writermag.com • The Writer | 5“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”
—Sylvia PlathNow, that’s a good writing prompt,
or a fine opportunity to spin narrative
out of scant information. Noting that
our patron was evaluating Tai Chi for
Beginners, and that another student in
the same class had already remarked
upon his or her improved balance since
taking Tai Chi, I freely assumed that
some portion of the students in this
class were oldish, perhaps even “elderly,”
because, as everyone knows, the oldish
but especially the elderly are more likely
to have balance that could use improv-
ing. It seems fair to extrapolate that the
student who wants a class on how to fall
down might also be oldish or even
elderly and wants to learn, literally, how
to fall down. Presumably without injury.
The toddlers in Saturday ballet class
could teach a class on how to fall down.
They have falling down figured out.
According to toddlers, the first thing
you do is you trip up on something:
your neighbor’s feet or maybe your
own. You go down. You are startled for
a moment, until you realize you have
had an upsetting incident. You wail. You
might need a kiss, but the kiss might not
be enough. You feel you might as well
die now because life is so awful. You
wallow in this feeling for a bit, until
your ballet teacher, “Miss Amy,” plays a
Louis Prima tune, which you just can’t
resist. You get up and dance.
The toddlers recommend “Pennies
from Heaven.”
When my son was a toddler, one of
his grandmas lived in the town of
Klamath Falls. When we told him we
were going to visit Grammy in Klamath
Falls, he felt called upon to correct us.
“No,” he said. “It’s Klamath Falls Down.”
See? Toddlers know all about it.
FALLING DOWN IS very common. I
myself came close to falling off the
front porch last week. My husband
used to take judo, and he informs me
that learning how to fall down is a veri-
fiable judo skill. I imagine there’s an art
to it, all right. This same husband fell
off a ladder awhile back with no
greater damage than a couple of sore
places. Of course, he has that judo
background. If I had fallen off that lad-
der, I suspect I would not have come
out of it with such flying colors.
My grandma fell down a month ago.
She’s 93 and has been using a walker to
get around her assisted-living apart-
ment, down the hall to the dining
room, and to chase wild turkeys when
they show up at her patio door. She
was in her kitchenette making coffee
when she let go of her walker for a sec-
ond, lost her balance, and went down.
Previous to her fall, Grandma had not
taken a class on how to fall down, and
if she knew how to do it when she was
a toddler, she has evidently forgotten.
She broke an ankle. Her doctor put her
in a cast, but Grandma either can’t
walk with the cast or she won’t. She has
since taken to her bed, where she now
sleeps upward of 20 hours a day. In
addition, she has gone off her feed and
is wearing adult diapers for the first
time. She tells us she is waiting to die.
When a frail elderly person falls, it is
not unusual that they break something,
stereotypically a hip. This fall, accompa-
nied by the broken something, often
heralds the beginning of the end – or, as
we caregivers call it, “CTD,” which is
caregiver code for “circling the drain.”
Grandma fell and broke something, and
now it kinda looks like she’s CTD. If our
student from Tai Chi for Beginners is
somewhat younger and further out
from the drain than my grandma, you
can imagine that he or she would bewary of getting any closer to it. It fol-
lows that if one can avoid the drain by
learning how to fall down without
breaking something, that looks like a
skill worth cultivating.ON THE ONE hand, a class on how to fall
down is a pretty specific request. Our
student has not asked for a class on how
to jump, or how to simply fall. This is
not a request for Skydiving, Bungee
Jumping, or Rappelling; our student
does not appear to be seeking adventure.
It’s not even a request for how to land –
which implies landing on one’s feet.
On the other hand, our student
might have meant “how to fall down”
figuratively, rather than literally.
Myself, I prefer this interpretation.
Writers, after all, are notoriously
unhappy with or at least unconvinced
by reality and are therefore partial to
the metaphorical, the speculative, or
even the wackadoodle interpretation
over the literal one. Long ago, in high
school biology, the teacher asked us to
write a “definition of life.” I wrote a
brilliant philosophical exposition on
life – on the meaning of life, on value
fulfillment, on our possibly immortal
souls. This was a biology class, though,
right? The teacher read my response
out loud in a blatantly smirky tone and
then asked the class, “Who can give me
a literal definition of life?”
My response at the time was abject
humiliation – a type of falling down if
ever there was. My response now would
be: Who cares? We obviously exist. I
don’t need to define that. I’m more
interested in what our existence means;
what it implies. I’m more interested in
that drain. What’s down there, anyway?
If you are a human being, it seems to
me you should learn how to fall down
in both the literal and the figurative
senses. If toddlers are any measure, it