Just after our improvised family Thanksgiving, I strolled naked onto my patio and fell headfirst into our Meyer lemon tree. As I lay there in the garden, bleeding from a dozen different places on my body, Meredy crying out to me…or perhaps it was me crying to her…I had one of those realizations that had been tapping me on the shoulder for months and now just slapped me in the face..or hit me over the head…or, actually, brought me down to earth: I am getting old. That is, too old to move as quickly as had been my habit these years. That is, too old to polish off a bottle of wine and then walk out into a dark garden. That is, too old to have a whiskey night cap and not expect to find myself impaled by a lemon tree on my way to the hot tub.
The signs had been coming, but of course I ignored them: a moment of unsteadiness when rising from a chair; the wobble as I stepped up a ladder; the bruises on my hips from bumping into doorways, bookshelves, chairs. A couple of weeks before, I had had a quick and happy recovery from a minor heart surgery. (I had two clips placed on my mitral valve) and I felt newly energized, having repaired my leaky pump. So I took Duke out for a hike, walking down a long, leafy corridor on the edge of Soule Park which required traversing a ditch at the end to get to the dog park. I made it down one side OK, stumbled a bit on the stones and leaves and decided that the best way to get up the other side was to charge up…bad choice. I did get to the top, with Duke pulling a bit to get to the dog park, but I was surprised to find my momentum continuing, my legs churning to stay under my body, finally resigning myself to a tuck and roll, careening down the side of the ditch into a bed of rocks and leaves. As one does in such situations, I laid there on my back and did a brief triage to see what was broken …which was nothing. I was just bleeding from both arms and a knee. Meanwhile, Duke, a very empathetic soul, was trying to give me CPR…”You OK? You OK?”
My point of relating this here is that I wrote it off as a one-off accident, not as an omen of age. It took the lemon tree to suggest that there may be a greater problem. Well there are strategies: begin to add balancing exercises to my day; focus on moving more consciously; cut back on alcohol, think twice before attempting much of what I have previously done with ease (Hire the gardener to blow off the roof and gutters. Request a spotter when I climb a few steps up to store something in the rafters of the garage, or try to stand on a stool to get those top tree ornaments just right.) It seems that, up until now, I had relegated the aging process to hair loss, wrinkles, and regular aches and pains…a trick knee, a sore morning back, etc. Yet, while these are indeed unsettling, they are not life threatening. Falling is in a whole new category of aging.
So, like so many of the lessons that have learned in life is the lesson that I am a slow learner, that my head is often several steps ahead of my body. Meredy says that she wishes that she had taken a picture of me sprawled and bleeding, naked under the lemon tree, a destroyed potted plant between my legs. I am pleased that she did not, for the moment is stuck in my mind, so it does not have to be in anyone else’s…..of course now it is in yours. But I do not mind sharing my humiliation. It makes me own it in a way. To further illustrate the slowness of my learning, I have been reading and semi-practicing Buddhism for more than half of my life, only to learn at 79 the importance of balance.