A Bag Full of Books and I’m on My Butt in the Sunshine

Books = Reading = Stories

“Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” ~ Haruki Murakami

I’ve said here before that when we are readers, everything is about reading, and I’ve had to challenge myself: Really? How so, Verna Jeanne? Well, let’s revise a bit: Books tell stories, we read books, we are being told a story. Some stories are in books, but many more stories come into our lives every day, the ones we are told, the ones we tell. I want to tell this story about falling, even though this is a blog about reading and books, so I do a little dance around the subject so I can say, “Hey! Reading is life! Listening to/reading stories IS life!” Let’s tell some stories:

A Story About Falling

I fell down one day about 6 weeks ago, face-plant onto the sidewalk, just a little stub of toe on the curb outside my apartment and I was down; I rolled over to see if anything was broken (nothing was broken) and stared up at the sky while blood dripped from a small cut in my eyebrow, and I waited to see if anyone was around who could help me up (no one was around). A quiet weekday, sunny, and warm there on the pavement all my myself, so I sat up and assessed the damage: on the sidewalk were my glasses (unbroken) and sunglasses (broken), my shopping bag with a couple of books in it (this IS a post about books), and while blood dripped down my glasses, I thought about how I was going to get up without help. Here’s the thing: I’ve been in this world for 78 years, and I’m healthy but not “spry” (I don’t like that word when applied to old people—“spry” implies “cute” and cutely unexpected, as in, “Oh how adorable that old lady is, falling down on the sidewalk as if she were still young!”). 

My point is that though I am healthy, I do have some of the physical challenges that many people my age have, and one of those is arthritis. My orthopedic doctor once asked me what else hurt besides my knees. I answered, “Pick a joint, Doc, pick a joint.” So I don’t squat down anymore to look at books on the bottom shelf at the bookstore because if I do that, I can’t get back up, and I found that out about 10 years ago at a bookstore in Boulder, on the hunt for a book on the bottom shelf. I got down in the squat just fine; it was getting back up that wasn’t going to happen by simply rising. So I rolled onto my knees (that hurt!), placed my hands on the carpet, butt in the air (making a tent shape of my body), and inched my way up to standing position. And hoped no one was looking at this feat of determination with not a speck of grace in it.

Back to the sidewalk, blood dripping down my face, feeling dazed but not really hurt, and how the hell was I going to get up off the sidewalk, gather my stuff (broken and unbroken) and walk the short distance into my apartment before the blood started dripping onto my shirt? I was too brain-fuzzed to think of it at the time, but I probably could have Googled it: how to get up from prone position when knees don’t work well. Stupid Google. Getting up off the ground is for young people. I managed. It wasn’t pretty.

About 10 years ago I kept a blog that was about living and whatever I observed or found interesting. I was trying to write every day, and so I gave myself a theme for each month, and one month, my prompt was to open a book to page 54 and take off on the third full line of that page. Below is the result from day 58 of the exercise and is the prompt for this post today.

“Whether through the door of a car, into a field, into the water of a lake or pool, or off a stool onto the floor of a bar, falling was the answer.”
~ Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watched over the World

Kids fall and quickly learn how to just get right back up and keep going. Of course, they’re shorter than adults, closer to the ground, and much more flexible. Big people don’t fall very often—I mean, we don’t literally fall down. But when we do, we don’t just pop right back up.

I fell once while running from my car to my house—in the rain—carrying a grocery bag in my arms. Head of lettuce rolled into the lantana, can of green beans rolled all the way to the curb, 1/2 gallon of ice cream plopped over, upside down. And I lay for a minute, face planted in the wet grass, knees grazed, heart racing until my daughters ran out and helped me up.

I fell once on the ice. We learn here in Colorado to kind of skate on the icy patches, but you can’t get into skating mode when you take your first step out of your car. I parked, opened the door, stepped out—carefully, I thought—and wham! I was on my butt—hard! No matter how big your butt is—and mine is ample—falling on it hurts like hell, and only your chiropractor can explain why you hurt in places that didn’t hit the ice.

I’ve fallen down the stairs in my house (no damage, they’re carpeted) and I’ve fallen up the stairs (don’t ask). It’s always a shock, always a rush of adrenaline followed by gratitude that I didn’t hurt anything but my sturdy pride.

There are pratfalls, waterfalls, falling rock, falling in love, falling asleep. Leaves fall, snow falls, night falls. Rome fell. So did the Third Reich and the Berlin Wall. And really—big people do fall—all the time, just not so obviously. Trying and failing is falling. Courage is getting back up. Every day. Courage is not reliving the fall over and over, creating stories on top of stories about how it happened, whose fault it was, and what to do next time. No padding or armor or protective coating can prevent the next fall or mitigate the fall-out from the fall or make you look graceful when your rear end is in the air as you inch your way to upright. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could just roll from fall to standing position as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the way we did when we were kids. Yeah. Fat chance. (Check out this video for some funny examples of falling.)