Raise your hands if you, too, are a klutz.
Tripping Over Croutons
KLUTZ REPORT: 2001
A colleague says she is known throughout her family as the person who could trip over a rogue crouton on a rug while heading for the sink. Usually she bangs her knees. About every other month the rest of us in the department take turns running to answer her office phone if it rings while we are meeting in another room. She can’t move quickly most of the time. It’s this knee or that knee. A couple of times both knees got bunged.
That opening paragraph is to set the scene for Beverly’s Big Black Eye.
BEVERLY’S BIG BLACK EYE
It was my first ever black eye, and it was a beaut. Did it all by myself. Luckily, I had a witness. Most people would prefer not to be observed while doing really dumb things.
Ex. The time I tried to use a big, thick. wet sponge to prop a window open about nine inches. It took me long seconds to realize why that didn’t work.
But if one is going to give oneself a black eye, it’s a really good idea to have someone around to confirm the series of events. Especially if the witness is NOT one’s husband.
The three times I’ve had smashing, scraping, bloody loud thumpings that could have caused critical injury, it involved one of my dogs.
How to Avoid Walking the Dog (R.I.P. Duffy, the English Cocker Spaniel)
The second occasion was due to Miss Bessie, who loves to sit in her queenly manner at the top of the stairs so that she can keep her eye on everything, and plunk herself between Her People who are in different parts of the house. I came up behind Miss Bessie at the top of the stairs and began patting her in a chest place that makes her melt.
She folded.
I went head over tush, thunk, thunk, thunk, down the staircase, crashing into a wrought iron lantern but avoiding the beak of the full size brass heron. The bruises didn’t show. I didn’t break anything. I was relieved NOT to have to explain to a physician that I’d been impaled on the proboscis of a large metal wading bird.
Let’s look on the good side. I was alive. Miss Bessie hurried down the stairs and licked me, but didn’t know where the ice bag was. Bill was hurtled out of a sound sleep on the sofa and thought an armed home invasion was in process.
It had been awhile since I’d done much more than walk into things, or try to pluck a too hot dish out of the microwave, thus burning the ends of three fingers.
Bill says the two most common sounds I make are, “Crash,” and “Ow.”
THE EVENT THAT CAUSED ME TO LOOK LIKE A MOVIE OF THE WEEK WIFE
The plumber came to fix a leaky commode.
We have baby gates up in a few places, trying to save some of the carpeting from an undependable puppy, Lillian.
The plumber and I stepped over the baby gate to get to the bathroom. I left the plumber with the situation. However, when I stepped over the baby gate the second time, I didn’t quite clear the top.
This caused me to shoot forward and right at an awkward angle, missing the carpeting in front of me (where is a rug when you need one) thus smashing my face really, really hard on the wood floor.
CRASH. OW.
I scared the plumber.
Even after glumly icing it for two hours, and feeling like The Roadrunner had dropped an anvil on my head, by the next morning I looked totally gross. After X-rays assured all of us that my cheekbone was intact, there was still the matter of The Story.
I wanted to have a signed, notarized, laminated note from the plumber to whip out so that people would know I was not being abused.
In New England, everyone I know would have said, “Holy Big Fat Cow, Jeeze Louise, what happened to your eye,” or something much like that, only with more colorful language. The trouble is, people are so polite in The South, that they don’t ask. Who knows what they think. Well, we do know, actually, since most of us are keen to these signifiers.
Mostly I stayed in all week.
Mostly I wore sunglasses.
Mostly I took a lot of Aleve.
My left side turned a glorious profusion of muddy red, deep purple, and a truly vile shade of yellow.
As Freud said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” followed by the rarely quoted, “Sometimes a klutz is just clumsy middle aged woman who never looks where she’s going.”
BUT SOMETIMES
People are being abused, and I’m not taking those truths lightly with this personal confession. The excuses people make for people who batter them are legion. Likely they are not accompanied by notes from the plumber.
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