Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Day 25: Legends of the Fall

I stubbed my little toe Saturday. It doesn't look so bad - kind of like a link sausage that is just starting to cook - but it is sore.

I tell you that because I think that may have had something to do with the fact that I fell down yesterday when I did not quite lift that foot high enough to go up the step at Sandy and Dave's house. LK thinks it may have been the flip-flops I was wearing. Peg thinks the step is a wee bit on the high side. Of course, those are essentially three excuses covering up the truth. I fall because that's just what I do.

Because I've had so many pictures taken in my shorts, I've (re-)noticed how scarred the bottom of my calves are. You know, the part that's hard for me to see from my normal view standing up. Those are scarred from a bout of cellulitis I had in Africa many years ago. That infection came about because - can you guess? - I fell down and scraped my legs while LK and I were walking to the bridge over the Zambezi River.

So during the next hour, she becames a star by bungee jumping off the bridge, while I stood there pouring mouthwash over my scraped legs hoping (and failing) to keep them from getting infected.

It really was no surprise earlier this year when my Wii asked me if I often tripped while I was walking.

Until I hit the trifecta of clumsiness here, I had felt I was getting better at this whole thing. But yesterday dispelled that optimism. Oh, did I say trifecta? Well, I should tell you that we all went to lunch yesterday.

It was good food but massively more than a single portion. LK and I both ordered salads, and the amount we each got was about what we would serve at dinner for four people. As I told her, only in America can they take ordering something healthy like a salad and turn it into an act of overeating.

Peg had a massive "small" salad with her sandwich, and we ended up with two full take-away containers full of the leftover salad. I was carrying them out of the restaurant when the top one started to slide off. Let me be precise, it was flying as if it and the container below were magnets of opposite charges.

I had no chance to catch the escaping salad, but I was near the door and I lurched just in time to wedge both salads against the glass. At which point the door, of course, started to open. With both salads now pretty close to hitting the ground - and surely spilling all over - I managed to reach under just in time to get the fugitive salad, while still holding onto the other one. Messiness averted.

Not many saw this, but one of the staff at the restaurant did. "That was an impressive catch," she said. She very politely didn't mention that my own clumsiness got me into the predicament in the first instance.

Oh well, this all could be biblical. LK says I don't take any pride in myself since I retired, and we all know what pride goeth before. Or it could just be that my biorhythms are very low, except that apparently that theory must have been debunked since no one uses it anymore.

The only good thing about all of these tumbles. They all happened in the afternoon before I had a drink. Better to be thought clumsy than a stumblebum.

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