Let’s see now, it must have been about 1993. I’m pretty sure, because it was not too long after we bought the house, and very shortly after I started using a daily dose of fiber laxative. These are milestones to remember, I hope you understand.

My morning ritual has been pretty much the same over the last decade or so. I get up, heat my cup of water, add the homemade coffee concentrate that I favor, grab the newspaper, and head down to the basement bathroom.

I usually drink about half of the coffee on the way downstairs, leave the covered and insulated cup on the chest freezer, take care of the usual morning requirements, including showering and shaving and others, finish the coffee and head back upstairs. The only recent change at the time of this story was a slightly more hurried attitude in preparing to descend to the basement bathroom, due to that recent addition of fiber to my bedtime routine. I remember that I was wearing moccasin-type slippers that my stepdaughter and wife had bought for me, and the large terry-cloth robe with big and floppy sleeves that was so warm and comfortable on Minnesota winter mornings. I carried the coffee mug in my left hand, clean underwear in my right, and the newspaper in the pit of that same right arm.

Now, about the moccasin-slippers; the sole of these very comfortable slippers was a stiff plastic. It was durable, and extremely slippery when worn on wet surfaces or carpet. The other major character in this little story is the carpet on the basement stairs…early-‘70s era shag carpet in a lovely black and white zebra pattern.

I pulled the heated water out of the microwave, added coffee concentrate, grabbed the above-mentioned newspaper and undergarment, kissed my lovely wife, and headed down the stairs in a hurry. My left foot hit the second step and did a perfect imitation of a comic-movie character’s foot that has just met a banana-peel in an unexpected place.

Time stopped.

I felt curiously light, as if I was floating. This might have been explained by the fact that I was – for all intents and purposes – suspended in air for an eternity. I looked “down” at my feet, and realized that what I saw “beneath” them was not the stairs; but was instead the wall that should have been facing me rather than being in the direction that my legs pointed. I instantly grasped the fact that there was a problem.

In that stretched-out moment, it occurred to me; “This is really going to hurt.” I found myself wondering in an idle fashion whether I would make first contact with the eighth, or the eleventh step. In the same instant that I wondered about which step, I realized that my wondering was irrelevant.

The handrail of our basement steps is of the standard two-inch dowel type. It reaches to within a few inches of the doorframe. The end of the dowel-handrail had slipped inside the floppy sleeve of my bathrobe, and at the very moment I was wondering about which step, it reached it’s deepest penetration and end of the slack allowed by the floppy sleeve. My forward motion stopped with a suddenness that I had heretofore not considered possible, and I was slammed to my back – stretched from step number three to step number seven. Coffee had sprayed everywhere, including all over me. I had a couple of body parts that were beginning to indicate the forerunners of serious pain, but nothing seemed to be broken.

As I lay there on the stairs, left arm still suspended from the handrail by the sleeve, I realized that I had got away with it. I wasn’t seriously hurt. The coffee would wash out. But, was there something else niggling at the back of my brain? Did something feel not quite right, even though I knew I hadn’t been seriously injured?
Then, it became clear to me.

If you recall, at the beginning of this story I made some mention of a daily fiber laxative…