Jackie Wells Fauth
As a child, I really wanted to grow up to be a ballerina. Then I discovered you had to be in top athletic shape, practice continuously and most of all possess great balance and grace and I soon got over that notion.
Although I will never dance the lead in Swan Lake, I do try to be as coordinated and careful as I can, but the older I get, the harder this becomes. And this week, I abandoned all notion that I might be considered graceful and poised.
It’s the carpets that get me. I have discovered the joys and comforts of sneakers, but the one thing they don’t like is carpet…especially short nap carpet. I tend to drag my feet a little (okay, probably a lot) and I discovered this week that the combination of sneakers, short carpet, dragging feet and lack of grace can be pretty lethal.
While walking across a short carpet, I pulled a pretty complicated dance move. My shoes stopped short, but the rest of me kept on going. This meant that I took a headlong plunge across the front of the theater at the school. Not one of my finer moments and a bit startling for the student I was coaching in oral interp.
By the time he got over to where I was sprawled, full length, I was dazed but already trying to get up. I had a bloody nose and my glasses flew off and bent, but I was able to scramble to my feet. Perhaps the worst part was that the coffee mug I had been drinking from fell from my hands and landed just perfectly to cushion the fall for my face. This sounds like it might be fortunate, but it’s not!
A coffee mug to the face at full speed tends to “knock you for a loop” as they say, so it took me a few seconds to realize I was bleeding profusely from the nose. I charged headlong into the bathroom, frightening two girls so much, I think they may have kept running until they were several blocks from the school.
Everyone was sweet and helpful, and I got ice packs and cloths and whatever I needed. I was really panic stricken because my vision was completely blurred, but this fear was allayed when they handed me my glasses. Oh, yeah, those help! My vision was still a little fuzzy, but if I set the glasses on my face at just the right angle, they still work! Hopefully I can get them straightened soon!
My most painful injury was along my side where I hit the ground, but because of public decency laws, I can’t show those bruises to anyone. The least painful, but possibly the prettiest is my eye. It developed a shiner like no other and it has been all the colors of the rainbow for the past few days.
Now, I want to just ignore the fact that I have a black eye, but when half your face is swollen and purple, people tend to notice. I tried all the regular jokes, “You should see the other guy,” or “It was a heck of a bar fight, but I won.” It still ends with me having to admit that my lack of grace and addiction to coffee collided in a bad way.
I am already starting to lose the worst of the color from the eye and even my side isn’t as painful as it was, but the fact remains that this accident happened due to my careless way of walking; time to learn how to do that all over, I guess.
The doctor may have had the best suggestion moving forward. “Go home and rest,” she advised. “Relax, read (if you can) and have some coffee…but maybe we should try a sipper cup.” Sound advice to wrap up my day of no grace!
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