Sunday, November 8, 2020

Falling For You

I looked down a flight of stairs longer and steeper than any I’d seen since climbing the pyramid at Chichen Itza. They led to the basement in the home of my mother’s 90-year-old cousin who lived alone in Iowa. They also led to her death. My own slight anxiety, tightly grasping the handrail, was justified. Several years later we could only imagine the misstep that sent cousin Ruth tumbling head over heels down her treacherous carpeted staircase. We wondered how long she lay on the basement floor, neck and back broken, with internal injuries, before she was found.

That brief story is background information for a similar episode that I witnessed and that had a better outcome. You see, falls are the leading cause of fatal injury among older adults, one every nineteen minutes. After about age sixty-five you really don’t want to have stairs in your house if it can be avoided.

During the 1970s commuting to college meant getting up early to catch a train or making an hour-long drive to the university I attended in Chicago. My grandmother lived with me at the time. I was twenty and she was seventy-two. We got along famously, but occasionally behaved like a bickering old married couple. We had daily delivery of the Chicago Tribune, tossed unceremoniously onto the apron of our long driveway in the darkness of the very early morning. Before I left for school I made a point of retrieving the paper and leaving it on the kitchen table for Grandma to enjoy later in the day. That and the soap opera General Hospital were two highlights of her mostly sedentary existence.

My goal each day was to quietly go out the back door, pick up the Trib, lay it on the table and then head off to school without waking Grandma. There was no point in waking her. I poured a bowl of cereal as quietly as possible, ate my breakfast of champions and tried to sneak out in as much silence as a small brick ranch would allow.

I’m not sure when a new pattern emerged, but upon entering the house with the newspaper, there would be Grandma waiting to take the paper and see me off. You need to understand something about this woman. Many years earlier, holiday visits to her apartment in the city always culminated in somewhat misty-eyed goodbyes as we drove away. We looked back to see her standing in the front window of her second floor Brownstone waving a white hanky as if we were headed off to war. It was her thing, and in hindsight was adorable and a fond memory. I have often joked that I come just short of this tradition (no hanky) when our adult children drive away from a visit to our home in Florida. I just hate to see them leave and wish they wouldn’t find me so annoying.

So there is Grandma standing just inside the back door each morning no matter how fast I try to retrieve the paper and bring it back to the house. I realize in hindsight that this became a game. It was the Olympic newspaper event, and seldom resulted in a medal-worthy performance by yours truly. She was just that fast, rising from a sound sleep at the sound of my spoon in a bowl of Captain Crunch, shuffling to the back door with sleep in her eyes. Now that I think about it, perhaps a quieter cereal like oatmeal would have improved my odds, but that would have required use of a noisy microwave and the danger of a cycle-ending beep.

Each day I tried harder, moved faster, eventually breaking into a run only to find my smiling Grandmother waiting with her hand out and a ready kiss goodbye, no hanky necessary. I know that I told her repeatedly that it wasn’t necessary to meet me at the door. I would leave the paper on the table for her.

Things proceeded, growing increasingly competitive. An imaginary starting gun and streamers lined the driveway. My time for the fifty-foot dash improved dramatically but was never quite good enough.

And then came that morning. That fateful morning when the competition ended. 


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