Fear Of Falling

I have been afraid of falling, well, since the last time I fell, years ago, it was, and stupidly running, clumsily in looping gait of a seventy something year old over the uneven brick sidewalks of Cambridge that I had thrilled to when first I came to Harvard in my twenties.  I got up from that fall with no external damage but aching enough to want to skip what I was running to, an adult education dance class, of all things!  The years have rolled by and my fear of falling intensified as my balance seemed ever shakier, and my footstep less sure.  And then there were those awful stories of the falls of friends, so many of them ending with the doleful observation that "sometimes you don't get up from a fall."  Indeed my sister-in-law slipped on the ice when she was eighty, got pneumonia while in bed waiting to recover and was done within days as I remember it.  And a decade later maybe her husband, my brother, fell down some stairs, was in and out of a hospital and then weeks later he was dead.  As some old geezer I used to walk with said in commenting upon a friend who had fallen and died "shook the stuffin' outna him."  Yesterday after having maneuvered some pretty steep and twisty wooden stairs at beach houses at the Cape, I was on the ferry heading back to Boston and saw a seat by the window and rushed down between the rows of seats arranged as a movie theater, tripped on some metal support and went down between the rows hitting my jaw on a chair arm jutting out and other parts of me on god knows what.  Nothing really happened, I banged up my cheek and it bled, and there was minor bleeding on my hands, but it was the shock, yes, the great awaited feared for FALL.  When I came to although I was not out, I heard so many anxious voices "Are you alright?"  Yes, I was, but the crew could not have been nicer.  One young man stayed by me until I was seated (not after all that, of course, in the window seat!), got me paper towels for the blood on my cheeks, went to the Red Cross box and got Band Aids, Wipes, and ointments.  He came back periodically  to check on me during the crossing.  I returned to psychic normalcy, and it was he who facilitated it.  God Bless Him.