The Luck of the Fall

When you slide on water someone spilled as you make your way to baggage claim at the Houston airport, carrying a very heavy backpack with writing journals and a book and your new reusable water bottle and lots of other stuff, and you're going to land on that crazy-hard floor (it's impossible to not fall once you lose your balance) but you somehow process HOW you need to fall, which happens in a split second, and maybe all those long-ago stage combat classes actually stay with you for the rest of your life, and you fall well (that's how you perceive it, anyway, from the perspective of someone witnessing), if there's an art to falling (the art of the fall - something Rena Shapiro perfected years ago, terrifying random strangers in a semi-regular prank), and tonight, after falling like that, you're popping back up gracefully (sort of) -- feeling kinda magical, like Mary Poppins -- after going down on your ass in the middle of an airport in Texas with a computer in your bag.

The computer is in a military case, but still...

So yes, you feel like a klutz, but you also feel like a break dancer.

And no matter how tired you are at midnight when you find yourself lying on the ground at the Houston Airport, wondering if this is a metaphor for something you need to pay attention to, when you pop back up and you're bounding on to baggage claim... nothing broken in your backpack or your body... you realize it's a hurrah moment.

And you want to sing "I Could Have Danced All Night" (it does occur to you), but you don't.

Because everything bad that could have happened after going down hard at the airport didn't.

And a little gift is no little thing.

Here's to the random falls that don't take us out. And of course, we're not invincible, but sometimes we're just so very lucky.
 
And a little bit balletic. 🙃