Gravity

For someone who has always prided himself in being well-balanced and upright, I was rudely humbled two days ago just outside my front door.

I had ventured forth to pick up the newspaper. The morning was fine with a slight chill in the air (which incidentally reminded me of a scandalous 1913 painting titled ‘September Morn’ by the French artist Paul Émile Chabas) and hardly a cloud in the sky. click here

The newspaper comes delivered in a plastic bag, presumably to protect it from dew or wet walkways (this detail adds nothing to the story, except to give it an element of veracity), and is then picked up gingerly by a corner of the plastic to avoid wetting the newsprint inside, which can happen after a heavy rain or by long exposure to the automatic lawn sprinkler system, when the paper is soaked through and rendered absolutely unreadable until it is later dried out in the oven, and even then acquires a strange crinkled texture that makes the whole thing rather unpleasant to unfold for reading. As an aside, sometimes the plastic bag has an extra sealed pocket in which has been inserted a sample of one kind or another: a foil package of instant oatmeal (dry, of course); a packet of laundry soap; enough instant coffee for one small cup. The sample is more of a nuisance than an incentive for the newspaper reader to go out and buy the large version of the product advertised.

But I am digressing here. Time to get back to my story.

While I was walking back to the house, my foot must have caught on some small obstruction on the edge of the lawn (it could have been a sprinkler head that had not returned to its position of rest, or a bit of aggregate concrete walkway lifted up by a centimeter or so by the underground root of a birch tree, betula alba being the correct botanical term for the European white birch of which our lawn has several, I’m not sure which it was).

One moment I was upright, walking, and in full awareness, not to say complete charge, of my bearings, and a split second later I was face down on the ground, my chin no more than an inch above the concrete surface, which by some stroke of good fortune or automatic reflex at the instant of my heavy and precipitate descent, had been spared injury of a sort that it makes my flesh creep just to imagine.

Somehow my left hand had reflexively broken the fall, and so became the main casualty of this plunge. Glasses, teeth, and bones were all accounted for and undamaged. The left palm bled a bit, having been abraded in several places, but that was a small price to pay for what might have proved to be a much more serious matter.

I might add as another aside that a stroller had just walked past my house when this whole episode took place, and so she was not a witness to it. Had she been half a minute later in her walk, and seen the tumble, I would have been mortified no end.