Life is an adventure, never ending; just when you think you’re on an even keel, the ground comes up to meet you. After church on Sunday I walked into the kitchen and slipped and fell and whacked my head hard into the corner of a wooden shelf over the table and felt blood on my forehead and went to find Jenny who was reading outdoors and she cried, “Oh my god,” and I said, “No, I’m only your husband.”

“Go to the bathroom!” she cried.
“Here? But I don’t need to.”
“Can you sit on the toilet?”
“I’ve done it thousands of times.”

She wiped blood up and put an ice pack on my head.
I suggested she put antiseptic on it.
“No, that’s old school,” she said.
I said, “So? I’m old.”

A bonk in the head led to a whole comedy routine. Remarkable.

I could feel I had rattled my brain, but I know that the mind is ever changing, gaps appear, sometimes enormous ones — I’m missing most of whatever I learned in college — and the secret of intelligence is forgetting what you don’t need. Einstein was able to come up with E=mc2 because he had only two kids, didn’t bother about his hair, skipped religion, didn’t care about sports, didn’t read fiction.

Me, I studied Henry James in college, pored over passages like Trying to ascertain if, indeed, Isabel intended to accompany him as promised to the soirée, glancing into her chambers he saw, reflected in the French mirror on her closet door, her pale naked figure like a classic Roman sculpture, the perfection of the image rendering it more like an idea than a living and breathing human — and thanks to him, I know less about economics than the average ten-year-old. Still, I know the basics. Early to bed, early to rise. Bird poop has to be cleaned off cushions or it creates a hole. Black is not a good color for a suitcase as you’d find at Baggage Claim when you see a hundred identical black bags go by: bright pink is better, sparkle green, puce, purple. Don’t drink alcohol and drive.

I quit alcohol 25 years ago when I had a small child and got drunk one night and put two and two together — “I don’t want her to see me like this and be embarrassed.” An easy decision.

I felt good Monday and celebrated by going to a barber, not a woman stylist who will nurture my hair as a sanctuary for my spirit on my earthly journey a but a guy with a revolving red-striped pole who’ll make me look nice.

Somehow the Sunday bump brought back a clear recollection of a miserable trip to Michigan years before, a delayed flight, lost prescriptions, a sleepless night, and a solo show in a theater, walking onstage to applause and feeling my whole monologue vanish from my head, a big whoosh of aphasia, a big blankness, so I stitched together other stuff, the story about throwing the rotten tomato at my sister and her chasing me across the yard and telling me I would spent eternity in hell fire, then Mazumbo the circus elephant tied to a stake and running his long trunk into the open window of the car as Dad pulled up next to him and all of us kids squealing as he sucked the hot dogs out of our hands, and then the World’s Largest Ball of Twine that a dairy farmer named Dick Nordquist created because he thought he might use the cord again and it grew to 15 feet in diameter and the hot core of the ball produced a gas, phlogiston, that cures phlegmaticism.

It was a good show. The laughs were long and hard, they made me feel like a famous stand-up comedian rather than a confused old man. Which is how I feel right now. Jenny wants me to see a doctor about the gash in the forehead and the weird dream I had Sunday night, and woke up and looked around for a “mouthpiece,” but I intend to move on.

Henry James’s brother William said, “Wisdom lies in knowing what to ignore.” Their nephew Jesse rode away from the banks he robbed and never looked back and his son Harry’s “Two O’Clock Jump” inspired the conception of thousands of children and his stepson Elmore sang,
I’m standin’ at the crossroads
And I don’t know which way to go.
But whichever way I’m heading
Is an adventure, that I know.

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