It's the fall that's gonna kill you

This morning I was served a bagel by a kind-faced woman named Comfort. Almost three hours before that, I watched a man roughly my father's age run through a long-term parking lot with a suitcase on a flimsy cart.

He fell. I didn't actually see the fall, thank goodness, but was alerted to his troubles by the gasping of the couple on the airport shuttle bus.

There are really two kinds of falls -- one is the kind I had on Wednesday, when I was wearing my 3-inch Steve Madden mules, and which, when sweaty, become treacherous. I stepped wrongly on a curb while talking to Ted on the one busy street in downtown Chapel Hill. I didn't get hurt, and was only a little embarrassed, mostly because I work hard to maintain my blow-dried, almost-chic image with the many men who build and fix things every day in my little world.

This fall, however, was the other kind -- the kind we don't laugh at, and which broke my heart a little. I almost cried, even, as he tried to regain his brisk pace and met his wife at the steps of the shuttle to quickly load their multiple pieces of luggage.

He was dressed in what my dad would also consider a traveling outfit: pressed, pleated khakis, a plain tee shirt under a cotton pullover, also ironed, with a collar that would be perfectly at home on a golf course. He wore newer white sneakers, for comfort over fashion, no doubt, as my dad would. His hair was brown and carefully combed, and he wore glasses.

I think, as I saw a black pavement mark on his right shoulder and while he rubbed a scratched hand - an irritatingly painful injury, like hitting a funny bone - that I felt indignant for him. Somehow, a law of physics had failed him, this man focused on a mission in an already stressful time. He was, as my dad would have been, doing all the work of getting the luggage, trying to make it to these infrequent shuttles, (it was, after all, 4:50 am) and helping his wife.

And I think it is still disconcerting because if there was a moment of comfort, I didn't see it; their interactions after it happened were brisk and business, and then they moved to the front of the bus. I wanted to see her sympathetically laugh like a mother does when her 2-year old falls and benignly hits his head. I wanted to see her touch his arm, make the frowning smile face that says, "Poor baby." Instead, the air on the bus felt embarrassed, one of those moments where, even if the audience is full of strangers, you feel as if the accident has shamed your competence permanently.

Maybe when this man gets to his final destination today he will tell the story, laughing. "I mean, here it was 4 in the morning, dark and cold, and I fall . . ." Maybe his wife will laugh, too, as my mom would. Because at least there is an antidote for burning shame; these stories become comical after some time passes.

I hope he laughs today. And I hope the stain will come out of his shirt. And I can go back to concentrating on how to avoid getting sick though I am breathing the air of a cranky-faced woman in a teal(!) leather jacket coughing deeply in my space . . .