Growing into your falls

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Funny! Some short time before I opened our front door to pick up Wednesday's "Nevada Daily Mail" off the porch, I slipped on one of our cats' fiendishly clever little Christmas gifts -- a cigarette butt-sized fabric mouse which, when you budge it, sets up a tiger-size yowling -- and barely missed falling on the hardwood floor of our living room. After my first reaction to a near-miss like that, a long, heated, personally soothing string of nasty profanities, I took the paper into the family room, opened it, and turned first to the editorial page. Imagine my surprise, then, dear reader, when I beheld my colleague Leonard Ernsbarger's editorial, "Fall Prevention Promoted By Veterans Clinic" staring me in the face! Mr. Ernsbarger says age 65 seems to be the dividing line between shrug-offable falls, of the type you sustain laughingly, without really thinking about it, and dangerous falls, from which you seldom get up without worrying whether you broke something or other. In my own case, I don't even remember falling before age 65 or so. Oh, sure, I must've fallen when I was a toddler, but I can't recall ever doing so, and there's nothing in the long Nash mythology--which, by contrast, includes the story of my running over my little sister Beverly with my Raleigh bicycle, and the mystery of how the gravy stain got on the kitchen ceiling -- about my taking even the meagerest spill. In fact, what I do recall is taking a bucket of foolish chances, so sure was I in my teenage years of my dexterity afoot. Like a 13-year-old Mercury was I.

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