The Nearness of Falling
1
While crossing our town’s main street between its two stop lights, a woman is struck by what a witness describes as “a speeding white jeep.” Her body is lifted and flung before falling to the pavement near her car. The driver pauses, then flees. Barely, she survives, suffering multiple serious injuries to her legs and internal organs. The newspaper publishes her photograph beside the front-page story. She works at the same university as I do. By the end of the following day, the jeep driver is identified as a man who lives “nearby.” There is security camera footage. The police report that they have examined his white jeep. Pending test results that seem to be a formality, he is nearly certain to be arrested.
2
For several years now, each of my doctors’ assistants asks, “Have you experienced any recent falls?” A few weeks ago, for the first time, I say “yes,” then quickly tense and add, “It’s not like you think,” hurrying to the anecdote about pulling weeds from the steep bank behind our garage, stepping back, losing my footing, and doing the head-over-heels through specialty grass, a yucca plant, and a patch of iris before rolling across a low stone wall and onto the lawn where I sprawled, taking a minute to evaluate my body from head to toe. I tell her I call myself lucky when the only problem seems to be strained ligaments in my left thumb. When the assistant begins to enter something into her computer, I say, “It’s not the kind of fall you’re looking for.”
3
Overnight, a high school classmate messages our five-year-old fiftieth reunion batch list to observe how the deaths of long-ago friends have become as ordinary as war casualties. She attaches an obituary scanned from a small-town paper, extended illness this time, not suddenly, not accident, further reference to the concealed carry of that classmate’s body.
4
When I mention my recent fall to the doctor herself, she says, “It’s a slippery slope,” not meaning the bank behind my garage. “Mobility limitations often lead to a decline in most things people do. Think of mobility as a barometer for how well you’re aging.”
After my exam, I follow two patients who seem to have kept appointments together, a husband and wife, most likely, or two friends or neighbors. The man uses a cane, yet struggles along the slight downgrade to the parking lot, holding to the railing with his free hand. The woman relies upon a walker, shuffling beside the opposite railing, not touching it, but appearing to take comfort from having it close by. When I pass, careful to give each one room, they nevertheless stiffen and stop. Later, as I pull away from the clinic, they are still navigating that ramp, and yet there is the sidewalk to cross after the railing ends, and then one of them, because nobody is waiting inside either car parked in the handicapped zone, needs to drive.
5
In the kitchen, sometimes, my wife begins to walk backwards, doing short trips between the sink and the table. Mostly, she does those retreats in the living room, happy to have six additional steps of room for the ten minutes of walking backwards that a friend has told her helps postpone becoming unsteady. She always musters a smile when she manages back and back again with grace.
6
Nearly seventy-four, an Emeritus Professor, now, for more than two years, I take advantage of the school’s fitness room more than I do its library. Even before I retired, I was sure I was the oldest person there every time I went. I go early, the upstairs room full of treadmills, stationary bikes, and elliptical machines, the room below it packed with weighted machinery to exercise every muscle in the body. Mostly, those two rooms are being used by young women. Unless someone remembers me from a years-ago class, no one speaks to me except a few other faculty members. On the level beneath the muscle-toning machines I use, there are thousands of pounds of free weights and music, mostly rap, turned up loud. It’s been fifteen years since I hazarded a trip down the stairs to try my hand at the free weights when I knew the room was likely empty at six a.m.
7
A scientist claims that the increased stress of our modern life may be withering the hippocampus. During depression, it seems to shrink, contracting from the drought of optimism. The hippocampus, that scientist says, is so vulnerable to stress that the common names for things it stores might leave their home. Memories become early departures, the ability to make new ones already on red-eyes to where the mind arrives unattended while even the body’s fundamentals, tucked deep inside the brain like carefully packaged glassware, show signs of shattering.
8
Thirty-two years ago, when I visited after my mother died, my father wanted to play golf every day the weather permitted. Before we left his house, though he was five years younger than I am now, he wrapped his knees in his unlit bedroom, using fifty years of first aid lessons he’d given to Boy Scout troops he’d led. “Ready?” he would say, a polite request. “I am.”
