I Fell Down a Step

In Which I Am Defeated By 12.5% Of A Staircase (for some reason)

I had one of those moments earlier today that I don’t really recall having when I was younger: I fell down a step. Not the stairs. A step. I was carrying a coffee cup and a bowl down eight steps from my home office into a tiled hallway. For reasons I may never know, my legs hilariously skipped the last step.

To clarify: the rest of my body did not know about my legs’ last-second gag. We all just thought, I suppose, that my legs would do what, until this morning, they’d done without explicit guidance, which is: do all the steps. Do not just skip one of them.

If my math is correct, one step out of eight is low percentage of the overall number of steps between the upstairs and the downstairs. But as it happens, skipping just one of them really screws up one’s stride, balance, and survival odds. Consequently, I fell forward in slapstick fashion, cushioned my fall with the bowl and both wrists, but mostly landed on my knees.

The truth is, I am not sure what it all looked like. Sometimes things like this happen and the person will say, “it was in slow motion” but just to be clear, this happened very fast. I am not saying those people are lying, but this was not slow at all, and let’s just say it did not make me look (or feel) like an athletic person.

Mom, I am fine. My ego is wounded, but as to the rest, I feel about the same way I did a few years ago when I slipped in similarly comical fashion on black ice: almost everything hurts a little, but nothing hurts a lot. I’ll take it.

The bowl is dead but we have way too many bowls in this house anyway. I am not saying I staged this fall to break a bowl. That would be irrational. But unlike my wife, who may learn about this incident while she’s at work reading her emails and hopefully my Substack posts, who may grieve a bit for the bowl, I am not grieving for the bowl.

I should give myself credit, since I stuck the landing well enough not to bash my skull into the hallway wall, floor, or any one of the 1,246 shoes in the vicinity.

A few additional observations:

1. In thinking this through, I had to explain to myself that I didn’t just slip. That would be comforting; I would feel better about the situation in general were I able to blame this mishap on footwear. Alas.

2. This is all very humbling. I don’t know how to add to this part.

3. I do not recall ever doing anything like this when I was a younger-ish person. You may say, oh well it happens, in fact that’s basically what the AI machine said when I inputted my situation. But does it happen, really? It reminds me of something that happened to me this summer while playing tennis. I did not play much tennis when I was young, but one thing I never did was swing at the tennis ball and miss it completely. This summer I did that a few times. And it was not “the wind.”

4. Come to think of it, my knees are kind of sore. But I will have to fake it. “Oh I’m fine,” I’ll say this weekend when someone notices the slight limp. “Ha ha. Firefighting, not for us elders amiright?”

This may strike you as a strange way to reinvigorate this quiet little Substack. But AI will never know what it’s like to sort of fall down the stairs, will it? So, I’ll keep writing a bit, while we humans have some slivers of humanity to write about.