On Wednesday morning, I got up with Graham and was helping him acclimate to his day. I usually tend to him first thing on days I’m not going into the office and it’s some of my favorite time with him. He is sometimes a bit bleary and more frequently revved up for his day, excitedly announcing what day of the week it is (a recent obsession), recapping highlights from yesterday (though the last week is still all “yesterday” and might come up as such), and lobbying for riding the bus at some point in the day just begun.

We have three floors plus a basement in our tall, narrow duplex half, with the laundry in the basement and Graham’s room on the top floor. It reminds me a little of living in Pomerantz my junior year in college, where I developed the habit of letting laundry build up to impossible levels before traversing the seven-floor gap to the machines. Here, of course, as a new parent, we are doing laundry all the time. Maybe a touch less than when we were using cloth diapers, but still quite a lot. Most of the steps in laundry are relatively quick to turn around once the washer is going: turn it over, unload it, take it up to the first floor, fold it, organize it in a basket. But for Graham’s clothes, the last step of getting it up two more floors for eventual storage is recalcitrant. The basket lingers on the first floor for a long time. And then it takes even longer to actually get it from the stair landing into his room and put away.

There are good reasons for this. His clothes are especially small and thus fiddly and the categories get combined more easily in the basket, making the last step relatively annoying. We are usually in his room before he does after-lunch quiet time (on his own) or bedtime, so we’re not trying to linger in the room. Performing tasks while we are there is hard because he wants our full attention while we’re up there. And in the rhythm of our day, most laundry gets put away while he’s asleep, which is easy everywhere except where he’s sleeping.

So on Wednesday, I was staring at the third-filled basket of clean laundry during his morning diaper change and thought that there just wasn’t that much to put away and I could make quick work of it and save myself the frustration of seeing the basket on the landing the next three days. I slid it along the carpet into the room and was working on resorting while keeping half an eye out for his whereabouts so he didn’t creep out along the outside edge of the railing, something he thinks is funny and we try desperately not to overreact to lest it set up a reward structure for him overhanging a six-foot drop.

And with this split attention, I turned away for a second, reached into the basket for some shirts, turned quickly up toward the closet door, and smashed the top of my head into the wall. More specifically, the corner wood molding of the closet door opening, right on the corner, such that I heard a crunch of sharp wood corner into skull.

I fell over and clutched my head and screamed for Alex. Graham came instead, his face puzzled, expressing concern. I was working on telling him to go get mommy when mommy bounded up the stairs and I had to explain the colossally stupid misstep I’d just taken.

Here’s the thing: sometimes accidents happen. Sometimes we’re in car crashes or something hits us out of nowhere and there’s really nothing we can do. Life is going to have a certain number of these and it’s indeterminant and bad luck. I think my father believed that you could pay enough attention to signals and warnings and bad feelings to literally avoid all of these and while I’m inclined somewhat in that direction, I don’t agree with the absolutism. We have, at the end of the day, 1/8,000,000,000th of the control in the world, or maybe 3 or 4 or even 10 8-billionths when you factor in relative positionality of influence of the United States. It’s not much. Our outcomes are mostly up to other people.

Which is why it’s so damnably frustrating and obnoxious when we use that little sliver of influence to not think through our actions enough to avoid easily preventable mistakes like smacking our heads hard into wood corners. And, it must be said, perhaps doubly so for the times we do this deliberately. I feel like I can handle a quotient of “fate” or bad luck (I do, after all, endure weather and American politics and Mariner fandom and capitalism, with relative degrees of resistance), but my own idiocy is particularly hard to bear.

I don’t think I got a concussion. But I wasn’t sure for much of the day. Had I been less committed at work, less overwhelmed by the constraints of a given hour, maybe I would have gone to the hospital or urgent care to make sure. But perversely, we are most inclined to avoid medical care when it seems we’re likely to encounter bad news. It wasn’t just the 90-120 minutes of time I didn’t feel I could spare, it was the 3-5 days of rest that a mild concussion diagnosis might mandate that I really feared. Which, yes, is exactly the wrong approach to such circumstances. I know. I know.

