Michael D. Davis

Tiptoe is too great a phrase for it, and step is just an over exaggeration. My feet move forward, one then the other, a centimeter at a time, barely leaving the ground. My hands are out at my sides like a circus performer traveling across a wire. I think this helps, but in reality, it just looks like I’m doing an impression of a catwalk model in slow motion. This is the only way I travel across ice without falling. It works about 45% of the time.

As usual, the traits and abilities in my household have been split up among the four of us. My father and sister have the uncanny capability to walk across an icy plane like they’re in rubber soles on hardwood. My ma and I, on the other hand, fall at the honk of a horn. That actually isn’t an exaggeration; once in the middle of summer, I was walking in front of the car, my ma honked the horn, and I went down.

The ice only amplifies our falling issues, which persist year round. You would think, being short and fat, that I would have a low center of gravity and be able to stay upright. But no. My ma is worse than I am. She gets up from a chair, takes two steps, then wobbles like someone pushed her. It happens every time she gets up without fail. The near fall or wobble, seems to only happen a few thousand times a day.

The back steps leading into the kitchen from the garage have taken both me and Ma as victims at one time or another. When my ma fell on the back steps, she landed in a pile of garbage. This landing was made worse when she figured out she couldn’t get herself back up. My ma slammed her fist on the metal side of the garage until my dad appeared at the back door. The old man stood in the door, looked down the steps at his wife lying in the pile of garbage, and said, “What are ya doin’ down there?”

One of my best falls took place years ago. I was walking across the living room, my foot found a dryer sheet, I slipped, and kaboom. I went face down on the floor, and my one slipper went flying across the room. I have since had at least two more dryer sheet related slip and falls, which have instilled in me a very founded phobia of the things. How they keep getting on the floor, I don’t know; maybe someone in the house is just trying to kill me.

The ice simply aggravates the situation. If I can avoid it, I will. However, it also allows for the opportunity to see someone else fall, and that is just the best. Before you say, “Mike, that’s just sick! I’m never reading your column again. I have to go hug a woodchuck just to feel better.” Hear me out, and that’s just strange with the woodchuck, man. I don’t care who you are, It is always funny to see someone else beef it on the ice.

The perfect type of people to see take a header are those like my dad and sister. 99% of the time, they walk across the ice like Jesus across water, so they take confident strides, never looking down, then BLAMMO, their down. The near fall is just as fun to watch in these situations as the full fall, because their arms go out akimbo, and their faces distort in ways never thought possible. My ma likes to tell this story of my sister from middle school. Ma was picking her up one winter day. My sister walked around the back of the car, and all of a sudden, she was gone. She’d slipped and went right under the car.

Before I go, I’ll tell one more of my fall stories for ya. It was sometime in the summer, and my sister, Ma, and I were carrying things in the house from the car. I grabbed a big old box and started across the driveway. I’d like to say I stepped in a hole, but in fact I don’t know what happened. Next thing I know, I was going down. I went down right behind my sister’s car, which was unfortunate because my head decided to bounce off her bumper. I wasn’t that hurt, but I was mad. I decided to leave the box and go in the front door, swearing all the way. And when I get to swearing, I swear like no one’s ever heard, inventing new profane phrases like an angry Lewis Carroll. And as I was walking and swearing up the sidewalk, I noticed there was a hole in our front yard. In the hole was a man working on some of our pipes. The face he had as he looked up at me from the hole as I strode past inventing a new lexicon of vulgarity, I think I’ll never forget.