I've been telling my family about some of the stories I told my mom while I was taking care of her, some of my most embarrassing moments. I was telling them one story that I'm not sure I told her about, but I can hear her right now telling me to, "put it on the list," for my book she said I should write. Now I'm in the mood to tell a few of the stories, so just bear with me on this one.
The first one happened during my first year away at school. It's required in order to earn an arts degree to take a language class, and I had a strange fascination with German instead of the more useful Spanish language. My German class was the first class in the morning. During the time of this particular memory, the professor had the tables arrange in a sort of square-like horseshoe arrangement. I always liked to sit in one of the front seats closer to the board on the left side. The class had started, but I hadn't taken my supplies out of my bag yet to take notes, so I reached into my bag to get out a pen. I wasn't consciously aware that as I was taking it out, I was scooting my chair back, and the bottom caught on to the edge of the table! All I remember after that was a split second of the light in the ceiling, and then found myself on the ground, still sitting in my chair, looking up at the ceiling! Ah, the faces and chorus of, "are you okay?" drifting toward me as I slowly got myself up, red faced, back into position! Embarrassing in the moment, but after leaving class and imaging what that must have looked like made me laugh so hard! There were times that I tried telling the story to my friends that I could hardly get it out due to laughing so hard. I still laugh about it.
I was telling my brother about this one (the one I haven't mentioned much, because I hadn't remembered it for a long time, but it suddenly came back to me). The teacher of my high school gym class had tried some innovative activities to make the class fun. One time, she decided to have a fun day and scheduled us to go to a nearby bowling alley to do some bowling. I've done it before, but only a few times, so I hadn't had a lot of experiences with it. During one of my turns, I grabbed the ball, and was ready to toss it, but somehow my throw got twisted. I rammed my arm into my leg just enough that the ball went flying not only out of my lane, but rolled clear across all of the other lanes in the alley. Everyone was looking at me; I took a bow.
I have so many stories. I'm certainly glad that for the most part I've been able to find the humor in things that go awkward quickly. It certainly makes the embarrassment easier to endure. Laughter is indeed the best medicine.
