Just Another Day In the Life

If you are thinking of becoming my friend, there is one thing I must confess about myself: I am absolutely capable of causing an embarrassing, very public scene; often and through no direct fault of my own. Er...I mean I suppose I am somewhat at fault because it is a fact that I am very, very clumsy.

I chose last summer to demonstrate my ineptitude to the crowds that swarmed around downtown Minneapolis, who obviously didn't have enough to deal with at the time. I was feeling more self-conscious than usual, since I had recently moved to the downtown area from a small town and was deathly afraid of showing my status as a transplant. At that time I did approximately all of my shopping at Target for the simple reason that every time I tried to go somewhere else I got lost. (Never, ever use the words 'north', 'south', 'east' or 'west' on me. Just point.)

I spent a good hour and a half wandering around the store; up escalators and down elevators, coveting merchandise in every make-up aisle, lusting after fruits and meats and pastries and harboring a general covetousness towards everything I saw until I was too tired and disoriented to look at one more item. I made my meandering way through the self-checkout with my meager finds and headed towards the exit.

Revolving doors confuse me. I am unsure of the exact moment when it is politic to enter, how many spaces you should leave between you and the person who got on before you, the speed at which to enter or exit the contraption, and fear many other possible breaches of etiquette. As I maneuvered my bags and my self through the entry, a commotion across the street caught my attention through the side window.

I am, along with everything else, very nearsighted, so I unwittingly stopped mid-stride to get a good look at what was happening. Unfortunately, the throng of shoppers whirling their way through in the other compartments were not terribly keen on accommodating my sudden full-stop, mid-trip around. Without further ado, a glass door rushed up behind me and knocked me in the back of the head so forcefully that I flew forward and my forehead had a head-on collision with the glass partition in front of me.

This whip-lashing combination of movement and contact had the undesired effect of knocking me out for a few seconds. When I came to, I was lying in a crumpled heap with my left leg stretched straight out onto the sidewalk, and my right leg curled up against me like a fiddle-head fern. I couldn't move ~ neither my muscles or my nerves had the slightest fight left in them. I stared at the homeless people sitting on chairs or standing around on the sidewalk, and they stared at me, possibly considering the thought that there may be worse things, after all, than being homeless.

All in all, I probably only held up foot traffic for less than a minute, and when I finally regained my feet, I wobbled home with a flaming face, blood dripping down my forehead and my poor body sporting more than the usual number of bruises. I spent the next week nursing a headache and sleeping far more than was healthy. I finally ended up talking to a nurse, who confirmed that I had, indeed managed to collect the second of three concussions to date.

I had two months of recovery before tripping on the sidewalk and breaking my hand...but that is a tale for another time. I am relatively certain that my last word will be, "Oops...."