U is for...

Uncoordinated

I've never been particularly coordinated. Actually, I'm quite clumsy. I'm always the one at the dinner table that tips over the glass of milk, or runs my sleeve through the gravy. The number of times I've tripped up the stairs at work or practically somersaulted my way down is too numerous and too embarrassing to admit. I frequently miss doorways by a few inches and slam my shoulder or my knee into the door frame. I've dropped my cell phone so many times that it's a miracle it can still turn on. And if there is a crack in the sidewalk that I am walking on...I guarantee you I will hit it with my toe and stumble.

I never played sports in school. I had a job at a pizza parlor all through school instead. I suppose I might've learned a little more coordination if I had. Or maybe it was God's way of protecting me from the inevitable humiliation. Watch me try to dribble a basketball, and you'll see what I'm talking about. (Although, I can manage to balance a large pizza and six drinks on a tray at once....for whatever that's worth.)

When asking Jerod to remember an uncoordinated story I could write about (since I've repressed them all to my subconscious), he remembered one night when I showed up at his apartment soaking wet and smelling a little like sewage. I had gone to dinner with some friends downtown and I was going to go to his apartment afterwards to see him before heading home for the night. Since I was parked at his place, I had to walk the five or so blocks from the restaurant to his apartment building. I can't remember if it had snowed or rained, but the sidewalks were pretty slick, and the street gutters were full of wonderful smelly runoff water. I was stepping off the curb to go into the street and with flaying arms, I fell flat on my butt in a nasty puddle several inches deep. Luckily, I was only a block away from my destination and it was dark and no one could see me shuffling bowl-legged and red-faced down the sidewalk. I called Jerod from my cell phone and tried to talk him into dropping down a towel from his balcony so that he wouldn't have to smell me and I could just get in my car and go home, but he made me come up so that he could laugh at me, and give me a pair of his sweat pants to warm up in.

So chivalrous of him, wasn't it?