#4 "Awkwardness" -- Don

“Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.” – Mark Twain

If there were a support group for clumsy people, I’d consider joining it, but I would also spend every meeting worrying about who’s going to mash into my car in the parking lot as everyone left to go home.  The word “awkward” comes from an older English word “awke” meaning “turned the wrong way.”  I think the word “awkward” is itself awkward because even when I know I’ve spelled it correctly, it still looks wrong to me; perhaps it’s the strangeness of those two W’s separated by that single K.  The second W in the word sounds nothing like the first W, and I think the letter K lives in a state of perpetual embarrassment over this.

If only my own sense of perpetual embarrassment were as easy to explain as the letter K’s, then perhaps I’d have a clue as to the best way of coping with this dis-ease, but, alas, when you’re stuck sliding on the Giant Cosmic Banana Peel of Life, you don’t expect to nail the landing like a Russian gymnast. I suspect that most people feel at least a tinge of self-consciousness as they go about their daily routines, but I’m one of those people who would be utterly satisfied if I could just sustain the athleticism of a Weeble, who (as people of my generation know) “wobble, but they don’t fall down.” 

I’d like to imagine that for every person who is as über-uncoordinated as I am that there are other people out there somewhere who are so graceful and lithe that they could roller-skate while shopping for crystal stemware.   Lest readers think I’m exaggerating how klutzy I can be, I once broke a toe simply by walking down a flight of stairs in my own home.  You know that guy who opens up a kitchen cabinet and then reaches for something off the floor and bangs his skull on the cabinet door on his way back up?  Yeah, that guy is me.  Perhaps you’ll remember me better as the kid who was not merely the last person standing against the wall when teams were being picked for junior high phys-ed, but more often than not, the kid who was told by the members of the last team to go, “Look, we really don’t want you playing on our team.”  Although that was a long, long time ago, I can still remember thinking, “Well, at least we’re in agreement about that; I don’t want me playing on your team either.”

If there’s a lesson to be learned from dealing with a lifetime of being supremely uncoordinated, it’s probably this: go ahead and dance at weddings no matter how appalled and horrified the relatives may be at your exuberate ungainliness.  Go ahead and show them your best stuff even if your dance moves look as though they were choreographed by an epileptic.  The kinfolk will get over it.

Here’s the deal: our dignity ultimately comes more from the grace we demonstrate after we’ve fallen on our face than from our ability to avoid the fall in the first place. It doesn’t matter who you are, from time to time Fate is going to shove a pie in your face.  Sometimes you see the meringue coming at you, and other times, bam, out of the blue, you find yourself suddenly looking out at the world through a whipped-cream facial.  It is in those moments when we reveal our true character, and I have found that the best way to respond to these situations is to laugh along with everyone else. 

Once in an English class in front of an entire room of high school freshmen, I sat down on a wooden stool that instantly collapsed beneath me and sent me hurling to the floor.  The guffaws that exploded in the room were loud and authentic.  Now a less experienced teacher would have probably tried to regain control of the classroom by immediately resorting to that authoritarian tone of voice and commanding the students to get over it.  Trust me, that would never work.  The better tactic in a situation such as this is to laugh along with it by stepping outside of your ego for a moment and honestly asking yourself, “Well, wouldn’t you have laughed if you were a high school freshmen and you just saw your English teacher catapult to the floor?”  Ultimately, life offers too few opportunities for genuine laughs, and if you can laugh at yourself when gravity gets the better of you, you stand a much better chance of gaining the respect of others when you get back on your feet again. 

Here, I think, is an absolutely essential distinction we must make as we receive those random bumps and knocks that come at us as we navigate our way through The Funhouse We Call Life:  Just because people may be laughing at something that has happened to us does not mean we are necessarily being ridiculed by them.  Ridicule is mean-spirited and personal, and I have little tolerance for it (I don’t like it whenever someone intentionally tries to hurt my feelings, and I don’t put up with it whenever I think some bully is trying to harass another student in my classroom).   On the other hand, not everything that happens in life comes as a result of deliberate mockery or derision, and when we can learn to respond to what happens to us with a chuckle rather than a profanity, then we really are well on our way to becoming commanders of our own destinies.  If I were The Buddha, I think I would have told people, “Life can be pure joy only after you learn to get used to being kicked in the rump every fifteen minutes.”  I guess that’s why I’m not The Buddha.

