoticed by all but their most beloved confidantes. These are the silent millions who deal with their mental illness with medication, therapy, exercise, support groups, supplements and in other ways. These people are more keenly tuned to their emotions than most, alert for any change that seems threatens their carefully wrought balance, ready to correct it before it impacts their lives and the lives of those around them.

They are not besieged by violent thoughts. By and large, they are in fact the most compassionate and empathetic among us. They've visited the darkest corners of the human mind and emerged scarred but typically the better for it.

When the demons visit them, they deal with them behind closed doors, not in public demonstrations of rage.

For those who are undiagnosed, the battle rages internally, not on the front page. If they think of hurting anyone, it is themselves. Life has become too painful. They feel keenly their difference from others, but fear the knowledge of what that may be. No one, they believe, can understand or help them.

I agree with Kamau that diseases like cancer and heart disease draw more attention and funding. The suffering and death that these diseases cause is all too visible. The suffering of those with mental illness passes unnoticed, and the disorders do not kill. The dying is internal. And so, mental illness goes underfunded and largely ignored.

Kamau makes a pitch for research that will reveal the chemical markers of these disorders. A side benefit of this kind of understanding, he writes, "will be to destigmatize mental illness."

But with writers like Kamau wielding the power of the editorial pen, the stigma grows only stronger.