For a professional dancer, I'm very clumsy; and since I am
not a professional dancer, I am very clumsy. Before getting
into my latest fall, let's take a glance back at some memorable trips and
tumbles and crashes ...
When we lived in Miami, it was in a gated community, which was nice
because there wasn't a lot of traffic going through the hood, and lots of
people had pets roaming the streets so they were relatively safe. We used to
walk our dog, Dengoso ... this was pre-Ozzo ... around the block a few times
each day and one day I was taking Dengoso on his morning constitutional; it was
a bright, sunny, cool day in South Florida and we were enjoying the journey in
solitude. We saw no cars, no people, no other animals out that day; even the
birds were quiet.
As we circled the block and headed back, I started to cross
the street; naturally I looked for traffic, naturally there was none. We
started to cross when it happened.
A pebble, roughly the size of a marble had somehow made its way to the
center of the roadway unnoticed and I stepped on it just right. My ankle turned
and down I went to the asphalt, letting go of Dengoso's leash. I hit the
roadway pretty hard, but I shook it off and started to stand when I saw it ...
In our quiet hood, vacant just moments before there were now two cars stopped on
either side of me as I lay on the ground and some ten or twelve people also out
walking that day; even Dengoso, who made it across the street, sat on the
grass, shaking his head at me, too embarrassed to believe what I’d done.
A few years later, we’d moved to Camden, and one day I was
unloading the car in the garage. I put a few things away in the garage and then
started inside. There are two steps into the house that I have climbed without
incident for months and months, but this day
for some reason, one of my feet nipped the lip of the door landing and I
began to fall, into the kitchen from the garage steps. As happens when I fall—I
don’t know about you—it all goes in very slow motion. I remember the feeling, I
remember seeing Tuxedo watching me, wondering if this might be his chance to escape
to the outdoors, but mostly I remember looking at the kitchen floor as I was
about to hit it and thinking, ‘God, that is ugly flooring.’
The next fall was after we’d had a dead tree taken down in
the front yard. We had a friend that wanted the wood and so I was taking the
rather large cut sections from the side of the house, across the yard, and
setting them on the side of the driveway to be hauled away. I had made several trips
and had many more—the tree had been at least forty feet tall—and was walking
across the front yard when I stepped into a small divot in the ground and
started to go down. My brain told my feet to run faster so I could stand upright
and avoid the tumble so I did that awkward kind of falling, kind of running thing
for about ten to twelve steps when my brain finally screamed, ‘Fuck it, protect
yourself.’ And down I went into the yard … just as our friend pulled in to
collect the wood.
This latest fall wasn’t so much a fall as it was, well, I
don’t know. Last Monday, Carlos had an appointment and I had taken the day off to drive him.
This time I was walking down the steps into the garage, but, well, even I don’t
know what I did. I usually step down right foot first, but for some reason I
went left first and then my right foot, confused as to why it was going second,
clipped the back of my left leg and I started to fall out of the kitchen into
the garage, and onto the concrete floor. I think though it was all ablur, that I
tried to grab the door handle, and then tried to step down backwards on my left
foot, while the right was in mid-step. But my right foot was not to be outdone
by the left, and it hit the concrete first, hard. Luckily I didn’t go down to
the concrete, though my right knee did get it twisted and I spent the week
hobbling and icing and wrapping and cursing my clumsiness.
Finally, a week later, and while there’s a dull throb, I am
funny upright and ready for the next tumble.
What? |