“How many times have you fallen in the past year?” “When was the last time you fell?” “Have you fallen during the past month?” I’ve been asked those questions so many times during the past year or two that I’ve been tempted to admit to an imaginary fall just to satisfy the people who keep asking. Apparently, they expect me to have fallen and are disappointed when I tell them I haven’t.
I think it’s been ten or fifteen years since I fell down, maybe longer, and it was because I was hurrying from car to mailbox, slipped on loose gravel, twisted my ankle and lost my balance. Embarrassed, I looked around to see if anyone had seen my clumsiness, jumped up, retrieved my mail, got back in the car and drove the rest of the way home where I unloaded my groceries and put them away before I sat down and inspected my ankle. It was a little tender and beginning to swell, so I spent a couple of days kicking back in my recliner and enjoying the excuse to let most of the housework slide. I let very few people know about my fall, it was embarrassing.
Aside from the twisted ankle, the palms of my hands were sore from the bits of sand and gravel embedded in my skin, as I’d landed on my hands and knees. One knee was red and sore, much the same feeling as when I’d fallen on the sidewalk while roller-skating at age eight. Falling hadn’t been much of a big deal then, we fell down a lot while playing, sometimes deliberately while playing cowboys and Indians or sliding into base during a softball game. While it didn’t exactly qualify as “falling”, we often ended up flat on the ground after jumping off the porch railing or the roof of the chicken house. I’d been bucked off our pony at around age twelve, slipped while “tightrope walking” on the top rail of a wooden fence at my grandparents’ farm. And once I slipped from my cousin’s trapeze rings, landed on my back with all the wind knocked out of me and lay there for several minutes gasping for air.
I’d fallen out of bed more than once after I “outgrew” my baby crib (forced out by the birth of a baby sister when I was only two.) And I’d fainted once during a high school cooking class. We’d been required to stand for more than half an hour to watch a lengthy demonstration and, as sometimes happens to soldiers and boy scouts who stand too long at attention, it had cut off circulation to my brain and I slowly faded away, not really falling but gradually collapsing until I was sitting on the floor. Add those up with all the falls and tumbles related to learning to ride a bicycle, roller skate, turn cartwheels, playing tag and playground accidents, I suppose I suffered well over a hundred falls by the time I was sixteen or seventeen. Add another half dozen falls attributable to icy sidewalks, broken stair steps, slippery creek beds and thoughtless haste, and I’ve been, otherwise, relatively fall-less for most of the past sixty years.
I said “relatively” fall-less because, aside from the tumble at the mailbox, I did fall one other time after I was all grown up. One summer I was taking classes to keep my teaching certificate current. My art class was in the old art building, just across the footbridge from the Union, and right after that, I had a teaching class in what was then the University Schools a block or so north of the Union. Those were my last classes for the week and I was carrying my usual large shoulder bag, a small painting and my case of paints and brushes, hoping to finish the painting at home over the weekend. I started down the stairs, headed for the footbridge. Students were rushing is every direction to their next classes. My eyes on the rushing crowd, I missed the last step of the stairs and went sprawling across the sidewalk, my purse and art supplies scattering across the grass. No one seemed to notice. No one came to ask if I was okay. No one stopped to help gather my scattered belongings. It was as if I were invisible. I had long ago outgrown the self-conscious reaction of looking about to see if there were any witnesses to my clumsiness. Falling was once fun, then embarrassing, then painful; now I just hope it’s a thing of the past.