Bump in the Night

Darkened with bruising even these seven days later, my back looks like a map drawn by a caveman.  That's why I haven't written here for a while.It wasn't because because of the end-of-year party we put on in the organization so close to my heart, or because of the graduation ceremonies the following day. It wasn't because because I have had nightly visitors in the form of alums of that same organization who are so much fun to be around I could practically sell tickets to strangers to come hang out with them. And it wasn't because I gave an hour-long talk last Friday at the local high school, or because of the DMV trip I made with my favorite new driver, or because of the potluck supper I went to, bringing crab cakes on a bed of greens, as promised.It was only because last Tuesday night I once again got a 10-on-a-scale-of-10 leg cramp, causing me to shoot out of bed with pain that felt as if the character the Mountain from Game of Thrones was twisting my leg off.I ran into the bathroom for hot water - I find my leg cramps are eased by hot water.“Fill the tub!” I thought, but that would take too long and the pain was too excruciating.  “Hoist the foot into the sink like when you’re shaving your legs and run hot water on your calf that way!" – only how could I do that, stand storklike on one leg when my knees were knocking so?“Wait, why are my knees knocking?" asked myself.  And why am I light in the head?”“Ah, Terry," came the answer from some wiser, more inner voice.  "Do you never learn? You are light in the head because any minute now you are going...to...faint. I tried to sit down so I wouldn't hit my head, like I did that time ten years ago when they made me wear a Holter monitor around for a week because they didn’t believe it was just a faint brought on by a leg cramp.And did sit down – I think. All I really remember is that there was a sharp crack! - then a brief blank period - and then I woke, halfway into doing a sudden sit-up. Thirty seconds later I was back in the bed.“What was all THAT? said David who has grown used to loud noises when to comes to his wife."Oh nothing," I said. "I fainted.” And I really did think it was nothing.The next day though, when I went to the Y for Pilates and found I couldn't sit. I guess I’m a little slow. "Really?" was what I thought.  "You can have arthritis in your sitz bones?” Then, an hour later, the class over, I reached for the car door and felt pain in my arm. "Really?" I thought again. "That shot I got at my annual exam is STILL hurting after all this time?"It wasn't until two days after when toweling off after a shower in our bathroom with the mirrored wall just opposite the tri-fold mirrors over the sink that I saw: I was - and still am - black and blue everywhere, on the delt of one arm, on my whole back, and, as I just saw this morning while in fact shaving my legs with one foot in the sink, on my left sitz bone, where the black and blue I got there a full week ago is still a lurid purple. I can’t picture any of it but I’m guessing I lost consciousness halfway through the-getting-down-so-I-wouldn’t-fall-down motion, landed hard on my bottom, had my torso slam back onto the tiles, even as I unconsciously kept my head upright, thus effecting that sudden sit-up I woke to find myself doing.I'm darkened with bruising even these seven days later, it's like I say: my whole dorsal side looks like a map drawn by a caveman, and all I can do is to wonder: How DID I clatter down to the floor really?And what would it take to get a nanny-cam installed in the bathroom, for the next time, because I mean really,  who doesn't love forensics? :-)

The Sound of Their Falling

On September 11th of last year I posted a piece based on the image of people jumping from another tall building. I wrote it in 2002 with the memory fresh in my mind of that footage  by those French brothers who were hoping to make a documentary about the firehouse right there in Lower Manhattan. Of course they too ended up racing to Ground Zero and the images they captured show how dazed and helpless the firefighters look as they stand in the lobby of Tower One trying to assess the situation. Then the bodies start dropping and the elderly chaplain begins looking disoriented as well as dazed and the next thing you know he’s being carried out, dead of heart failure. I found a little of this footage on YouTube and I’ll post it below.

It was the sound of their falling that I couldn't forget - until I read that Robert Pinsky poem about the people almost a hundred years ago who also jumped to avoid the flames. That was the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire of 1911 and the dead, young women mostly, had been locked in at their machines, company policy.

Strangely enough, it comforts you to read the poem. I keep my piece about it at the top of my home page here. It used to be what I thought of whenever I thought of this awful day. Now I also think of the two people David and I knew who died there and how almost a full year later they found a credit card belonging to one and a little finger belonging to another. And I also think for all we might do wrong here in America, what other country would spend more than a year moving 16 acres of ash and rubble, then sifting, sifting, sifting and doing the careful DNA work too, all so that the families of the victims  might someday have some peace?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg8FQiJ-Rcw&feature=related]