Steps

                Just after I woke up this morning, I descended my stairs carefully.  I had soft thick socks on, the wooden stairs had a shiny finish, and my fear factor was at a ‘two’.  So, I deliberately planted each step firmly and I did that thing where both feet meet upon the same step before another step is ventured.  This is an old-people thing, of course.  As I later puttered about on the first floor, I dissected the significance of the ‘two’.  It should have been a zero.  Fear seemed like an intruder here—the uninvited kid at the party who is rumored to have a gun. 

I had gotten used to zero. For so long, falling was fun, and was seen through the prism of play versus injury. In the playground, we’d push each other down just to ignite a chase. As teenagers, we’d jump off our 10 foot high porch roof into the grass yard, having to clear a menacing metal fence underneath! We’d build up to that stunt as a rite of passage in the neighborhood. Later, I’d parachute out of airplanes in the military and, despite carrying heavy equipment and even jumping at night, we’d usually land without injury. (Myself excluded—but that’s another story!)

                 I’d had a fall down the aforementioned staircase recently, and ended up in a pile at the bottom of the stairs with my laptop and a few other things strewn about the impact area.  Memory came upon me while I was lying there catching my breath and teared up until she realized I was pretty-much OK.  Nothing broken.  But that scene must have looked like one of those commercials for a ‘life-alert’ device, where the actor who has ‘fallen and can’t get up’ looks to be about 80 years old.  

                There are many manifestations of aging along our lives’ journeys but to be worried about stairs feels like a big category jump; a jump into the last category of aging—that category where people talk wistfully about moving to Arizona or Florida and getting a one-story house with no stairs.  Another big category jump is when discussing surgeries competes with discussing sports teams as general conversation at a gathering.  We all remember that kid in 4th grade who had their tonsils out—so exotic and novel was the idea of surgery and hospitalization back then that we were mesmerized and even jealous of that kid.  All the special treatment they must have been given at home, and were certainly given back at the classroom!  But now I’m afraid to ask how someone is, for fear of opening up the door to the banalities of their various health ‘procedures’. 

                 Well, I guess I’m old.  I’m admitting that.  Whew, that was a big step I just took there.  A-Ha-Ha-Ha. 

I picture it all as a long journey to the top of a hill and then down the backside to the final valley of death. I’m over the top, am somewhere on the backside and, actuarial tables aside, I think my slight fear of stairs can give you an accurate grid coordinate or my location. The exact location of the top of the hill, the peak of one’s life, is different for everyone, highly subjective, and open to interpretation as to whether it’s a physical and/or mental thing. Good arguments can be made for various ages and events up and down the ladder of human experience while life is shiny and strong. We can, however, exclude a timid descent of well-lit ordinary stairs as anywhere near a peak life event.

                So, now that I’m here, what do I have to show for it?

Well, a good lifelong friend and mentor said that perhaps the only thing that survives our deaths, after anybody who remembers us also dies, is our writing. So, since I’ve been writing for many years, I picture the backside of that hill glittered with little pages here and there.

And this piece is now also behind me as I stumble downward through the end-of-life scree.

See it? It’s just over there, at the base of that fallen tree, fluttering gently in the fading light.