Dear Michael,
You recently managed to earn your
first black eye. That’s normally not
something a boy gets for the first time at the age of five, but you certainly
are a precocious child. I fear that this
is due to the unfortunate genetic gift I’ve given you.
I come from a clumsy people –
both the Places on my father’s side and the Ollivetts on my mother’s side of
the family. We’re bright but
bumbling.
It’s a terrible affliction, this
complete and utter lack of grace. We
fall down at the most inopportune moments, the worst locations.
Grammy – the Ollivett side –
falls down at the drop of a hat and that’s not because she’s eighty. She’s been falling for years. She loses her eyeglasses and her wine glasses
all the time too but I suspect those things are unrelated.
Grandma Lorrie – my mom – gave me
the worst introduction to horseback riding imaginable when I was nine or
ten. I was so excited and had begged for
horseback riding lessons. When Mom
finally capitulated and took me for my first lesson, Mom rode first while I was
getting my gear on. I watched her horse
trot into the center of the ring and geared up for a jump…..and then Mom fell
off the damn horse. She falls down all
the damn time now too. Usually it’s
outside and she bangs a foot, a wrist, an ankle…she has trouble staying
upright.
Your Aunt Heelo….where I do begin
there? I’m not sure who wins the sash
for More Clumsy – me or her. Heelo
tripped on a wet floor in a Stop n’ Shop and broke her foot, which resulted in
two surgeries, a lawsuit, and many months of a cast. She tripped walking up the stairs at the
Eveready Diner the night of Aunt Karen’s memorial, just barely keeping from
flashing her rear to the whole of Route 9G.
One of my favorite falls was when we lived in the house on Mulberry
Lane. We had a long wooden walkway
leading up to the front door. There was
about three feet of walkway before a small step, probably about three inches
high, leading to another three feet of walkway.
Heelo was running to the front door when the toe of her shoe got stuck
on the lip of the small step and she did an abrupt, high speed face plant into
the wood. I’m laughing right now as I
remember the sharp “thwap!” sound her body made as it crashed. I don’t remember laughing harder at any other
misfortune that’s befallen her, except for maybe when our Beagle peed on
her. That one is a close second, if not
an outright tie.
Your grandfather managed to drop
the top support pole of a swingset he was putting together onto his leg,
tearing a huge gash into his shin that required quite a few stitches, if I
remember correctly. He is the only
person I know who’s been attacked by a baby elephant. I’m sure there are other people in the world
who have been charged by a diminutive pachyderm but I don’t know those people
and I witnessed this magnificence firsthand.
We’d gone to the Catskill Game
Farm (which, sadly, is no longer. I’d
have loved to have taken you there) when I was about fourteen or so. There was a young elephant in a small ring,
its foot chained to a post in the ground, the chain at a humane length, and the
ring was made out of logs, about two and a half or three feet above the
ground. My father suffers from some form
of disability where fences and lumber rings do not dissuade him from attempting
to get nearer the enclosed animals. He’d
done it more times than I could count with feeding giraffes, so why no one
thought he’d go straight for the elephant like a moth to a flame is beyond
me. I suppose it’s my fault as
well.
Anyway, Dad thought it a great
plan to throw one leg over the log and try to feed the elephant some of those
weird crackers they sold to feed the animals that kind of smelled like big
chunks of Cracklin’ Oat Bran and tasted like sawdust. Maybe the elephant was afraid of Dad’s beard
or just didn’t like crackers or was perhaps pissed to be chained in a ring of
lumber, but regardless of his motives, the elephant charged Dad. He was on a chain, as I said, so couldn’t
reach him but no matter, I don’t care how tough you are, if an elephant charges
you, you are going to get the hell out of Dodge.
Except it didn’t go quite as
planned. Instead of making a swift exit
by pulling one leg back over the log, Dad slipped, ripping his goddamn jeans
from crotch to ankle. In public. Because what zoo is deserted, ever?
Ripped. His.
Goddamn. Pants.
Did we go home? Hells no.
We’d just gotten there. My
industrious, MENSA-member father, gathered some extra denim at the knee and
tied the pantleg up, semi-camouflaging the fact that he was half wearing a skirt. At least the wound in his thigh from an
errant nail or something in the log wasn’t to a major artery.
And this brings us to me.
I’m pretty sure one of my first
mishaps was going down a slide face-first – under the watchful eye of my
step-grandfather – and planting my face in the ground, resulting in my teeth
going through the inside of my lip. I
don’t remember that one, just heard about it secondhand. But I know me and it definitely sounds like
something I would do.
