He Fell. No, Really.

Today I was discussing topics for memoirs with my students. one student recounted a story in which his siblings rolled him up in a carpet and pushed him down the stairs. This reminded me of a similar event with my own siblings on a set of stairs.

First, I must have you travel with me to an event prior to this. I was six, my sister was five, and my brother was three. We and our parents were living in a small 2-bedroom apartment outside the air base where my dad is stationed. I don't know why they stationed him at this one base because they turned around and sent him to school at another, and we didn't have him around. Anyhooooo, it was a cramped situation. I had a bed on oneside of a bedroom, and my brother and sister shared another across the room.

One morning my sister and I woke up to find the house eerily empty. Our brother was gone and so was our mom. We searched each room, but we were alone. We went upstairs to tell our neighbor, a nice woman with a daughter in my class. She explained that my brother had fallen out of bed and broken his collar bone. My mother was with him at the hospital. We were to get ready for school, and she would take us. I suppose it would have been less scary had my mother just woke us up and told us to go the neighbor's. On the other hand, how are you going to wake up two kids who are sleeping through a screaming baby brother? We later found out that he actually rolled over my sister and fell out on the opposite side of the bed. I guess you could say we were deep sleepers.

Years later my mother recounted that at the hospital, the doctors kept asking my brother how it happened. He kept crying, "I fell. I fell." The doctors just gave my mother dirty looks.


Flash forward. I'm ten, my sister is nine, and my brother is almost eight. Again, we're temporarily in one place and my dad is in another. During the summer we had gotten a pool - one of those small ones with corrugated sides and a plastic liner. Now that it was winter, we used the liner as a tent. When we were bored with that, we came up with a new idea. At the house we rented, they had stairs from outside to the basement. For some odd reason, the railing went straight across to the wall rather than down the sides with the stairs. So we decided to drape the line over he railing and hide on the steps. Then we got rocks and put them around the liner to hold it in place. THEN, we took turns getting ON the liner while the other two pushed the rocks off. The person in the middle was slowly lowered down the stairs like an elevator.

While my brother was on the liner my sister asked, "I wonder what would happen if we pushed them all off at the same time?" So like any budding scientist, we put the question into a hypothesis (We predict he will still go down.) and proceeded with the experiment. One side of the liner gave way and my brother was slammed into the wall along the side of the stairs and then dropped unceremoniously onto the cement landing face first.

My brother let out a wail. We girls ran . . . down the street . . . away . . . My mother loaded my brother in the car and passed us. "You girls head back to the neighbor's. I'll be back." We knew what that meant.

When my mother came home, she was steamed. My brother's face was swollen like a red tomato with a black eye. His bruises were fantastic. Every time the doctors asked my brother what happened, he cried loudly and said, "I fell, I fell." They gave my mother dirty looks.

My brother has survived his bumps and bruises (with no help from us). I'll have to thank him for giving us good material for stories.