i’ve fallen! and i can’t get up!

My family has this thing about falling down. I think it started when I was born, and my grandmother fell in the grocery store (or was it the driveway? the kitchen?) and, my mother thinks, cracked her hip. She got very sore -- practically immobile -- and spent the next three weeks in the rocking chair on the third floor (back in the 70s, when we had a third floor), with me standing up in her lap. My poor mother, post-pregnancy, would trundle food up to my grandma (and me), toting my (at the time) almost three-year-old sister around the house with her. Sure, she didn't have to take care of screaming little me, but I'm pretty sure she would have preferred being the one in the rocking chair.

But this is not the story. It is merely the beginning.

My sister was sleepwalking one night when we were on vacation in Door County Wisconsin (she was probably trying to walk back to something that resembled civilization), and she fell down the stairs, waking up only when she had hit the bottom.

My mom once took a fairly serious header off a curb in NYC and hit her head on a truck and then the gutter. (We had to laugh about that a lot later.)

My mother, sister and I did a three car pile up in Florence when mom tripped over her shoe, Polly tripped over my mom, and I tripped over Polly. (My dad continued on down the street, completely oblivious). (This gets reenacted during Dinner Plate Theatre, and often involves the noisy clanking of a spoon on top of a fork on top of a spoon.)

My aunt fell off her shoe. My mom fell on her computer. I fell up the stairs. Any time gravity over-exerts itself on a member of my family, we tend to report it to one another. And then laugh.

Which is why, when I fell off my shoe AND fell down the stairs in the front of the bar I was at last night, I had to report back to my family. "Just fell off my shoe and down the stairs. Thought you should know."

I landed partially on my 99 cent bottle of Faux Drano and partially on my knee (both emerged mostly unharmed, if not a little leaky). I got a small scrape on my left knee and an even smaller one on my right ankle. But the best part of it all was when my friend Andrea (who is recently returned from south america -- yippee!) said, "do you want to walk down the street a little bit and then cry?"

"No," I said, smiling at her logic, "I don't think I actually need to cry. But I would like to walk away a bit so I can inspect the damage without a whole bar full of people staring at my clumsy ass!"

Feel free to call me Grace.