My world and welcome to it, B. I'm the pratfall queen. I've tripped up and fallen down more stairs than I can count, sometimes spectacularly. And if there's one square inch of mud on a sidewalk, I'll find it and skid on it like Frick and Frack doing their ice routine.
My earliest encounter with stairs was as a toddler, about a year old. My mother swears she can still see the little plaid dress I was wearing when I waddled over to our stairs, just out of her reach (she was 7 months pregnant with my sister Chris and couldn't run fast enough to catch me.) I tumbled down all 15 steps. My grandmother got the hysterical phone call - Dad was out of town and Mom was supposed to pick him up at the airport. I was bloodied but unbroken, amazingly enough. In later years I'd take another slip down those same stairs and put my foot through the wooden slats of the cold air box at the bottom - again, no damage to me.
At least once a year I go flying, usually on a patch of ice but have never yet - knock wood - broken anything. I've slammed into a steam radiator on a landing, failed to break through a line playing "Red Rover" and skinned my back on the asphalt where I landed, had a milk truck run over my foot (thank goodness for saddle shoes), had the wind knocked out of me slipping on the back steps of my dorm, etc. So graceful. My family's favorite was a trip (no pun intended) to the state fair when I was about 11-12. We went to the Coliseum to watch the horse shows. The steps are concrete and narrow. My younger siblings ran all the way up to the top row, and Dad sent me up to bring them back down to where we were sitting. Well, last one up, first one down. I missed my footing as I turned, and tumbled down three-quarters of the staircase. I can still see strangers' hands reaching out to try and break my fall. No damage except to my dignity but it was almost 30 years before I set foot in that building again.
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