7:55pm June 3, 2015

“
Mrs. Whatsit went tumbling backward with the chair onto the floor, sandwich held high in one old claw. Water poured out the boot and ran out on the floor and the big braided rug.

“Oh dearie me,” Mrs. Whatsit said, lying on her back in the overturned chair, her feet in the air, one in a red and white striped sock, the other one still booted.

Mrs. Murry got to her feet, “Are you all right, Mrs. Whatsit?”

“If you have some liniment I’ll put it on my dignity,” Mrs. Whatsit said, still supine. “I think it’s sprained. A little oil of cloves mixed well with garlic is rather good." And she took a large bite of sandwich.

"Do please get up, Charles said. "I don’t like to see you lying there that way. You’re carrying things too far.”

“Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?”
”

—

Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle In Time

I can really relate to that passage right now. Yesterday, I had to walk two blocks, and part of the walk is a hill. It’s steep, and uphill or downhill it’s dangerous to me without crutches. But I was managing it with a cane, because I’d forgot about the crutches until I got to it.c

So I went there, had the meeting, and left for home. I’d gotten up and down the hill once just fine. I was almost home. Then I realized that I’d left my purse in the room upstairs. I couldn’t call anyone to come get it. My cell phone got canceled for reasons unknown that I have to look into now that I have money again. So I turned around to go back to get my purse, and stepped right off a high wooden curb into thin air. And then hard onto my hands and knees on the pavement of a parking lot. First time I’ve skinned my knee since I was a kid. (I did fall on the ground, I just never fell while balancing or climbing. Sort of like Viktor Krum was graceful in the air and clumsy and ungainly on the ground. My falls rarely caused much injury though. My body was durable.)

Sprained dignity is totally what this fall was about. I didn’t hurt anything badly. I feel a little banged up but not much worse than I already felt. I did feel really crappy when I got home, and took the limit of Tylenol that I’m humanly allowed without damaging my liver, but after that I’ve felt mostly fine.

But I remember lying on the ground wondering how I was going to get up. I’d saved my iPad from dying, so that was good. I wondered if I should type something out on the iPad and scream for help, or whether I should work out a way to get up. I strongly preferred working out a way to get up. I knew there were lots of people standing around in the parking lot, and i didn’t want to chance being helped up by, say, the teenage boy who had “ironically” yelled “hey BABY!” as I passed.

(Yes, I know that when they yell that at a fat short ‘woman’ with facial hair, a cane, suspenders, a checked shirt, a hat, and a big red backpack, slowly picking hir way down a hill with hir head hunched over staring at the ground in front of hir, they’re not voicing attraction in any way. It doesn’t bother me much anymore, although I did entertain brief, semi-amusing fantasies of whaling on them with my cane, just to see how they’d react.)

Anyway I figured out a way to pull myself up the curb. And from there my cane did the rest. Canes are very useful things.

Walking up the hill again was agony. I felt like if I put one foot wrong on the gravel I’d fall. I used to be able to enter into a relationship with something like a hill, feeling it out kinesthetically, almost effortlessly, like a mountain goat. One time I even echopraxically climbed up a rock right after a teacher who had told us not to bother trying because none of us could do it. I didn’t even think before following him up the same route without effort at all. Then even though all the other kids – all of them boys, which made him even less likely to believe that this 12-year-old ‘girl’ with not much upper body strength and no special gym class or sports accomplishments,

I got up there though, and I got my purse. On the way down the hill, though, I felt like I needed help. I was wearing my oxygen. I’m supposed to always wear oxygen when I walk, and I needed it. I was getting light-headed, and spacey, and the last thing I needed to do was space out and slide down the rest of the hill on my face.

So I asked my dad for help.

I said something along the lines of, “I know this is far from the hiking trips we used to take, but it feels about as strenuous as one of the harder parts of the shorter hikes maybe. And I really need help or I’m going to fall on my face.”

And every time my mind wandered, I heard his voice in my head clear as a bell, saying “caaaareful, now,” the same way he’d have said it in real life, unexpectedly too. And he said it all the way down the hill, then I rested on a couch outside the loading area of the second-hand store (everything’s overflowing because the college students are leaving and it’s a university town), then he made sure I got off the couch before I just stayed there forever. Then I made it home just fine, and was so happy I thanked him a zillion times.

He reminds me of Gandalf, after all the mess with the Balrog was over. Like all the bad parts removed, turned into something powerfully good beyond my understanding, but still undeniably who he is, his personality, his essence is still there.

I can’t say I understand a lot now, but I understand more of what happens after death for the luckiest people, than I understood before. It’s now my endeavor to meet him there one day. And as far as I know the only way to do that is to embrace love early and often and to follow it where it leads no matter how hard the road, because however hard the road seems, it’s better than what seems like the easy way at the time. Unfortunately I’ve still got a rather massive ego problem, like most people, so I want to take the easy way out at every turn. But every time I try I’m reminded that short cuts make long delays and all that. The easy way out is the hardest way forward. The hardest way is easiest, if we’d only ever fully recognize that.

I think I read something like that in the Tao Te Ching once, that book is amazing for condensing truth into as few words as possible.

Anyway, I don’t expect anyone else to believe my experiences, I would have trouble believing them myself if they didn’t match so well to what other people who knew him are saying. And if they weren’t so vivid and unexpected. Whatever’s going on, I think it’s beyond normal cognitive understanding.