I was so mad, eh? I
mean....what the blankety-blank goes on when you can't even walk down the
street? when you can't trust anything? - not the ground you walk on, not even
the feet that carry you. When you can't simply "put all your troubles in
your old kit bag, and smile smile smile" while you amble along - or hurry
along - whatever. The point is: you can't relax for one little second, lest the
gods, or fate, or some stupid little pointy-toed shoe that you never usually
wear, catches on a broken bit of sidewalk sticking up above what should have
been a flat, smooth surface. Thanks,
Toronto, for not keeping your public walkways in good repair. But why am I
wasting my time, lowering myself (literally, as you will see) to sarcasm and
insincere thanks? There are real thanks due somewhere, to someone, or
something. To heaven?
Perhaps. It was a miracle, after
all. An ordinary, out-of-the-ordinary miracle on Victoria Park, near Danforth
and the infamous Shoppers' World.
OK, so I
tripped, and began to fall, but only began, moving in a series of stop-action,
slow-motion stills, going from sudden lurch forward to half-bend,
arms-thrown-out-in-front, to overall wobble-with-one-arm-circling-back, to the
miracle: to myself caught in the timeless battle between heaven and earth, -
body splayed in a prone position, and hanging there, as if by strings from
above, like a Gulliverian suspension bridge, just THIS close to the ground. And
then the strings suddenly cut, gravity sucking me down in victory, and my body
jerked forward once again, upper limbs flailing out of the airplane position;
plane bound in free-fall for the ground, but then once again swooped up and
seemingly cradled by an invisible etheric force, and my body, delayed from the
inevitable crash, is guided and lifted to a standing position, sputtering with
evil curses, but upright.
Oh, I swore
long and loud, and a-plenty. A frightening, bone-threatening, ungainly and
embarrassing acrobatic act performed publicly will unleash anger and a streak
of blue that you never knew you had in you. You tremble and stomp at the same
time; you feel betrayed but fiercely determined, and finally you walk away,
seething, searching for the idiot with a cell phone that might have preserved
the shame. But as I walked, I couldn't help thinking back on the incident,
trying to reconstruct the few minutes that the almost-fall had actually taken.
I couldn't, but I had to admit that something strange had occurred, that by all
physical laws, I should have been smashed onto the concrete, with the fracture
clinic awaiting my arrival. But something weird had changed the natural course
of events. Was it my own mind, screaming NO!!! and willing myself into a
resistance that literally pulled me back? Or was it an intervention from
unknown spirits - souls who have known me perhaps, maybe even loved me, but who
were now gone from this life, watching from the world beyond? Did someone reach
down and grab me, holding me until my poor brain could scramble to receive my
own propriocentric transmissions, correct my motor functions, and finally
restore my balance? I will never know. However, after the anger and the
thinking, I was humbled; shocked and awed for sure, but then simply the witness
to my own amazing experience, an unbelieving believer in the unexplained. I
walk, therefore I talk: Gracias a la vida.
(Maybe it was just the greens I've been taking lately - a super-Popeye
response, you know?)