Despite any heat or humidity, he always wore his old work pants. What he complained about was the cart that cost too much, but now was necessary. He never said a word about his knees or his varicose veins or his troubled heart.
9
At my request, my wife agrees to find and walk a long-abandoned section of the Pennsylvania turnpike. Nearly sixty years it’s been since several miles of that highway, including two tunnels, were taken out of service. The tunnels, left behind by the railroad, were only two lanes wide, an impossible bottleneck, traffic clogged to a crawl, headlights necessary to fend off fear of oncoming traffic inside them. An alternate section was finally completed. The site, by now, looks like a museum for a post-apocalypse future, the roadway cracked and disintegrating, scrub trees and bushes rearing head high, the two tunnels spawning thousands of graffiti artists and outright vandals. “This is no place to trip and fall,” my wife says, the road we begin to walk on vacant for as far as we can see in either direction, our car the only one parked in a small lot a few hundred yards away.
10
For months, the hit-and-run victim is wheelchair bound. Then, for short distances, she is able to use a walker. The newspaper reports there are additional, unspecified complications. Sympathy lingers and sighs before moving on. Soon, she loses the job that made her my colleague for three months. The company that fires her makes the termination call from fifteen hundred miles away.
11
Late last year, my daughter’s wedding, her second, was held outdoors in a storied California canyon, the nearest town, a week earlier, evacuated by wildfire, the one access road closed while a community died in flames. A mile north, two days before we arrived, devastation had been declared contained, that metaphorical border unseen by guests. Two days afterward, nearly next for takeoff for our return trip to Pennsylvania, the pilot announced, “Our computer has informed us the plane cannot be flown successfully,” and we taxied to the gate, disembarked to wait, then to be rescheduled and vouchered for overnight in a cheap hotel.
12
When I notice my wife walking backwards, I agree that the legs are vital, stories of hip-breaking falls already stored on retirement’s flash-drive. Friends our age have taken tumbles that force them to begin taking baby steps on level ground, and yet I default to a skepticism that requires me to refuse joining her.
13
A descending ladder of thoughts and prayers follows the post from my high school classmate, the phrase as familiar as the sound of passing traffic. I’m up so early the starlings are just now awakening, every teeming tree chattering what sounds like an invisible babble of surveillance. I add a postscript of my own, all of it referencing events from over fifty-five years ago. Hourly, throughout the late morning and afternoon, I check back. During the evening, as well, but nothing is added, not even more thoughts and prayers.
14
Without exception, the websites I examine say that mobility promotes healthy aging, helping to maintain the ability to live independently and reduce the risk of falling and fracturing bones, helping to maintain healthy muscles, bones and joints, helping to control joint swelling and pain associated with arthritis.
15
In the university fitness room, three gray-haired women appear early each morning to dust and wipe clean the surfaces of machines that measure maintenance. They wear oversized shirts tucked into baggy pants, and when one reaches behind my stationary bike to fine-tune where nobody would notice, I nearly pause to tell her my father, after closing his bakery, became a janitor when he was forty-seven years-old, choosing night shift so he could work alone, his only partner the self-discipline he wore like a uniform to make locker rooms and gymnasiums spotless for coaches and teams he never saw.
16
At another doctor’s office three weeks after my fall, the assistant is more specific with her questions after I admit I’ve fallen: Do you have difficulty climbing up ten steps or walking a quarter of a mile? Because of underlying health or physical reasons, have you modified the way you climb any steps?
It’s because of my knees and back, I answer, not because I’m out of breath. She writes my acquiescence into her computer without comment, and I don’t mention that my thumb hasn’t improved much after weeks have passed.
17
I’ve learned there is one small solace for those whose brains are failing: the damaged hippocampus might never again make new memories, but older memories are often safe.
