Limping

I’m limping.  I took a fall Saturday night, 2 April, carrying a carton of recycle paper with a pile of flattened cartons on top down the elevator to the street level and the few steps to the basement of my apartment building. The cardboard stack was light and wobbly and high, in poor balance with the heavy carton full of paper, and I could not see where I was going, or rather, where my feet were going. Accidents occur from carelessness and lack of foresight; I graphically lacked foresight.  I should have made two separate trips as was obvious only in hindsight. 

By fortune, I didn’t break any bone; I hurt neither my hip nor my knees.  I got a scrape on my right arm (under a sweater sleeve), a blow on a left rib, and a twist in in my left ankle.  All evening, it was excruciating to take steps, even to put my injured foot down on the floor.  Recovery was visible overnight, however; I could walk, though painfully, with a limp the next day.

I see on the streets people of my age or older (and younger, too) limping along or else treading wearily with a cane or a walker, and, seeing them, I ruminate that eventually I will be like them while at the same time they always make me feel sprightly and happy to be able to move nimbly.  My injury was light and I expect to be bouncy again soon. 

It so happened that I had a reserved ticket Sunday to a concert across the town at Alice Tully Hall.  I was at my computer in the afternoon and when I realized and looked at the clock, it was 4:50, and the concert was to start at 5:00.  There was no way I could make it, but paradoxically I had no regret.  With the uncertain ankle, one is prone to turn it easily, certainly going down the subway stairs, and it made good sense to stay home.  I thought I made a wise decision after a laughably foolish act.  Actually, it wasn’t that; it wasn’t by design. I had forgotten about the concert until it was too late — another carelessness. Still, I felt a higher being guiding me away from still another foolishness of going out limping and taking another fall.

PS.  Limping makes one look old, easily older by ten years.