My neighbor pulled to a stop on the corner across from my residence, lowered the window on her car and called out to me, “Are you OK CJ?” She had just seen me execute a 6’ 1’’, 178-pound body drop onto the snow and ice. I reassured her that I was indeed, OK, and resumed a more dignified standing pose, so that I could continue toward the pub where I intended to shoot pool. Snow fell from the arms of my jacket and the legs of my pants, and as I brushed the ice from my pool case, I pondered the time-old question: Was that an embarrassment?
I used to say to my children and any other person who might be interested that, “I haven’t fallen since I was eight years old.” It is my joke, of course; I am of the age when my annual medical reviews ask if I have had falls in the past year. I have chuckled at the question, and boldly marked “No,” or “None.” Three years ago, when I was visiting friends in Cincinnati Ohio, I tripped on some garden twine and fell to my knee, the first fall that I have had to put into my permanent medical record. But this winter has presented a challenge to me and my perambulations: walking is treacherous.
No one who has known me for more than 38 seconds can be unaware of my distaste for the season called “winter.” When my younger two children were, well – younger – their mother and I would read a book to them. “Happy Winter” by Karen Gundersheimer was a delightful read for them; Gundersheimer wrote of “frosty patterns” that “look like lace” on the windows, and continues, “Surprise! Surprise! Snow’s everywhere! … Hooray for the snow that fell last night!” I choked out those words for my two children, and never cried out in disagreement that winter was never happy for me. I grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and walked uphill both ways to and from grade school, plowing through waist-deep snow. There were no school buses and no “snow days.” My first bride and I took off for California soon after we married, and I never had a bad day in that state. But here in St. Cloud’s … uh, Indianapolis, there is nasty snow and ice.
On that fateful “fall day” that started this account, I had helped the ladies of the Weekly View deliver our weekly offering. Paula Nicewanger, co-owner, and Creative director, drove the car and I scrambled into and out of it with bundles of papers for our distributors. I clambered over mountains of snow and ice that had been pushed to the curb by street-cleaning equipment and stepped gingerly onto the glazed sidewalks. After we completed our appointed rounds, Paula dropped me off at home, but had to return immediately to allow me to retrieve a package I had left in the trunk of her car. She pulled up to my abode, I shuffled out to her car and then, foreshadowing my evening event, planted my butt onto the snow and ice.
Indiana Live’s Trivia at Si Greene’s Pub on Thursdays gives hints to questions that will come up. One of the hints on my “flop day” was about group names; a flock of crows is called “a murder,” a group of flamingoes is “a flamboyance.” I discovered that a group of pandas is called “an embarrassment.”
I contend that a grown man flopping onto his back on the ice and snow is the true embarrassment: The embarrassment of winter.
cjon3acd@att.net