The Fall

The FallDown slippery steps made semi-professionally of Home Depot wood many years ago now. Repaired and repainted several times so that as the freshest layer peels away and other color preferences are revealed. In this case Pink.The pair of Korean style slippers gifted to her by her most gifted giving gifted friend would remain gently splayed and clearly abandoned at the bottom of the step. No breath is making it in or out and this moment in time feels like the body on pause, or stop. Remembering as she is a similar experience when she was a small child is a form of self-talk geared toward keeping her from racing panic. She crawls along the wet cement driveway on her hands and knees and wills the body to take a breath. Sullenly, it does. She groans, loudly as she winds her way back up the stairs and into the house.Mom is the first call. “Really?” she says, “I’m on my way.”“I’m alright I just scared myself” she replies, but the strangled loud and painful delivery of these words explains that there is real pain and the brevity of the conversation reveals that it will be an hour or more before it feels funny.She is and has always been of the frame of mind that falling is always, sooner or later, a laughing matter. In this case it will come once call number to Judee B arrives to check out the five paramedics announcing “cute!” as if either one of them could make hay with this information. By the time third call Spider has crossed the crisis line, noting to himself that the slippers seemed to have been drilled into their casual placement, there cannot help but be humor. She laughs and rolls into her fetal ball again and stays like that until she has to wave him away or allow her midriff to be ravaged by jags of laughter and not enough air.There would be x-rays and a phone call to explain the new term “compression fracture” of the 7th vertebrae -- aka in the care-giving circle as a “broken back.” In my own limited The Learning Channel education a broken back does not allow for much movement. There is traction, pain, immobility. This is a new era then, for me at least. Everything moves. The body has remained bandage free. No bruises save the one cursory emblem on the mid right arm.There is pain, though encumbered by excellent medication, it remains there. A dull and deep attention getter. Providing a persistent canopy under which remembering not to fall becomes a matter of fact. Cautiousness where there had been none. An understandable, possibly temporary, loss of ignorance. Another peek into a world where things can happen to you. This is what casts the illumination on a character of person who consistently remembers not to dwell too whole heartedly on those ghosts under the bed, nor the wicked stings they bring. This is what the laughter is for. Rendering the unexpected, the daunting, the unpredictable a gas, a hoot, something to celebrate instead a stake through the heart of lighthearted movement about the world. Be unafraid, not because you don’t have reason to be. Be unafraid anyway.