(re-run)
The first time it happened, one of my shoelaces was untied. I stepped on it with my other shoe, then picked up my foot in the untied shoe and fell over. I was going over a berm along a busy street to get to – you guessed it – a thrift store. That was a decade ago.
“Hey, are you okay?” a guy in a car asked after he stopped to check on me.
You know what they say: if you fall and people laugh, you are young. If you fall and people try to help you, you are old.
When I bought my little house, the first month in it I fell on the driveway. The toe of my shoe gad gotten caught in the extra-wide groove in the concrete. That was December, and I landed on my face. So much for looking good at the holiday parties.
Today I fell. Pepper hadn’t been walked in two days. As I headed to the beach with her, a cold wind made me slow down. I snapped up my L.L. Bean hand-me-down pullover and missed seeing the tree root. I hit the mud, almost falling on my dog. She’s fast, so she got out of the way.
Did the construction crew two doors down see me fall? Nope. I got up out of the muddy dirt and checked all appendages. They worked. I wiped off my jeans and headed down the wildlife corridor. A worker dude drove by slowly. I waved at him, and he waved back. He must’ve seen me go down.
Friends of mine have fallen and have broken their wrists. When my bone density scan suggested that I had osteoporosis, the endocrinologist asked if I’d ever broken my wrist. The answer was no. I’ve only broken my thumb, smashed it, actually in a freak garage-door accident. Remind me to show you my right thumb sometime. Lifelong scarring. I’ll never be a hand model.
Oh, that’s right, no one is getting the hand-model gig in her sixties.
But I digress. Nothing hurt on the beach walk. I was able to go down the hill, along the beach and up another hill to get back to my place. The sun started to come out as we got back into the neighborhood.
I had my fake cup of coffee while I threw the ball to Daisy in the front yard. She chased it over and over until she was done and my coffee was gone.
It wasn’t until I headed out to the thrift stores that the aches and pains started to kick in. I thought I had until tomorrow before I would feel the effects of my fall. Wrong! My left shoulder hurt, and so did my right leg, even though I landed on my left knee. Weird.
Now I have a headache, which I hardly ever have with my simple diet of someone with a bad and sensitive stomach.
I have a partner-dancing date tomorrow night. I hope my aches and pains are gone by then. It’s ten more days until my next chiropractic adjustment. Maybe the spinning will snap everything back in place.
P.S. My elbow still hurst all these weeks later, and I’m reading a biography (how ironic) about Stevie Nicks, member of Fleetwood Mac, that sang, Say You Love Me with a repeating line of falling falling.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 