Balance

It is all so hard to describe, this business of feeling tipsy without having touched a drop.  More than anything else I am staggered--a choice expression here, I see!--when in the morning i open the sliding glass doors to the open air collection of potted plants that constitute "my garden, " and of a sudden, as they used to say in the eighteenth century, I lurch forward as some kind of ballast in my body gives, and the internal mechanisms fail and I am in danger of plummeting down to the ground.  My, my, how I struggle to avoid the fall!  It has happened more often than not, but then again, not as frequently as one might imagine in the case of an eighty six year old.  I have a thing about falling and maybe that's because I remember all too vividly falling from a balcony down a flight onto some stairs.  Then again I have a thing about automobile accidents, imagining much too often the fatal collision of my father's car in 1936 and my husband's probable crash with me in the passenger seat in 2016.  I am all too aware of the insubstantial in my life, whether it is Daddy's car being suddenly crushed by an oncoming truck or the slippery edge of the balcony railing on which I was perched to enact some juvenile mischief. Four years old!  What a little devil!  I started up with my balance classes today after a hiatus of months due to the heart surgery.  The teacher had me stand from my chair and walk to a given point circle and go back.  He said it took 24 seconds and before my surgery I had it down to fifteen.  Okay, back to square one, as they say.  I guess I am more concerned about flying to New York and lugging my suitcase around.  I know that I cannot do this, cannot get it into proper balance with my weight and stance, even have real nightmares of imagination trying to take the damned thing off the luggage carousel and being suddenly sucked up into its maw.  Had the genius idea of sending clothes and such by UPS in a box a day or so in advance to the apartment of my friend.  I saw myself arriving from LaGuardia with car and driver at the address on the Upper West Side, absolutely free of any impediment, balance perfect, but for the nagging image trying to compete in my brain, me trying to go to the subway stop and falling on the stair.  I can take a cab, I can take Uber, everyone does it nowadays.  I wish I felt more secure about the trip.  Going to Manhattan and visiting all the museums is what life is all about, isn't is?  I can live without fine restaurants, yes, even live without most of the theatrical productions on offer.  I used to say "Hey, just walking around the streets of Manhattan is enough for me!"  But, then, you see, I have to think about balance.

Here it is, six o'clock in the evening and this morning I had to rush out to have blood tests a day late because the doctor's office forgot to send in the forms.  Ah, well, here we go.