Pride . . .Fall

A defining event of my younger years was the moment I fell from one floor to another in the stairwell. I was four; the fall damaged the bones of my lower back to the extent that I wore a corset until I was ten or so, then, when more active, graduated to a steel and leather truss, a kind of brace, designed to hold my skeleton in place as it grew rapidly through the teen years.  At eighteen I threw it away gladly, surrendered to intermittent joint pain, sometimes shockingly lacerating, but registered the freedom of movement for my sex life and jitterbugging.  As one can see, it is right to designate it as defining, not only for the continual pain, but for my withdrawal from an active life to a sedentary scholarly existence.  Abruptly in my mid thirties all pain ended.  Who knows why?  The fall, however, has been a leit motif in my family ever since.  My brother, aged ninety, visiting his daughter in Texas, fell down a flight of stairs and died from complications two weeks later.  My sister, aged 80 or so, was alone in her house, walking through her kitchen when her femur suddenly shattered, and she fell to the ground, and with effort dragged herself to the telephone and hospital services.  After five years in a wheel chair and sometimes with a walker, and after some years of slight improvement, she fell again one day, while overbearingly standing and offering someone a chair in the nursing home dining room; she died of internal bleeding which she chose not to have staunched.  My ex-wife, a feminist before her time, alone in a large barn in New Hampshire, decided to move a large antique chest of drawers from the upper store room to the lower floor, and in devising a system of weights and pulleys to achieve this feat alone, she instead managed to fall over the edge and plummet to the floor below where she lay from maybe mid morning until evening in more or less freezing temperatures when her daughter came home from work.  After extensive surgery which many claimed was botched, she never stood erect again, and walked only with the aid of a wheel chair or cane for the rest of her life.  She never complained, always insisting that it was entirely her fault.  At eighty six I have developed severe balance problems which have been variously diagnosed but one of my favorites is the inherent sense of acting out the primal fall so to speak of my very youth, and thus I will always be tottering on a precipice imagined or real, psychically.  When I fell initially I was crouching over the staircase a floor below in order to throw a blanket down on the head of my unsuspecting two year old sister whom I knew was coming to join me in the nursery.  So the event was a kind of primal sin as well. I remember every moment vividly.  Pride goeth before fall, and, boy, don't I know it!  As an absurd coda to it all, I was reminded last week when describing this nexus of falling to a long ago lover, and he recounted the time we were vigorously making love in a great old Victorian double bed when suddenly the slats which supported the mattress gave way and we crashed to the floor.