I’ll Tumble For Ya

Maybe Wray is right that I should always wear a helmet and thick body padding.

Yesterday after I got home from work, I took a rather nasty tumble down a flight of stairs. It was a short flight, but enough to cut open my leg, wrench my back and send a full mug of hot tea splashing onto various walls, carpets and my entire body. How does liquid manage to triple in volume once it leaves its vessel? It’s a mystery.

The weirdest part about this fall is that I didn’t make a sound. Not an “uh-oh!” or an “oof” or a peep came out of me. It was as if I were a costar in a Charlie Chaplin movie. Eventually, I came back up still holding the empty mug in my left hand. Strange.

Sammy had been fast asleep at the end of that particular hallway and I was pleased to see that she quickly came to see what had happened. Being so dainty, she refused to tiptoe through the river of tea but she did look concerned, probably about who would feed her if I didn’t make it.

And that’s what was truly on my mind. I stayed still in my fallen position for a few minutes and I thought of a police officer whose name I don’t remember. More than 10 years ago, she slipped in her bathtub and cracked her head open. No one found her for almost a full day because she lived alone and was on her days off. She and I were the same age back then. As I lay there on my wet rug in my soaked clothing, clutching my mug I thought, so this is how people die in a stupid, wasteful manner. If I had gone all the way down and struck my coconut on the ceramic tile, well, I might have had to learn my primary colours all over again, or worse.

I have a long and storied history of falling down stairs. Pantyhose met a steep painted staircase in my first Wingham apartment and I actually knocked myself out on the way down. In Hamilton, I twisted my ankle by rushing down to the landing, and ruined opening night at “Joseph” for my niece, whom I was planning to take as my “date”. And now the tea incident, when I wasn’t rushing or wearing pantyhose or walking on a painted staircase – just doing my ordinary, everyday thing.

Maybe I need to go beyond a helmet and consider one of those chair lifts that goes up and down stairs. Or an elevator. Or maybe I should just pay more attention to what I’m doing like, oh, where I step, because there’s no way I’m going through the rest of my life with helmet hair.