So, can I really blame JP Crawford for staying in the game later that night after colliding with his teammate, Eugenio “Geno” Suarez, and being knocked to the ground? They were both going for the same ground ball, both had a chance to make the play, and were too focused on the ball in front of them to see each other. JP smacked his head against Geno and fell to the dirt, flipping and rolling and coming to an anguished stop. The fans cheered when he stayed in the game, but his subsequent at-bats faltered and he was finally lifted in the 8th as the Mariners broke open a 1-1 tie toward a 6-1 win.

He landed on the Injured List last night, for at least a week. And if I think I don’t want to miss work to rest off an injury, imagine being the captain and most consistent hitter on my favorite baseball team.

This is him when not concussed, in a fairly typical depiction of his enthusiasm for the game:

He’s been my favorite player on this very exciting drought-busting Mariners squad for a while, since well before he tied the playoff game we attended to cap an unprecedented comeback to clinch the series. And last night, his first game out, he wasn’t even in the dugout, which is probably a good precaution with a concussion, what with his penchant for cheerleading success, smacking the home-run trident (which he bought) in front of teammates, and generally expressing excitement physically. Rest and calm are prescribed for brain bruises, and these are incredibly hard for him to manifest. Watching the Mariners win 9-2 last night for their 8th straight win, I couldn’t help but wonder how hard it was for him to watch at home.

I was helping a faculty member write an extension letter for something this week, as well, and one of the arguments for it was that they’d endured a concussion and post-concussion syndrome during time slated for research. They’re one of two faculty members I’ve worked with in this role known to have a concussion. Let’s just say I’ve got concussions on the, what is it again?, oh yes, brain.

I felt photosensitive for a few hours Wednesday morning, and perhaps a step slow. But I often feel photosensitive at any given time, and frequently a step slow in the morning, especially mornings working from home where the boundaries between my various life roles blur and distract. Things turned substantially better in the afternoon, which itself is a rare phenomenon, given my lifetime status as a morning and night person who can’t stand the languished malaise of the time between. And I don’t think one recovers from a concussion, however mild, in hours. Given the size of the bump on my head, it feels like a significant but ultimately superficial surface injury. Even the shower the next morning that I dreaded felt less painful than expected.

Injuries, be they borne of our own neglect, bad luck, a moment of self-hate, or others’ malignance, can be capricious. It’s easy to feel like they’re all random and fall like anvils from the heavens, picking their victims indiscriminately. And indeed, taking probability too personally is a dangerous game, as is feeling sufficient sense of responsibility to desire control of the uncontrollable. It is hard to have just an eight-billionth, or even a billionth, of anything. Even fathoming how small our role is in larger contexts is flummoxing, much less when we start to zoom the lens out and see our planet in a wider celestial context. It’s easier to think those stars are interested in our actions, as astrology teaches, than the cold vastness of how much exists outside our own heads.

But our vulnerability, our smallness, these are reminders to slow down when necessary. To remember that whatever endeavors are in front of us and seem so important can end just as quickly, sometimes never to be renewed. When we die, our thoughts and feelings and, more crucially, strivings and failings on this planet cease. And it’s a thinner line between life and death, capability and disability, thriving and decay, than any of us want to internalize regularly. We need the respites, the setbacks, to keep us grounded in this reality. Just enough for it to intimidate us back into the right priorities, the right urgency to live in a way we’d be proud to remember.

This is the 18th post in the One Thing series.

Last Five
#17: Sifting Rocks in the Hot Sun
#16: Fifteen Nails
#15: Old Friends
#14: Mailing it in
#13: Get Organized

Introduction & First Four
#4: Forgive, Don’t Forget
#3: Call Your Mother
#2: In the Land of Make-Believe
#1: Wistful Wisteria
Introduction: Announcement and Rules