Klutzy McGee

I've decided that I don't really need to worry about eating healthy and exercising. Not only is that stuff lame, it's also unnecessary. At least for me. I don't need to worry about keeping my body healthy because there's no way I'm going to make it to old age. I'm sure I'll meet my demise by means of my own clumsiness WAY before the deterioration of my body becomes a factor. I don't know if I'm technically the World's Clumsiest Person, but I'm certain I could give the title holder a run for his or her money.

My brother--the guy who ran cross-country, played soccer and basketball, got a brightly colored belt in Tae Kwan Do, and fell 75 feet off a cliff-face he was rapplelling down--has never broken a bone. I'm not athletic, not even outdoorsy. I don't put myself in situations where injuries typically occur. Yet I've broken my toe, my tailbone, my elbow, and my nose (at least twice, but probably thrice).

I have so many "and this is where I burned myself when I accidentally..." stories that it's stopped being sad and started being a running gag.

One Sunday evening I managed to burn the backs of both hands on the oven door, then on Monday morning I proceeded to mangle (the palms this time) both hands and both knees when I tripped on asphalt while running the 50-yard dash in PE. (After I fell, I tried to get up too fast and fell backwards and konked my head--but you can't see that scar and there's a chance it wasn't actually a concussion, so it doesn't count.) Boy did I look cute limping around school with both hands swaddled in gauze.

I once fell into an empty boxcar. It's a long story.

I'm the kind of person who breaks things I'm not even touching. Just walking by things creates such a disturbance in the force that glass shatters and pictures fall off walls. The first Christmas after we got married, I washed the lovely glass pitcher we'd gotten from my aunt for our wedding and the beautiful (family heirloom) antique crystal pitcher Steve's grandmother gave us when we got engaged. I set them on the counter to dry, then left the room (the safest option considering my track record). A while later I went to get something from a cabinet and the pitchers both fell over and shattered while I was several feet away. For bonus points, I got a giant gash in my finger while trying to catch the falling pitchers. The only way I avoided a trip to the Emergency Room for stiches was to play the "I don't want to spend Christmas in the ER and I don't think you do, either" card.

The first time I had lunch with my future parents-in-law, I poured an impressive percentage of a pitcher of water in Larry's lap.

I've fallen down the stairs so many times we might as well just install matresses on the landing and the bottom. Or maybe on my bottom--that might be the most practical solution. (Of course, since I've decided to eschew dieting and exercising, I'm working on my own plan to add padding in that area.)

One of my funniest clumsy moments was a few weeks after I started officially dating a very nice Canadian boy named Ian. I was spending the weekend visiting Ian and his family and it seemed like a good opportunity for me to meet his best friend from high school--I think his name was Scott. We popped some popcorn and settled in to watch the Red Green Show. (That's what Canadians do on Saturday nights--it's the law.) I decided I wanted more pop or something and got up to go to the kitchen...and brought my heel down on the popcorn bowl with such force and perfection that popcorn exploded into the far corners of the room. I bet there wasn't one kernel left in the bowl. Now that's a meeting that will make an impression on a guy's best friend. I still feel a little badly about the popcorn incident...I bet they were still finding popcorn behind the TV and wedged in the window sills long after I broke up with poor Ian, so the reminders of our doomed love probably lingered long after the thrill was gone.

I'm so used to my clumsiness at this point that it doesn't even faze me anymore. Nowadays, unless it's a magnificently spectacular blunder, I don't even remember it an hour later. I wish I had a dollar (I know it used to be a nickel...inflation) for every time I've found a scratch, cut, bruise or scar and had no earthly idea how it got on my body. It's a good thing Steve is a sweet, gentle man. If I'd married a wife-beater, I'd never get anyone to believe that my bruises weren't from one of my trademarked pratfalls. Yep, if I told anyone who knows me that I got a black eye from walking into a door, they wouldn't give me that patented Lifetime Movie look of sympathy and concern. Nope, they'd just snicker and say, "It figures."