18
The hit-and-run victim had once been a dancer. She has children whose accomplishments she mentions to the reporter who writes about her case as the six-month anniversary of her accident arrives. Her friend, the principal witness, says she wants everyone to know they were both sober when the collision occurred. She says there is no question the jeep was traveling way over the speed limit. She says the driver knew what had happened. She says she would know that jeep anywhere. The victim, the article reports, is going to have a series of kidney operations soon.
19
To help study aging, a “handicap suit” has been created at an MIT lab. Its nickname is AGNES, an acronym for “age gain now empathy system.” It simulates a variety of issues common to gaining, including tight bands around the knees to produce stiffness and padded boots to produce loss of tactile feedback. By now the researchers know that most wearers become angry. The suit infuriates the wearers by slowing and making awkward even the most routine actions.
20
On my father’s favorite golf course, the fourteenth hole overlooks an immaculate farm that spreads along the creek that winds through the course. The two of us would sit where I parked the cart in the shade, neither of us mentioning heat or humidity, relying on the view to account for a few minutes of rest. I would wait for him to say, as always, how beautiful it was and then turn away while he pushed himself up and out of the cart with both hands and steadied himself with the five iron he’d pulled from his bag before we parked, then used it as a cane before preparing to carry a hundred and twenty yards over water to the green while I waited, still standing in the shade, with a nine iron.
21
Cautionary Tales:
1 The tomb of Jesus is in danger of collapse. The shrine’s foundation is so unstable that an engineering miracle is required for safety.
2 Just off the coast of Australia, four of the stone-tower Apostles have drowned in the sea. Diving is necessary to examine the bodies of the towers that are underwater.
3 From the shore, near San Francisco, a local resident gladly shows me where the famous earthquake’s epicenter lies offshore near Mussel Rock.
4 Where I live, thick stone supports are strung across the Susquehanna River, remnants of a bridge collapsed, decades ago, by torrents of ice freed by heavy late-January rain. A friend died in that flood, swept from his feet and washed into catastrophe the night before my school office took water as I typed on a Saturday morning, a state policeman knocking in a way that made me believe my teenage son was dead until he asked if I’d seen that friend reported missing.
22
For more than a decade, my father, his knees ruined to the threat of buckling, crawled backwards down the stairs to the damp basement for the years-old jars of my mother’s preserves that spoke one version of eternity.
23
Recently, I watched as one fitness room cleaning woman began to vacuum the carpet and another squatted to clean an exercise mat. She settled, at last, for sitting within a fog of sighs. Two minutes after she finished and struggled to her feet, a student in matching shorts and tank-top wiped that mat with a white, antiseptic cloth before lowering herself to stretch her toned body while what sounded like static reached me from pale, blue buds pressed into the student’s ears. The student’s rapt listening was as visible as the vacuum cleaner tracks I followed moments later, staying inside one narrow swatch as if it overlooked a brief, but fatal fall.
24
Five weeks after my daughter’s wedding, for our long-planned retreat from winter in Pennsylvania, my wife and I return to Los Angeles. Our January rental is on the twelfth floor of a building a mile from our daughter’s residence, only the penthouse above us. “Like we’re near the stars,” our young granddaughters say when both of them follow my wife, later that evening, onto the balcony to watch her lean over the railing to photograph the rare, red moon while I stay behind, dizzy with imagined falling, yet three full steps from any chance of tumbling over the railing.
The elevator, each day, always rises to meet us. If there are passengers, they always disembark on our floor. For all we know, the penthouse lies empty. Four weeks, it takes, for the elevator to descend when we press the down call-button. The passengers are an elderly couple, the woman white-haired, illness-thin, and immaculately dressed. When we greet them, the woman speaks over our heads as if fixed upon the descending numbers. After we settle at the lobby floor, her right hand flutters toward the man in a way that confirms she is blind or very nearly so. One hand on her back and the other holding her hand, he talks her slowly across the lobby toward a luxury car, shuffling in sync with her tiny, cautious steps.
