Lessons Learned

I've always been a fan of physical comedy. Maybe too much of a fan. Lisa has more than once looked at me with a truly worried look on her face when I laugh heartily at a piece of physical comedy. After I've caught my breath she'll flatly say, "That wasn't that funny." But I can't help it. When Kramer walked off the stage when he was modeling on Seinfeld, when Chris Farley on SNL leaped onto a coffee table when he was supposed to be a motivational speaker, when Eddie Murphy in his Delirious stand up act described his aunt falling down the stairs--these all made me laugh the first time I saw them until I cried.

But in the last three weeks I have twice slipped and fallen on the ice. Hard. And it wasn't funny at all. Either time.

The first time was the hardest fall. The fall happened on the evening of December 23, Christmas Eve Eve. It was the night that we had all of that surprise ice in my area. Lisa was out, and she had called to warn me not to take the girls anywhere, that it was VERY icy out, that she had almost gotten in a wreck. So it wasn't like I should have been surprised. But the next day was recycling day on my street, and I wanted to get the stuff out to the curb, so I walked out the front door of the house (see photo to the right), unaware that there was a thin sheet of ice on all of the uncovered concrete. I asked Natalie to hold the door open for me as I went out (the recycling container, which is just a big, open-ended plastic box, was all but overflowing with plastic and aluminum containers), and as I went out the door I said to her, "Don't follow me out, though, because Mom just called and--"

I never got the rest of the sentence out. As soon as I placed my foot on the top step of the porch my feet flew out from under me. Empty soda cans and glass jars and plastic salad dressing bottles rattled loudly in the plastic recycling bin and flew halfway across the yard. My body turned as I fell. It seemed that I hung in the air for several seconds, but I finally smacked the ground with my feet sprawled across the sidewalk and my right hip coming down hard on the corner of the bottom step.

"I'm all right!" I shouted to Natalie. "I'm okay!" But I wasn't. My hip was what really hurt. I wasn't sure at first that I hadn't broken it. I slowly got up, a little embarrassed as I assumed that the whole neighborhood had heard what sounded like a car accident. I slowly rolled over and didn't feel any sharp pain from my hip. So that was good, I told myself. But there was an achy pain, and I could tell there was going to be a bruise. I picked up all of the recycling strewn across the yard, put it back in the recycling bin, took it gingerly to the curb, and went inside. I calmed down the girls, who both looked pretty scared (Meredith, in fact, had been shouting, "Should I call 911?" while I was lying sprawled across the steps), and then I went inside and looked at my hip. A bruise had already started to form. By the next morning it was the size of my outstretched hand, and now, three weeks later, it's still there, though almost gone.

You would think that a fall like that would put me on high alert when it came to ice, but apparently not. And once again the recycling bin had something to do with the fall. Last week it rained a little bit, and then it snowed after that. There was not that much of either the rain or the snow, but it was enough to setup another accident. The whole family and I met at the school for Natalie's academic team meet, and afterward I gave everyone a ride home. After we got out of the car I saw the empty recycling bin in the yard and I picked it up and decided to take it down the driveway and into the garage, which is where we keep it. If you look at the photo above once more, you can sort of tell that the driveway is angled pretty steeply. There's a drain at the bottom of the driveway, and it works great, but there's a small area there a little bit lower than the drain. That small area was completely iced over, and the ice was covered by that dusting of snow. I hit that patch of ice and again I went airborne. My feet flew up in the air and I came down square on the center of my back, knocking the wind out of me.

"I'm all right!" I gasped as loudly as I could as tears poured out of both of my eyes. "I'm okay!" But I wasn't. I'd twisted my back a little, and I'd scraped both of my hands enough that they were bleeding. And more than that, I was miffed. It's one thing to slip and fall once a season. It's another thing to do it twice in so short a span. I was mad, mad mad. Mad at myself. Mad at the ice. Mad at the world.

I learned a couple of things from these experiences, though:

1) If I ever die a violent death (Say I'm murdered or in a deadly auto wreck), my last words are going to be, "I'm all right! I'm okay!" Apparently I say this on reflex.

2) Falling is a great equalizer. It's a great humbler. 'Cause it doesn't matter how important you think you are, or what big plans you have that day, or how full of yourself you feel. Gravity doesn't play favorites. And once you're in the air, you can be a homeless person or you can be President of the United States, and there's not a darned thing you can do about it no matter which one you are. You're going to do what you're going to do. It's actually a very liberating experience.

But that doesn't make me any less mad.