Mr. Blandings Takes a Fall

 

In a split second I thought of a quote from Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You, a very funny paragraph about aging:

 What is it about falling? "He died of a fall." "The poor thing never recovered after his fall." "He broke his hip in a fall and was never the same." "Death came relatively quickly after a fall in the back yard." How fucking far do these people fall? Off of buildings? Over spuming cataracts? Down manholes? Is it farther to the ground than it used to be? In years gone by I'd fall on the ice, hop back up, and never think a thought. Now it's a death sentence.

 That moment took place as I landed on the brick pavement in the portico of our relatively new home which we moved into during the pandemic.  Since then we’ve had a number of major projects on the outside of the house – ones rivaling Mr. Blandings’ that involved a workman breaking our main water line, resulting in a monster geyser and a frantic search for the water meter and shut off (buried under a bush!).  That in itself is another story.

 Later on during that work they broke a sprinkler pipe, something I didn’t discover until I saw the tell tale mix of sand and dirt that was blasted onto the sidewalk stones of our home.  It required an irrigation specialist to repair.  He turned the system back on to automatic after testing it.  So, all is well, right?

 No, as we have brand new plantings all along our backyard and it is supposed to run 4 days a week until the new plantings take.  After a couple of days, the system had not gone on, and this is after a few days of no water while the system was turned off.  I made a mental note to manually operate it early the next morning, even though it was scheduled to operate the following evening.  The plantings were starved for water.

 So as the sun began to rise, I was out there in my pajamas to turn on the first zone.  Good timing I thought as the new plantings are in the third zone and by that time I could be dressed and ready for my morning walk while the sun is still low in the sky.  I donned my shorts and got dressed for the walk, all except for my socks and sneakers, as I would still have to go out and turn on the second zone and the timer is several feet from the portico on the side of the house and I didn’t want to track dirt back into the house.  Therefore, I wore flip flops which I could leave at the front door.

 As I went outside to turn on the second zone, still in a sleepy state, I saw an animal approaching me quickly along the side of the house, me wearing shorts and open face slippers.  I thought it was a water rat as we live on a small lake.  I tried to sidestep back to the portico but my right flip flop got caught by a partially underground sprinkler head, and down I went.  This was the first fall in my life since childhood or maybe when I played tennis as a young adult.

 There I am in mid air, remembering the danger of falling at my age and in particular as my Doc said I have the early signs of osteoporosis; wanted to put me on Boniva which I refused.  As I went down I think I saw a squirrel out of the corner of my eye, not a rat, but as soon as I hit the ground, landing on my right shoulder, hip, and knee, I suddenly felt something moving under my tee shirt.  Again, visions of a rat danced in my shocked brain. While on the ground, stunned, I grabbed at my tee shirt and was holding some sort of living creature.  I managed to get up on my feet holding this thing underneath my shirt and by that time I surmised it has a harmless gecko, so once unsteadily standing I pulled the bottom of my shirt out of the way and dropped it on the ground, indeed a gecko.  How it got there during a few moments on the ground is unknowable, but there I was bruised and wobbly, “attacked” by a squirrel and a gecko. 

 My right knee was scrapped and bleeding, as was my right elbow and a couple of toes that were scraped on the brick because of my open toe slippers.  My right shoulder was in some pain, as the brunt of the fall was absorbed by the upper portion of that arm which is still muscular and that, I think, saved me from breaking anything or dislocating my knee cap.  That also mitigated the impact on my right hip.

 I went inside to wash off my wounds and test how steady I was walking.  Not great, I thought, cancel the walk that day.  But I went outside, again in my flip flops, to check the sprinkler heads along the side of my house and there I was accosted by a snapping turtle.  Not my day.  At least no alligators and fortunately no death notice that “he died relatively quickly after a fall in the back yard."