If anyone has an acoustic guitar handy, you might want to gently strum the Weebles jingle as I acknowledge with some irritation that today I too wobbled but didn’t fall down — because our front door was partially open and its angled side was in the way. It’s a monster-thick, frighteningly heavy wooden door that’s solid as a rock, and it barely budged as I struck it. The impact left a mark — my left forearm is already bruised and swollen.
It also hurt my wrist, hand and shoulder and jarred my neck, which adds insult to injury when your neck is normally all but frozen. “Oh, so you can move after all, can’t you, you sonofabitch?” I’d like to ask it, and I should clarify for Crankenstein that I still possess enough of my faculties to know that my neck wouldn’t actually reply. (This was put here to amuse her, lest anyone think I’m peevish.)
If you read Michael J. Fox’s No Time Like the Future, it’s basically a memoir of his most recent falls. His falls are tens on the Richter scale after 33 years of Parkinson’s, while mine are (fortunately) too mild to register at all. A couple years ago, before we knew why I kept finding myself on the ground like Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford, I got an Apple Watch so I could summon help if necessary. It was more of a concern around the house and in the yard than when I’m running amok in the broader world, because that’s where I’m likeliest to fall — and to have strayed far away from my phone.
That brings us to why I wrote this: it reminded me of the most infamous tumble I’ve yet taken, which happened when I was probably 10 or under. Everyone was at my grandparents’ house for our customary Friday night dinner and I was with Felix and one of our cousins in our grandparents’ bedroom, which housed a small television on which we could watch Nickelodeon. That’s where I used to enjoy Bewitched reruns on Nick-at-Nite while my mom and grandma gossiped on the bed.
At the same time I rounded the corner to head downstairs, my aunt was at the bottom of the steps preparing to bring my non-ambulatory cousin Brandon upstairs. I slipped and fell almost immediately and right as I was poised to practically cartwheel past her and careen into the front door, she dropped Brandon to catch me. It wasn’t as violent a spectacle as it sounds: by then he was much too large to be slung over her shoulder or anything like that. Instead he was hovering close to the thickly padded carpet and she basically set him down with lightning speed.
Her joking response when my mom said “I can’t believe you did that!” was “What? It’s not like I can break him.” Brandon was the first to laugh. I like to think I would’ve done the same after that run-in with the door earlier, had I not chosen to curse instead.