Putting My Best Foot Backwards

PUTTING MY BEST FOOT BACKWARDS

I had interrupted my wife’s evening monologue, something about knitting a scarf for the neighbor’s cat, to read the staggering prediction that there will be 4 ½ million home accidents in our country this year.

Give the woman credit (every store in town has--why should you be an exception?), no sooner had she run that figure through her mental maze than she came up with the definitive answer. "Let’s move," she said.

Now, that reply is not as stupid as 4 ½ million home accidents in our country this year.

Give the woman credit (every store in town has--why should you be an exception?), no sooner had she run that figure through her mental maze than she came up with the definitive answer. "Let’s move," she said.

Now, that reply is not as stupid as you might thing. (I’d rather stay out of it, if you don’t mind.) In fact, if we were to move into a house without stairs, bathroom or windows, the idea would be one of her best. Stairs alone account for nearly half of all the headers that keep our nation’s fracture wards in business.

Eventually I would join the stairs bunch. But before that, proud little old me was not going to have friends coming in to scribble graffiti on my leg cast as the result of a mundane fall down the stairs. And since I couldn’t afford to get my bell rung, as they say in football circles, on an Aspen ski slope, I did the next best thing and took to the roof of our house.

My first escapade of note was cleaning out the gutter and coming down the ladder without benefit of hands. While my dear wife was thoughtfully draping the welcome mat ovr me until she could get help, she suggested that perhaps it would have been better if I hadn’t had the vacuum cleaner in my arms at the time.

My next exploit proved even more colorful, thanks partly to a windstorm that reportedly blew all the feathers off a flock of chickens in the next county. But when my schedule calls for painting the TV antenna, no 90-mile-an-hour gale, or wife, or common sense is going to interfere.

Wedging a can of spray aluminum paint into my hip pocket, I scaled the ladder, inched my way up to the antenna (one of those tall suckers having its own narrow ladder) and worked my way to the top. In the process my hat sailed off to join the chicken feathers in the next county and I came within three fingers of going with it.

Managing to work the can out of my pocket, however, I took aim at one of the antenna arms--and got the first, and only, shot squarely in the face.

My glasses completely coated, I fumbled my way down to the roof, then mistook the rose trellis for the ladder to the ground. Luckily, my dear wife happened to spot me crawling past the basement window and came up to ask if she could help me look for something.

That’s the scary thing bout home accidents. A guy can eat fiber until it comes out his ears, and have one of those high, intelligent foreheads that require him to stoop at most doorways, and still these things happen. The scars on my high, intelligent forehead didn’t all come from banging into my dear wife’s macrame pots. I’ve worn this star-shaped one ever since the Christmas I tried to place the star atop the tree from a scaffold consisting of the recliner chair, the footstool and the shoeshine kit. Fortunately, the tree when with me, or I might not be around to write about it.

The skateboard incident I hold not so much against the kid who left it in the upstairs hallway as against the new bifocals that led me to mistake it for the floor. Now that I have recovered, excepts for a slight hitch in my left leg on rainy days, I’m thinking of writing to the Olympic committee and suggesting they add the event to their games in 2104. After all, there’s not that much difference in the luge, which has a man coming down the track lying on his back on a bobsled, and the lunge, where the man comes down the stairs lying on his back on a skateboard.

As for the thrills, according to my family it’s no more exciting to see a sled leave the course and go into a stand of poplars than to watch a man on a skateboard shoot over the stair rail and disappear behind the sofa. But I wouldn’t know.

Then, no sooner had I adjusted to the bifocals to where I could board a bus on my feet instead of on my shins than the optometrist warned me: "We still aren’t feeding our corneas." I told him I would leave a saucer of warm milk on the nightstand every night and our corneas could help themselves

Which bring us to the night we had the Perkins for dinner. With mint sauce, they’re delicious. Okay, I’ll rephrase it. The night we invited the Perkins to have dinner with us.

Having forgotten their unsociable habit of being on time, we were upstairs dressing when they rang our chimes. Now, unfortunately, our front door was designed with one of those beveled glass panels that permit a caller to peep in and see if we are trying to hide or perhaps hightail it out the back door. On this occasion what the peepers saw was me, in shirtsleeves and bifocals, rushing down to welcome them, mistaking the bottom step of the stairs for the floor and instead of turning toward the door plunging across the living room and ending up draped over the television with a fractured pelvis. And there’s nothing more uncomfortable than sitting around half the night making small talk with a busted pelvis.

The night of April 14, Income Tax Frenzy Night, as it’s known at our house, I was required to ascend to the attic to check my "long-term capital-loss carry-over." Our attic is spooky enough at best. At worst, which is late at night with wind moaning through the pine trees and branches brushing the windows, you can have it.

Not even our daughter’s crayoned sign, "NO BOYS ALOUD," thumbtacked to the attic door, prepared me. I did remember to duck my head to avoid being scalped by the nails coming through the roofing boards. But I didn’t know that the girls had taken a radio up there--presumably to keep abreast of world affairs while cutting out paper dolls. Nor did I know that the radio had begun warming up as soon as I hit the attic light switch.

I still believe if the thing had come on with music, or even a newscast, I might have held my ground. But when out of the shadows cast by that naked light bulb a Kissinger-type voice growled, "Vun more step und you are a dead man!" not only did I take vun more step but it was a dandy. And in the process the nails from the roofing boards combed my hair well below the scalp. For the next two weeks my forehead could have been rented out as a cribbage board.

To make a lasting impression, however, stairs accidents don’t necessarily have to be physically painful.

The accident that promises to last me as long as I last goes back to the afternoon my office buddy Ed rushed me home from work to change clothes and grab my golf clubs in hopes of beating the crowd to the first tee at River View. Dashing into the house and up the stairs, I made it to the landing before noticing that I had come out of my shoes. They lay on steps two and four from the bottom. And my socks were stuck to the landing.

"Don’t use the stairs!" my dear wife yelled from the basement. &qu