Although everyone in my immediate family can tell you their own personal favorite “Don Hits The Ground Thunderously Hard” story (including the time I knocked myself out while testing a zip-line I constructed over the family’s pond and the time I landed on a pile of scrap metal while trying to swing across a ravine), I’ll end this blog post with a brief retelling of the time I mangled the muscles in my left leg by falling 12 feet straight down into a garbage pit. 

About once I year, I make a “get-rid-of-it” run to the dump where I throw out all the useless junk that accumulates in the basement or the barn because it is too big to put out with the rest of the regular weekly garbage.  On this particular trip, I was standing on the tailgate of my dad’s old Ford pickup truck kicking out the last bits of trash into the deep metal receptacle below.   At the Meigs County Refuge Transfer Station, you can park directly above the gigantic metal bins that get loaded onto the back of semis, and from this vantage point, it’s quite easy to just drop whatever you’re wanting to get rid of down into these bins below.  I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow the tailgate I was standing on decided it too belonged in the bottom of the garbage pit, and as it launched itself in a suicidal declaration of its independence from the rest of the truck, I went along for the ride.  I must have looked like a bizarre hillbilly surfer as I whizzed through the air and collided at the bottom with all manner of foul and pointy refuse.  I destroyed the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) in my knee and subsequently had to endure weeks of crutches and physical therapy, but at least I didn’t pass out this time.

As I looked up from my terminus amidst the debris at the bottom of the massive trash receptacle, I noticed two professional garbage men waiting their turn to jettison their truckloads into the bin I now occupied.  As they looked down at me from where they stood beside my dad’s old Ford pickup, I heard one say to the other, “Now that’s a rookie mistake.”

Okay, even with stars swirling around my eyes and despite being half-buried in crap, I had to laugh.

Olivia says:


I know you think you take awkward to the next level, but I disagree.


To me, you transcend awkwardness.  


What you do is art.  Even when I have watched a handful of those stunts first hand, I can still remember thinking "Wow ... he nails the landing!"  You may slip on every banana peel, but you make it look like you meant to do that.   Well, most of the time at least.  


My favorite and most cherished moment of awkwardness that bloomed into spectacular moment of embarrassment would definitely have to be a family dinner at Bob Evans, circa 2001.  


You know the one.  


Ellie was 9 and I was 11; we shared a booth-seat facing you and Mom.  When the waitress brought us our drinks, you grabbed a straw and prepared it as a blow-dart missel, as that is the instinct of most adolescents and men of all ages.  We ducked, menu-blocked, and otherwise squirmed while you choose your victim.  However, as fate would have it, a fake-out shot at Ellie and a gust from an opened door led your strawpaper up and above your 9-year-old target, to fall lightly, feather-like, on the short white curls of an old lady dining with her husband in the next booth.


"Olivia - go get that!" you say in stage whisper.  We both knew there is no force on earth that would persuade me to pluck that strawpaper from it's newfound nest.  


"Ellie!" You urge Ellie, who has not forgotten that she was the intended target to begin with, and who fanatically declines.  


Never had we ever encountered anything like this.  This conundrum is what I call the "awkward" portion of the experience.  


And worse, her husband had spotted it and was grinning like it was his birthday.  


"Embarrassing" is what describes the next part, when after realizing that you could not convince either of your children to retrieve it, you would have to go where no man had gone before.  


I genuinely have no idea what you said to that woman.  My mind wants it fill it with Yosemite Sam sputtering.  I just know that woman was not pleased to discover her probably salon-did hair was hosting an intruder.  


As you sat back down, I remember trying to pay vivid attention to how we would recover from that moment.  I probably looked over-dramatically with my mouth agape from face to face, as if to search out a cue for what was meant to be said next.  I think we probably just waited in silence punctuated by throat-clearing until the waitress came ten minutes later.   Talk about the longest ten minutes of age 11.  


Thanks for that, Dad.  Truly.   (And you wonder where I developed this taste for awkward moments?)


Yes father, indeed you have definitely earned some sort of minor record in the human triathlon of humiliation.   I can't even tell you how strangely nervous I felt while watching you jump on the trampoline when I was a child.  But what is truly incredible is you that always have the grit to make it to the next round in roughly one piece, if not the same shape.  And for that, you're incredible.  


Also, is that a shirt with a sweatshirt over it in the picture ...?  


Honestly though, I've loved that picture.  That picture is the definition of 'cowabunga'.