A friend of mine fell. He fell and may have bounced. One of the falls you could hear from here, no matter where “here” was.
He’s not old. I’m older than he is and that’s not old. If Clint Eastwood is not letting the old man in, we aren’t opening the door either.
He’s not clumsy. He’s no dancer but he could be described as possessing a big man’s grace.
He can walk backwards, he can walk forwards and he probably can do a pretty good side-to-side shuffle without clipping a heel.
In other words, he possesses athletic grace, obvious in his younger days but still not completely absent in his wiser, more mature ones.
“While walking into our favorite restaurant/takeout place, I stumbled and slowly realized I was going down. On my back in the parking lot, I gathered myself as this guy ran over from the restaurant and said, 'Dude, you ate ... Are you OK?”
“Full disclosure, I was wearing clogs. I caught an edge and a clog and that’s a problem. These clogs have at least a 2-inch heel. I’m fine but for the first time in my life, I’m reflecting on my footwear choices.”
Clogs? Good for trimming the azaleas or wearing in the operating room but maybe not so good for nonmedical use or when you’re not kneeling in the garden with both your clogs and your backside up.
His friends were supportive as you would expect guy friends to be. We asked for details, an injury report and how many people had witnessed his complete and utter humiliation.
“No injuries. I rolled onto my back in total surrender,” he said.
Darn, I mean thank God. What I really mean is did he think he could put together a PowerPoint, assuming nobody caught it on video, that would include music, arrows going every which way, and a chalk outline of the crumpled, insensate body?
This is a risky business; I know better. Making light, making fun, taking delight in a friend who has fallen and who has miraculously not hurt himself is tempting the gods and they don’t need much temptation.
Do this, go down this road and your time is surely to come and it will arrive sooner than later. When it does, you will be smote down because you deserve smoting.
I knew this, as did the other friend in on the three-way call, but who could pass up this opportunity?
I wondered out loud whether there was a way of falling like you mean it? Think Gene Wilder in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” He falls when he is walking up to the gates of the chocolate factory and executes a perfect somersault.
I asked him if he did a pushup while he was on the ground. That’s one way to make it look athletic rather than feeble. Pretend as if it's part of your workout. A yoga move but rather than "welcoming the sun" it’s "saying goodbye to your youth and self-respect."
He hadn’t. He was like Charlie Brown after missing the football. He laid on his back and looked at the blue sky for answers.
He sent videos of other people falling, a woman with a big tub of popcorn in a movie theater who trips and whose popcorn goes flying. A woman dancing along a sidewalk who stumbles and ends up decapitating a small tree.
Both showed good acceleration, which is what happens with most of us. We pick up speed on the way down so we can do the maximum amount of damage to ourselves.
We talked about it, we had fun with it and we knew that our turn was coming and soon we would be on the conversational griddle.
That night, I pulled my right groin while playing tennis. I’m calling it a high groin strain because it makes it sound as if I might have been moving quickly and as if I know what I am talking about, which I don’t.
It was athletic. No one said anything but that’s what my imagination tells me and the door is closed on that getting older.
November 19, 2020 at 01:56AM
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HERB BENHAM: A short fall from friend to Slippin' Jimmy - The Bakersfield Californian
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Herb
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