I am not used to being fragile. I’ve been through car crashes, fallen off cliffs, thrown from horses, slipped on ice, and once had a mineshaft start collapsing while a friend and I were exploring, but all in all I’ve been lucky and have escaped major injuries in this lifetime. But two bad falls this week have left me sore and bruised and feeling rather shaken. Their sudden unexpectedness has left a grim reminder that we aren’t always in control of everything, and as they say, stuff happens.

The first accident happened in – of all places – the local emergency care facility. My grandson and I were waiting in the car for his mom, and after a while the little fellow needed to use their restroom, so we were making our way across the parking lot when an uneven spot in the pavement tripped me up and I went down, hard. That bruised both knees and my wrist, and all three are still sore several days later.

The second incident happened yesterday as the same grandson and I were shopping. He was being playful and dodging around me, I reached to grab him up, missed, and hit the floor sideways, landing on my shoulder. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but a couple of hours later I couldn’t raise my arm over my head, and by late last night there was an unmistakable ache telling me something got bruised or worse.

This morning I am limping, gimping, and having trouble raising more than a coffee cup. Arnica is my friend, and I’m going to invest in a heating pad since I loaned all of mine to others in need many years ago. Meanwhile, there’s a quote by Mark Twain, one of my favorite authors, about accidents.

I only dimly remembered how it went, so I looked it up online: “There are no accidents, all things have a deep and calculated purpose; sometimes the methods employed by Providence seem strange and incongruous, but we have only to be patient and wait for the result: then we recognize that no others would have answered the purpose, and we are rebuked and humbled.” That quote is from “The Refuge of the Derelicts” published in Fables of Man, which was written in 1909. Knowing the context, I don’t think Twain had silly stumbling falls in mind when he wrote that, but no matter, it makes me feel better to think that perhaps there’s a reason for my accidents, even if it’s only message from the universe to slow down a tad.