When I was in kindergarten, we
had this great jungle gym on the playground that looked like half of the Death
Star. I used to like to climb up a
little ways, hook my legs over a rung and hang upside down. Ordinarily I was pretty good at this until
the one time I knocked myself out when I swung back too vigorously.
One of my dad’s favorite stories
that he still enjoys retelling to this day is when I knocked myself out on the
muffler of the family car. It was winter
and we had THE BEST driveway of anyone we knew for sledding (go ahead and ask
anyone who’d been to the house on Mulberry Lane and I dare them to dispute it)
and sucked for everything else. It was a
big hill, steep, unpaved, with a giant ass turn in the middle with a landing. Thank god for that landing in the winter
because when that bitch froze, you were lucky to make it to the landing and
usually you could only do that after getting a running start from the road (all
the while praying no unsuspecting people were coming from either direction on
the road). When it got bad, we’d park
the car on the landing at the turn and then have to hoof it the rest of the way
up the driveway, trying not to fall on your ass.
I was young, I have no idea how
old, maybe six or seven, and Dad had the brilliant idea to send me down the
driveway on my plastic sled with Bandit, our puppy. I got set up in the sled, holding the
wriggling Bandit, and Dad stood in the driveway, legs wide so he could take a
picture as his eldest daughter and smallest dog went hurtling down the ice
crusted, snowy driveway.
Hurtle we did. Right down the driveway and underneath the
goddamn car. Knocked myself out on the
muffler. I don’t think Bandit was quite
the same after that.
When I was sixteen, I fell down
the stairs on Thanksgiving at Aunt Patti’s house. Everyone thought I’d killed myself.
The following year, I fell in the
Smithsonian Museum while trying to trip either my dad or Uncle Bob,
subsequently spraining my ankle and breaking my foot. That was the last time we went as a family to
Aunt Patti’s for Thanksgiving because I am too accident prone.
When I was away at college, I was
alone in the dorm room I shared with my roommate Sara, and got out of bed to
change the song on the stereo. Sara and
I, in an attempt to create more room for storage in our small rooms, had our
bed frames up on cinderblocks. I rose
from my bed, stepping onto the floor without noticing the clamshell case to my
VHS copy of The Muppet Movie under my foot.
Plastic VHS cases slide across linoleum like a sex waxed surf board over
the ocean. I shot right past the stereo,
probably having to listen to Sara’s damn Shabba Ranks CD, and flew across the
room, landing underneath Sara’s bed, at first not understand how the hell I’d
gotten there. I had a bruise on my bicep
the size of a dinner plate that was the color of an eggplant after that. I’m still not sure how I got that bad boy, I
think I must have thrown my arm up in the air and smashed it into the bedframe
on impact. Regardless, it was
impressive.
Most recently (I have fallen many
times in between college and now, please don’t think I had a dry spell that
lasted THAT long, the preceding were just the most noteworthy), your father and
I were goofing around in the kitchen and your father tried to “dip” me, like we
were dancing.
It ended with me flailing my arms
like a drowning person and falling to the floor in the kitchen like a sack of
stupid, graceless potatoes.
Considering the way you ended up
with your black eye, I fear I’ve cursed you.
And I apologize in advance for all the slips and falls and bumps and
bruises you will no doubt incur in the years to come. I’ll make sure we have the best medical
coverage available.
Two weeks ago, I was out having
dinner with JJ when I received a text message from your father, saying “Table
1, Michael 0” with a picture of you with a super puffy eye. Evidently, you were running around (normal)
with the dog (also normal) and Ruby got underfoot, you didn’t notice (normal
again, for you and the dog) and you tripped, therefore sailing eye-first into
the edge of the coffee table, which may be made of the hardest wood known to
man, or at least available in the 1970’s.
The up side to this was that you were home from school for a few days
(unrelated to your injury, there’d been a snowstorm) so I didn’t receive any
phone calls for visits from Child Protective Services or your teacher.
Your little legs have been a
patchwork of bruises since you learned to walk.
Like your mother, you have no idea from whence they come. Get used to it, that doesn’t stop.
So consider this my formal
apology and the explanation of the long line of graceless bastards that have
come before you. But hey, at least you
won’t be boring! Farting and falling are two of the funniest things in life (to me) so you should definitely learn to embrace the ridiculous.
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