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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
Funny how you can discover some basic facts about life when you’re well into your eighth decade.
One Friday afternoon during a Toronto rush hour, I was walking north on Avenue Road, making the most of the summery air. I hadn’t slept well the night before. I’d been dropping things and spilling things all morning. But I’d had a good nap after lunch and felt that I was okay.
Apparently not.
Crossing at an intersection, I tripped over the curb ... or something. I don’t actually know how it happened, but I did a face plant on the sidewalk.
In a moment like that, you see the sidewalk coming up at you and you think: “Okay, here we go, this is it!” Fortunately, that lasts for only a split second. Then contact is made and the damage is done.
I caught my breath and rolled over. It felt like there was a little cloud of blue air around me. Was that about pain and discomfort? Or anger at myself for being so clumsy?
And then I realized five or six people were surrounding me, trying to help. Three of them were key players.
The first was a woman of about 50: she had long brown hair and beautiful features clouded with worry. Crouching down at my level, she reached out to me, gentle but solicitous, with a professional manner. Maybe a doctor or a nurse? “Don’t stand up, don’t even try to stand up.”
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t think anything’s broken.”
She picked up my sunglasses from the sidewalk. “Oh, dear,” she said. “They’re bent.”
“That’s the least of my troubles.”
Everybody was noting that my face was bleeding. My hands, too.
The woman rushed toward a Tim Hortons to get something to wipe the blood off my face.
The man who took over next was about 40: lean, fit, fair hair, buzz cut. A sports coach or trainer? “Are you dizzy? Any shortness of breath? Any chest pain?” He asked if somebody could get me some water.
Remembering the plastic flask in my back pocket, I pulled it out and took a swig.
The coach asked a mite suspiciously, “What’s in the jug?”
“Water.”
“It’s pretty small for a water jug.”
“That’s so it will fit in my pocket,” I explained innocently.
The flask hadn’t broken but my bum was wet. Some water must have squeezed out of the flask when I rolled over.
The third attendant was my bodyguard: tall, husky, with a greying mustache. He was standing with his arms across his chest, making sure everything was being done right, grunting his assent when it was.
Store owners were standing on their stoops and watching.
The doctor came back with a wad of paper towels. “This was all I could get.” She held them toward my face but let me do the mopping up.
Somebody said they should find something softer.
A man pulled his car up to the curb on the wrong side of the road. My helpers asked if he had any tissues. He produced a wad of Kleenex. The kids in the back seat of the car were all agog at the back-seat window.
The sports coach asked the driver: “Do you have any antiseptic, some kind of sterilizer?”
The driver fumbled around in the car’s compartments and came up with a little bottle of hand sanitizer.
I pulled my own out.
“It’s going to hurt,” the coach said.
I slapped some on my cheekbone where most of the blood seemed to be. Surprisingly, it didn’t sting.
Reluctantly, my protectors let me stand. Nobody was actually lifting me up but somebody’s arms were hovering around me in case I lost my balance.
I stood for a minute or so.
“Is there anybody we can call for you?”
“Nope. I can make it home on my own,” I said.
“Where do you live?”
“Just a couple of blocks from here.” (A lie.)
“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?”
“Yeah, fine.”
As I started to back away, they stood in a semi-circle, watching me apprehensively. This was my last look at my saviours. I was never going to see them again. And they were never going to see each other again. They had formed this rescue team for just this 10-minute period of their lives.
With a hand gesture taking in all of them, I tried to say something like: “Thank you so much, you’ve all been so k ...”
I choked on that last word.
Walking the 10 blocks back home, I fought back tears, and I wondered why.
Because of pain? No!
It was because strangers had been so kind to me. Why didn’t I know that Torontonians could behave like this? I’ve been living in this part of Toronto for 46 years, why did it take me so long to find out how nice people could be?
Admittedly, the tears may also have had something to do with shock. Let’s face it, my whole being was shook up.
My walk was jerky, partly because my right knee was feeling sore and twisted. My hands were hurting, having taken some of the brunt of the impact. But they weren’t too badly banged up. There was a small puncture in the palm of the right hand and its index finger was sporting a flap of loose skin.
As I was walking along, my wad of bloody paper towels in hand (I don’t know what happened to the tissues the driver provided), teens on their way home from school gave me wary, sidelong glances. Adults avoided eye contact. They didn’t want to be caught staring. I was hoping for maybe a bit more sympathy but these strangers probably figured if this old guy with the blood-stained face was plowing along on his own steam, they didn’t need to intervene.
I wondered if my initial helpers had been so kind because of my age. But they probably would have helped anybody who’d fallen the way I did. My venerable appearance may have made them a little more caring, though.
Was it such a surprise that human beings could be so nice?
Not really. But you hear so much about the less admirable side of people that you need to be reminded about the kindness.
Here’s hoping the next reminder doesn’t require another face plant.
Patrick Donohue lives in Toronto.