So, what did you do last weekend? The one before Easter weekend, I mean. It was good, eh, but not as good as the Easter weekend on account of the Easter weekend was a holiday weekend? I hear ya.
Me? Oh, nothing much. Just, you know, fell down. Broke my ankle. Five stitches in my hand. Went out for supper. The usual stupidity for Mr. Clumsypants, here. It’s so much fun being both stupid and clumsy at the same time.
So I’m in Calgary with my friends Ron and Paul from our old (very old) band called SAM, and we had a lovely day in Richard’s recording studio thrashing away trying to remember how to play some tunes from the 1960s, whereupon it was time to head for home.
It was a day of Pepsi and stale sandwiches from the convenience store, nothing more, I swear, and we are chatting away, well that is — I’m chatting away as usual and we are walking along Richard’s backyard patio to our car and I didn’t see that there was a small step or two at the end of the patio and so I miss the step and so I fall down.
Stepped on the old (very old) ankle, rolled it over and went down like a sack of hammers more or less into a small fence that Richard has around some garbage cans at the side of the garage.
It wasn’t all that graceful a move I can tell you, and it was more than a tad embarrassing.
Laying there for a moment, the guys asking me if I was OK, me thinking: “Oh, this isn’t very good.” Certain parts of my life flashing before my eyes.
Like the last time I really hurt my ankle. Flashback to many moons ago, when my Better Half was still only my girlfriend (GF), and she was living in Edmonton taking classes with Alberta Ballet, and I’m heading up to bring her back home for the weekend.
For some reason, I’m carrying a TV, a medium-sized countertop television set, and yes, I step off the back step and turn my ankle and fall — hopping down the sidewalk in blinding pain holding onto the TV set and trying to find a place to land.
I remember plunking the TV in a snow bank and then falling face-first beside it. I was whimpering away and grunting such bad words through clenched teeth that it nearly turned the snow blue.
To make a short story long, I somehow got the TV in the back seat of the old ’67 Mercedes that I still have parked in pieces out at my sister’s farm, and somehow manage to drive the standard stick shift to Edmonton.
Ended up at emergency (back in the days when the wait was only several hours or so) with torn ligaments, 14 pounds of thick white tape from my toes to my knee, and crutches.
The GF and I meet our good friend who shall remain nameless on account of he’s a member of the legal profession, and he (Kirk) makes me stump along on a surprisingly excruciating ankle, the crutches already a royal pain in the armpits and hands, all the way across the U of A campus, needlessly and solely for his own amusement, as I limped and grunted like a three-legged dog.
So that dumb ankle has been weak and waiting all these years like a little time bomb for me to do the old fall-down-the-steps routine again.
And I’ve done it several, well, many times since then, but never like my swan dive off of Richard’s patio.
So the other day I manage to get back up and I notice there’s a rip in the palm of my hand deep enough to allow me to see the inner anatomical workings that I don’t want to see, and I’m hopping along to Ron’s vehicle blaming it all on him on account of he made me carry his guitar stand, which is a little folded up thing that obviously threw off my balance and caused me to crash like a doofus.
I get Ron back by bleeding all over the back seat of his truck, but by the time we make it down the QE2 it’s all good and we decide to go for supper where some good food, good company and good beverages seem to help a great deal.
The BH picks me up on her way home from working late, shaking her head at me because she knows me too well. Only this time she’s driving and Kirk isn’t there to make me limp around for an hour or two.
So the next morning is Sunday, of course, it’s always Sunday when you need a doctor, and we find a walk-in clinic that’s actually open.
“It’s X-ray for the foot and stitches for the hand,” the good doctor says with a very distinctive British/Dutch/German hybrid accent that clearly comes from South Africa.
“So,” I say, wincing away, trying to make lame conversation. “You’re not from around here, are you.”
“No,” he says in Afrikaans English. “I’m from Manitoba.”
And we laugh, which causes me to go “Oww!”
Turns out he moved to South Africa from Canada as a child, and we had a very interesting chat as he poked various sharp instruments into the palm of my hand.
So for three days I hobble around with a large sock on my bass drum foot and a large bandage on my cymbal hand, and I finally get a phone call from the lady at the clinic.
“You have several small avulsion fractures,” she says and I say what does that mean and she says she doesn’t know and I say how do you spell it and I’ll look it up.
“The doctor says to keep on wearing the air cast boot that he recommended,” she says, and I make a note to go get an air cast boot thingie.
So after visiting my regular good Dr. M., who confirms a lateral malleolus fracture, which I have to go home and look up, here I am clomping around with a Star Wars Storm Trouper ski boot thingie that cost me 160 bucks, and a bandage on my hand and I’m steadfastly avoiding patios and steps of any kind.
And wouldn’t you know it, a bunch of us from the old (very, very old) Gaetz Ave. Dance Band are rehearsing this weekend. I figure I still should be able to make enough noise on the drums to keep up, but I’m not carrying any guitar stands.
Or TV sets either.
At least not until next time I decide to get clumsy and stupid at the same time.
Harley Hay is a local freelance writer, award-winning author, filmmaker and musician. His column appears on Saturdays in the Advocate. His books can be found at Chapters, Coles and Sunworks in Red Deer.