My plan to walk to work was sidetracked this morning by a phone call right after breakfast. There had been a cancellation. Could I come for an MRI this afternoon? (I am supposed to get an MRI every six months to check on the progress, or regress, of a benign tumour situated underneath my brain.) Of course I could.
So, after lunch, I set off on the short walk up Albert Street to the imaging clinic. The sidewalks are covered in ice. Intersections–anywhere the spinning wheels of vehicles have polished the ice into a surface more appropriate for skating than walking–are particularly treacherous. I carefully picked my way over the lumpy ice. I didn’t want to be late, so when the path wasn’t dangerous, I hurried. As usual, I hadn’t quite matched my clothing with the temperature, and by the time I got to the clinic, I was damp with perspiration.
This was my third MRI, and it was like the first two. The machine’s noises reminded me of industrial dance music, although this time it seemed louder than before. It seemed to take forever, but time also seemed to stop. Periodically I would open my eyes and focus on the curved panel inches above my head. Then, suddenly, the test ended. I got dressed and walked home.
Last night, I read Tanis MacDonald’s thoughtful essay, “Falling: A Reckoning,” published in her recent book Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female. I’m teaching Straggle next week, and I was happy to reread it carefully, thinking about the text through the questions my students might ask about it. In that essay, MacDonald discusses falling in performance art, pratfalls in movies and real life, falls she has taken and witnessed. Falling, she tells us, is a corrective: “remember, nothing belongs to you, not even balance” (174). “What if we acknowledged the presence of ungainliness in the world?” she asks (171). It’s an important question. Perhaps we value grace too highly; perhaps we need to accept our imperfections, our failures, our slips and spills. Perhaps my anxiety about falling on these sidewalks is overblown. Perhaps it’s just my pride, worrying about the humiliation of landing on my ass in front of strangers.
But then I remember friends who have fallen on ice during Saskatchewan winters and ended up broken bones or concussions. It’s not the falling, I realize; it’s the landing, and what the collision of my aging body with ice and concrete might mean. How long would it take to heal after a serious fall? Longer than it would’ve taken decades ago, when my muscles and bones were younger. I think about crutches, physiotherapy, the questions about metal screws and plates inside my body that I answer prior to every MRI test. Nothing, not even balance, might belong to me, but I want to maintain the illusion that it does, at least for a little while longer.
Work Cited
MacDonald, Tanis. Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female. Wolsak and Wynn, 2022.