25
When, after months, the hit and run victim is released from the hospital, a donor volunteers a motorized scooter that, he says, had been a life-saver for him. The gift-giver, in the newspaper’s large photo, looks bent and fragile. In a jaunty font, Pride Go-Go is splashed across the scooter’s side. The donor’s hand rests on a handlebar as if he relies upon it for balance.
26
For a week, I check the class reunion site, but the thread still ends with my comment. However, a new one begins—an old classmate has posted to explain how mindfulness was such a godsend during her career as a professor. She says she used to practice “feeling” to prepare for the end-of-semester trauma of failing students. She says she the technique became even more important when she rehearsed for her mother’s passing, that now she calculates the responses to her own death by remembering herself in the third person. Upstairs, two doors slam. A few hours later, my old classmate returns to post she has listened, minutes before, to a recording of giraffes in a Viennese zoo. Though everyone believes they are mute, she writes, they hum to each other at night, the frequency so low nobody noticed. For comfort, she guesses, for reassurance, though she acknowledges that scientists are, for now, uncertain.
27
Twenty-two years ago, after knee surgery, I submitted to the cajoling of a therapist who set the treadmill, initially, at one mph. My hands gripped the railings while I relearned the alphabet of walking. Across the room was a patient who seemed unable to stand. From a nearby apparatus, another patient whispered my way, “It’s hell, ain’t it?”
28
For his eighty-fifth birthday, I drove my father to the property he’d bought while believing he could make a life there with my mother after he closed his small bakery. I was thirteen, so I know he was forty that year. He thought ten years would free him to part-time work, the self-sufficiency of livestock and well-tended fields. My sister and I would be gone by then, whatever money he had enough for two people happy with little.
The dirt lane, unchanged, took us past the house he’d rented out but never lived in, winding to a field he asked me to drive into, following some farmer’s matted meadow tracks to the edge of the wooded acres he’d always loved. I shortened my steps as he limped slowly among the trees to where we could see, still standing, a shelter he’d built by hand the year I was twenty, preparing for picnics, the families my sister and I would bring each summer. I held my father’s hand against the threat of roots and rocks until he stuttered the last small steps to the shelter. Beyond a patch of pines, a man smoked on the porch beside the rented house, and I worried he’d seen us until he bent to busy himself with a shovel. My father ran his hands over the logs he’d raised to form a room no one, apparently, had used in years. When he asked me to try the door, I pressed until it buckled inward on the covered space, where, he said, he wanted to stand, knowing it had lasted.
29
After a year, the newspaper revisits the hit-and-run story. The test results on the jeep, according to the police spokesperson, are still incomplete. He asks for patience. Near the accident site, a few flowers are strewn. The following morning, they are gone, either gathered and saved or simply picked up and discarded.
30
My wife knows that I pedal in the fitness room not only as a way to stay fit and maintain mobility, but also to relieve depression. She doesn’t know that each time I spin my digital pulse into the age-calibrated red zone, a range that was marked “conditioning” ten years ago, before backing off, I am both terrified and thrilled.
31
Cautionary Tales:
1 To pilgrims, the temple constructed at the site of Christ’s tomb must have made heaven seem near, yet it’s been destroyed and restored three times.
2 Mussel Rock, the writer John McPhee writes, is like a three-story building, standing in the Pacific, with brown pelicans on the roof where the San Andreas Fault intersects the sea.
3 The remaining Apostles, because they are made of limestone, will be extinguished by the sea. In time, the sea will create more by carving them from the current cliffs.
4 My friend, it was surmised, died because he was too frail to withstand the force of rushing, calf-deep flood water.
32
In a study conducted by the makers of a personal emergency response system, the alarm button that hung around my father’s neck for nearly five years, 83% of subscribers who fell and couldn’t get up for more than five minutes didn’t use the alarm, most likely because they didn’t want anyone to know about their helplessness. During all those years my father wore that alarm, despite his history of falls, the only time his alarm button was pushed was by his curious great-grandson.
