Earth Sucks

 I blame myself for having studied physics back in high school. I actually believed all that Newtonian garbage that they flung at me. Force equals mass times acceleration squared. What goes up, must come down. I had seen these equations fulfilled numerous times in my youth. I had no reason to doubt them. 

Until I got to college and some wiseacre professor began prattling on about curved space and quantum mechanics. Like these were real things. Like I should pay attention and learn them all over. Because everyone knows that an apple doesn't simply fall from a tree. It needs motivation. 

Or something like that. 

I bring this up because I fell from a tree recently. As tradition has it, I climb up into the plum tree in the front of our house three times a year. Once at the end of November to mount the Christmas lights. Again on New Year's Day because who keeps their Christmas lights up past the first of the year? And one more time right around Father's Day because that's when the plums that no one in my family likes begin to find their gravity challenged. I go up there to shake the thing until all or most all of the fruit has been harvested. 

Which is what I did. Then it was time to come back down. Which is where I had the chance to think about those physics experiments. A Dave in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force. The ground, for example. As this acceleration toward a more massive object, the aforementioned ground, I had a chance to consider the way my father met his match when the plane in which he as flying succumbed to some of these same forces. And how about that time that I decided to launch myself into the night air from a swing on my way to rupturing the ligaments of my left knee. 

So I did what I could to diminish the gravitational force by attempting to cling tenaciously to the trunk of the tree, since the ladder which had been my means of up had slipped away. Down. The direction that I was heading. 

There was no one around to witness the thud or the crumpled mass I made at the bottom of the tree. My first inclination was to sit there and wait for someone to come see if I was alright. Being a grownup, none was forthcoming. Adults get up, dust themselves off, and make a mental note along the lines of "you're sixty-one, maybe you could have someone else crawl up in that tree." 

Or maybe I should wait until I have someone to watch me disobey the laws of physics.