The Fall

In the flash of a moment ...

a back staircase

I fell down the stairs a week ago. I had started to climb my back staircase when I remembered I wanted to take a book up with me that I had left on the kitchen table. The back staircase is dark, encased between two walls, painted dark brown, is steep and winds at the bottom. I had ascended a few steps and turned, but halfway, not completely around and descended sideways, like a crab. I know better. But, you know … just a couple of steps, grab the book and go back up the stairs. Just where the staircase winds, I missed a step and landed on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor.

Moments to consider my dilemma: I was alone in the house. The kids at the preschool across the street, come out for recess, running like banshees, all around the playground, run, run, run, fall on hands and knees, get up and keep on running, like the fall never occurred, like it was part of the running process. That’s how it works when you’re four. Not so, nearly two handfuls of decades later. But that many decades later, you forget: you’re not four. You’re not 24 nor even 34 or 48.

So, here I was. Down on my hands and knees with a closeup view of the kitchen floor. I assessed the damage. Some body parts kind of hurt, but not too much. The first thing instantly springing to mind was coming up with some vocabulary to express my dilemma. My words were comprised of French or whatever you call that language. Look what I’ve gotten myself into in the flash of a moment by simply not minding the steps. I know better. Look at the crumbs scattered all over the floor. Maybe I should get a dog.

But, most importantly, could I get up?

I reached for a chair and slid it over. Using the chair I pulled myself up. I sighed in relief. I was actually standing and I could walk. I walked over to the phone and called my friend R. Falling, when you’re older than four, causes trauma even if you’re not in much pain, not bleeding and nothing seems fractured or broken. It’s a shock. Shocking that I’m not brilliantly intelligent, therefore unfailingly remember to negotiate the steps carefully. I sat down and R talked to me until the major trauma effects mitigated.

I had bruised my right foot, left knee, and upper left thigh. Injuries so strategically dispersed seemed creatively placed. I was OK. I hobbled around for a few days due to the mild pain, could negotiate the stairs, both back and front staircases via a firm grip on the banister. Look, it’s a Victorian house and the back staircase was obviously meant for servants. Having a back staircase is part of the charm that sold me the house. The servants, in the old days, who had to carry pails of water up and down those stairs probably didn’t find them so amusing.

I thought getting out of the house would do me good, so I went to a meeting marked on my calendar. The attendees were all women of a certain age. As I entered the room I announced, “I fell down the stairs two days ago.” That ignited a conversation. Every one there had a falling story to tell.

One woman said watch, because sometimes you experience residual injuries only months later. She had fallen months ago and only now was experiencing pain from that fall. She had an appointment to visit a chiropractor the next day. The best story, though, was about a neighbor of one of the meeting participants. This neighbor had fallen out of bed, couldn’t reach her phone and so shouted for Alexa to call her son who lived out of town, he called 911, the fire department came and had to throw a brick through her window to get in.

My pain has shifted. My foot no longer hurts and the bruise has faded. Both my knees hurt now, especially the backs of them. The lump on my thigh is reduced and that bruise fading. I did laundry the other day and carrying it up and down and up and down those back steps made my knees ache and my legs very tired. This serves as an excellent excuse to sit in my library in the chaise with my feet up and read a book, so I’ve been living on Marco Island, Florida, where I actually used to live and work, while author Randy Wayne White tells me stories of the Calusa Indians. A nice break from our cold, winter weather. They’re all wearing shorts and swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, or whatever it’s called now. I lived in Southwest Florida in the ‘90s and Randy Wayne White relates his story in the ‘90s. Maybe I met him when I worked at the farm market down there. I wouldn’t have recognized him; I don’t know what he looks like. Everybody came into the market, people of interest, like retired CIA and FBI agents, and it was rumored that Stephen King, who owned a home near Miami and drove a big Mercedes, might stop in. I would recognize him.

I could not finish this story without relating a parallel between my falling down the stairs and the Democratic Republic of the United States of America falling down the stairs. I had just finished watching Ken Burns’ documentary, “The American Revolution,” how America’s founding turned the world upside down. The world. It changed the globe. The courage and inspiration of those rebels and the miracle that won them the Revolution and their rights, their freedom from a dictator. Imagine. All was good they thought 250 years ago.

Well, after the 1990s, there was 911 and the terrorists and the Patriot Act of 2001¹, meaning individuals lost their privacy. There goes our liberty, somersalting down the dusky stairs inside a Slinky. Some of the articles of our Constitution that our nation’s founders wrote when the Revolution ended, like habeas corpus, the right to produce a prisoner in court, no longer fly. Now, ICE (Internal Combustion Engine)² can fling anyone from our country, on a whim, citizen or not, or just shoot them in the face, point blank and blind them. Who cares? It’s all about greed and money and more greed and big, inflamed egos, especially that of the grotesque who sits in our Oval Office conjuring plans for a gilded ballroom where the East Wing of the White House, the people’s house, stood. Even President Teddy Roosevelt didn’t go for the gild when in 1902 he renovated the White House adding a small East Wing for visitors, providing an entrance during social gatherings, when it was necessary to accommodate many carriages and cars, with a place to hang men’s and ladies’ coats, a long cloak room. But, today, so much for humanitarian concerns. Why does our Orange Grotesque hate his fellow Americans so much. I suppose we could use Greenland as our Siberian Island of Sakhalin to which to ship off and imprison undesirables where they could be worked to death building golf courses. The terrorists have won, without so much as a battle; sociopathy and cruelty run rampant. Few paid attention to Hitler in the 1920s and ‘30s, we tolerated Stalin in the ‘40s because he helped us overcome Hitler and the Nazis, and no one paid attention to the Japanese — until they attacked Pearl Harbor. Not enough are paying attention now. It’s all back staircase stuff that no one sees but those cast to carry the buckets. Paying attention and uniting. How the American Patriots, so disperse, in land and ideologies in 1774, came together and created, fought and won a Revolution is a genuine miracle. If we don’t remember and recognize that, we here in the U.S. could wake up one bright morning and find sunshine glinting off warships and bomber airships, all Europe on our shores, and this time it won’t be the French fighting on our side. Our Orange Gargoyle and his shifty team have sabotaged our relations with our allies. Thomas Jefferson warned of the capricious human nature, so did Winston Churchill: beware, democracy could die at the drop of a green card³ or the grabbing of Greenland or Venezuela or Colombia in the dark just where the backstairs wind.

I need not list the details here, but it is embarrassing and humiliating for many of us Americans. I must apologize. I did not vote for the Orange Grotesque sitting in our Oval Office planning to turn the East Wing into a big, beautiful gilded ballroom. “It will be beautiful, big and beautiful. Wait until you see it. A beautiful thing. So gilded and shiny. Trust me.”

I am pressed to draw my sword. My pen. That’s the weapon I possess with which to do business. Would that I will wield a few words to impel others to take a closer look at the gathering crumbs. Gather enough of them and you’ve got one heck of a fruitcake right in front of you.

My fall down the stairs didn’t rattle enough brains loose in my head to keep me from knowing we’ve got a real wing nut swinging around out there. And it’s downright frightening.

1. Giving law enforcement the right to search property and records without the owner’s consent or knowledge and the right of law enforcement to indefinite detention without trial of immigrants.

2. Not really. ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But in our current asinine atmosphere, what’s the difference?

3. A permit allowing foreign nationals to work and live in the U.S. permanently.

~Samantha