the pride and the fall (part one)

My practice of falling started at a young age. At three I fell down the basement steps and hit my head on the cement floor. At six I was thrown from a trampoline and gashed my chin. At nine, I tumbled down the stairs, slammed into the front door, and broke my arm. I just couldn't seem to stay upright.

I remember once standing at the top of the stairs to ask my mother a question, and by the time she answered I was sprawled in the downstairs hallway.

And it wasn't just stairs. In sports I found all kinds of ways to fall. I fell into and off of and over people and into splits. I once tripped over an immobile soccer ball and skinned my nose. My coaches said they'd never seen anything like it.

I kept falling with the seasons. I fell through ice on the lake. I careened my sleds into stonewalls. Any form of snow-navigating objects on my feet left me floundering in snowbanks, entangled in trees. My mother would take me along for cross-country skiing, purely, I suspect, for her own entertainment.

Then, for some unfathomable reason, I spent one winter trying to learn to snowboard. The results I chronicled in a 9th grade English essay about how the experience was great fun for everyone on the mountain, save, of course, myself.

I couldn't even make it from the lodge to the lift without wiping out half a dozen times, frequently taking random passerby down with me. No one was safe, from pedestrians to lift attendants to snow patrol. I still wonder if my snowboard being stolen that year was an Act of God, or perhaps a vast conspiracy on the part of other mountain-goers.

But I was undeterred, and determined. I went against nature and kept renting.

And I only got worse as time went on. Every day I caused major traffic obstacles on both ends of the slope. I managed once to be dragged backwards by the J-bar up the entirety of the bunny hill.

When I did finally make it to the top, I gave a proud wave to my mother, spent ten minutes fastening my bindings, and slid directly into the one tree-like object in a half-mile radius. Once I disentangled myself, I shoved off again, this time into a group of snowboard instructors.

I made my final third of the journey on all fours, my butt sticking up in the air gorilla-like, as I slid backwards down the remaining three feet of slope into my mother.

I couldn't tell whether she was crying out of laughter or embarrassment. Once she composed herself, she said that this was even better than cross-country skiing.