Wordless Wednesday: Fill in the blank

Wherever I go the drats are hopping

Oh, drat it. There go my potatoes again. ~Waterloo Bridge (1931)

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Normally I don’t talk about my health in writing. I fear it would bore you to tears and I hesitate to be guilty of that so for me it's, like, an unwritten rule.

But rules were made to be broken, or so they say, whomever they are.

Therefore once in awhile when I fall out into the floor, sidewalk, street, or ground, like more than a decade ago when I flipped out in Ohio, or more recently when Sue the Hobbit a/k/a Nostalgic Nana came to visit me, I tell about it because it’s anything but boring.

In retrospect, it’s funny. As in, laugh or you’ll cry. And then we’re right back where we started. Circular reasoning, as it were.

That was quite the moment, when Sue turned around from the railing at Findlay Park where she was admiring the Columbia skyline and saw I’d fallen off the edge of a paver -- elevated from its neighbor two inches, maximum -- shredding my knee and practically breaking my hip.

I fell again -- from a deck step, into my own kitchen, nearly breaking the same hip again -- about six months later, but you didn’t hear about that, did you? 

I was in a hurry because I was home alone and I’d burned some popcorn, not meaning to (does anyone ever mean to?) and I rushed outside to let the smoke billow because if it billowed in the kitchen it would set off an alarm.

And if the smoke alarm goes off, the firemen come over even if the alarm company calls and you tell them you only burned some chicken.

(How do I know that? Because also in my checkered past -- home alone, again -- is an incident wherein I burned the chicken and set off the alarm. A big red fire truck came. The cute fireman standing on my front porch said the chicken smelled good!)

(You can’t put a southern boy off his feed just because you singe the poultry.)

But when I blackened the popcorn, no sooner had I made it out onto the deck than I began to worry that the alarm would sound anyway, there being so much smoke (because I'd poured the burnt popcorn into a bowl while still in the kitchen, which trust me you should never do), and I turned to go back in so as to stand beside the panel and punch the code in quickly if need be, and tripped over the threshold (or perhaps my own flip-flopped feet) and ignominously met an expanse of ceramic tile.

I was finding popcorn kernels for weeks.

And did I tell you about when I fell only a few weeks ago while making a bed, catching my toe in a loop of the decorative edge of a bedskirt (why must we have such frippery anyway?), losing my balance, going to the floor and cracking my skull so hard on the base of a TV armoire, I think I may have been unconscious for a few seconds?

(At least, I saw stars. And I don’t mean like Johnny Depp.)

No.

Why?

Because ... very simply ... as we have established, I am averse to blogging about my health, or lack of same, or my frequent mishaps.

Why?

Because I have worked my entire life to conceal exactly how clumsy, klutzy, ditzy, scatterbrained, and graceless I truly am.

However at this stage in the game I reason that my cover has been blown so many times and with so great a cloud of witnesses, there are no longer enough mirrors or adequate smoke in the world to help me pass as a sprite, a sylph, a pixie or a ballerina.

You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

The fact is I pash to the cravement at the hop of a drat, and wherever I go, the drats seem to be hopping.

Not only that, but I want to tell you what happened to my handsome TG last week, but I cannot unless I tell about my own accident-proneness first.

It’s, like, a rule that cannot be broken, no matter what they say: If you can't take it, don't dish it out.

Not that I’m about to dish on my darling TG. I really just want to praise the Lord.

Shall we continue? You will understand it better by and by.

This story is about people of a certain age who need to watch where they’re going or soon they won’t have sound limbs to carry them anywhere, or sighted eyes to watch with. 

It’ll be rocking chairs (or wheelchairs), walking canes, and butterscotch pudding from there on out.

It is a cautionary tale, a what-if saga! I promise if you’ve gotten this far, you’ll like it.

The tale actually begins with me -- who else? -- again, as on a recent holiday I tumbled yet again.

In a cemetery.

(Add that to the list of “exciting” things that have happened to me in cemeteries! I’ve lost a diamond ring in one; I’ve gotten locked into another; and now I’ve fallen and nearly killed myself in yet another.)

I already told you that on Thanksgiving Day, our family ventured out for a photo shoot. We chose Elmwood Cemetery as our venue because of its beauty and serenity.

Also because TG and the kids know when we get into our cars and head out, if I have any say, nine times out of ten we’ll end up in a cemetery.

(The day my family plant me in the ground no doubt they’ll leave chuckling through their tears, saying, “Well, at least that’s the last time we’ll be following Mom into a graveyard.”)

On the gratefullest day of the year I was setting up a shot in which my four kids would arrange themselves on stone benches atop a concrete platform set up on the western edge of Elmwood, where hundreds of Confederate dead are buried.

There is a flagpole attached to the front of the platform. What you cannot see is that there are two rusty wires at about the level of my shins, running three feet or so from the base of that flagpole, over to the skinny “trunk” of an anemic bush.

And I didn’t see them either.

So as I walked from one side of the platform to the other, directly in front of it, with two expensive cameras hanging from my person, and without warning, I became tangled in those wires.

I don’t think the judges awarded me any style points at all this time, although I did attempt to execute a pirouette so as not to face-plant in the dirt beside the Confederate soldier platform.

And in doing so I may have saved my cameras (they’re fine; thanks for asking) but I wrenched my back, bruised and scraped my leg, and rendered the tender inside of my forearm exceedingly raw. There was bloodshed.

I am now having a passionate affair with Ben Gay. Don’t tell TG, although the strong smell of wintergreen permeating our abode may have already revealed the depth of our mutual affection.

So that’s a rundown of my latest unfortunate pratfall and I am thankful the outcome wasn’t worse (my pride sustained the most dire injury). We went on to take more pictures. I played with pain.

But TG’s incident less than one week later was more severe and potentially so life-changing, I still shudder to think of it.

He was at work last Wednesday when it happened. Specifically he was leaning over to turn on a spigot located on the outside of a house.

And as with my recent injury, there was a bush involved but there were no wires. What there was, was a trellis.

A trellis the same color as the bush, and standing at about the same height. Embedded, as it were. Camouflaged.

Which is why TG didn’t see it.

While turning and leaning simultaneously to turn on the water, his right eye met one of the sticking-up parts of that all-but-invisible trellis.

Now, this is the interesting part. I think if TG had been facing the trellis and had leaned forward from the waist, this might be a different story altogether.

As in, I believe it might have put his eye out and/or blinded him in that eye.

But because he was turning and leaning, the stick caught him on the eyelid and jammed it upward into his orbital bone, which stopped it. I am glad my TG is so hard-headed.

The result was a gash in his eyelid that required an evening at urgent care and three stitches to close.

And you should see the shiner now! It’s magnificent. In church yesterday, no fewer than thirty people wanted to know if I’d punched him.

No. I nursed him back to health! It took about three hours.

My TG does not stay down for long. Nor does he ever complain.

We got home from the doctor's office just before nine. TG went to sleep. I kept watch. At midnight he got up, asked for toast with jelly, and watched ESPN for ninety minutes.

Against doctor’s orders, he was back on the job the very next day.

He even put in a full day on Saturday.

In this Christmas season I am thankful for what my mother called the "angel wing" that the Lord put between TG's eye and that trellis, averting a more terrible disaster.

And I am thankful for the twinkle in both of my TG's eyes, and for his always-sweet smile, without which there would be no Christmas for me at all, ever again.

Merry Christmas! Happy Week!