33
In the newspaper, a physical therapist is interviewed about the mobility issues of the elderly. “If you are unable to get out and around,” she says, “you can’t go shopping or out with friends to eat dinner or go to the movies, and you become dependent on other people to get you places. You are likely to become a recluse. You stay home and get depressed. With immobilization comes incontinence, because you can’t get to the bathroom. Then you can develop urinary infections and skin infections. It’s like a row of falling dominoes.”
34
After two years, the hit and run victim completes extensive kidney surgery, one of them now removed. The test results on the white jeep are still in limbo, even as the statute of limitations is about to expire. Along our main street, a church has filled a vacant storefront. On folding chairs, a small congregation, each Sunday, sits as quietly as the truth. The hit-and-run victim is reported to be moving to Turkey.
35
Before boarding for our most recent flight to California, I am pulled aside for a stand-and-frisk. The guard pats me down, carefully tracing the corrugated surface of my leg as other travelers, curious, retrieve the items they carry close. He pauses by my knee to ask what it is he feels. “Varicose veins,” I say. He offers me his screen, my image bright yellow from below the knee to mid-thigh, a sign, he says, that suggests knee replacement, smuggling, or even a suicide bomb. We shake hands. He even smiles, “They must hurt,” he says, and I walk away assessing imperfection’s power, just one of the terrorists we might travel with, those raised and bubbled veins so much like multiple fuses that flight must be preceded by the self-incrimination of the body.
36
For the hour that my wife and I hike along the near rubble of the stretch of abandoned turnpike, the sound of traffic along the nearby open stretch of road is constant. For a brief time, the cars and trucks can even be seen through a section of sparse foliage. We are frightened by the approach of the only two people we see. Both men prove to be friendly, stopping to chat, asking what they might expect to discover next. However, when they vanish, we worry again about their possible intentions. As if even among so much disuse and decay, we can still doubt that anyone but us could be interested simply in finding synonyms for collapse.
37
My dermatologist examines me literally from the top of my head to between my toes. Yesterday, as she looked closely at my legs, she paused at my varicose veins. “Does it hurt?” she said.
38
As we retrace our steps along the abandoned stretch of highway, my wife and I pass the place where we can see the turnpike traffic through the trees. “Do you think any of them are aware?” she says, and though I have no way of knowing for certain, I answer “No.”
39
After three years, word arrives that the hit and run victim has died. The cause is reported as cancer; a rumor has it by an opioid overdose. For certain is the news that she had won a settlement in civil court for $50,000, what seems a tiny, unacceptable sum. The parents of the suspected driver had paid in exchange for no admission of guilt on their son’s part. The suspect who will never be tried is twenty-three now, his residence less than a mile from the accident site. The victim’s children flew to Turkey to oversee her burial. The store-front congregation has grown in size. From the street, when they are repeating their litanies, they seem to be stage-whispering reassurances: “And still.” “And yet.” “Despite that,” the code cadenced into the weakening heartbeat of epitaph.
40
My father, at ninety, was interested only in the sound of my voice, caulking each pause with “good,” his legs restless in a wheelchair.
41
Now I am afraid, some days, that I, too, am growing indifferent to things. There are mornings when loss of interest extends an overnight visit, as if I should check the bedroom closet for a rack of foreign clothes, the hamper for strange underwear, the bathroom where I believe I might find an extra toothbrush, a display of prescription medicines, a towel damp at six a.m., the shower stall traced with fog.
42
What I do not write on the classmate site: Becoming gradually frail is neighbor to paradise. Being thrust suddenly into weakness is hell.
42
Last evening, when my wife walked backwards, I joined her, both of us counting our steps together without feeling behind ourselves for the bookcase or the wall devoted to art, doing a simple line dance to the rhythm of apprehension’s melody, hearing time’s chorus hummed into our ears, the one so familiar we automatically mouth the lyrics, walking backwards to its music, following the lead that waltzes us in a tempo so comfortable we barely sense the tiny increments of change, and balance seems enough for joy.