The annoying thing about getting older is, you just don't bounce like you used to, LISA SCOTT writes.
I've just taken the economist to the Urgent Doctors with another broken finger.
Look, I know my last column suggested I had a plan to kill him by overfeeding, anticipating a time when he'll get all dribbly and be unable to do the lawns (as opposed to refusing to do them), but I had NOTHING to do with this, he was practising push-ups on it a la Bruce Lee.
No, he wasn't, he was surfing and trapped it between the board and the leg rope, which is kind of sexy in a klutzy way. Really, it wasn't me. I need to nip mounting suspicion in the bud, or people will start calling me the Blonde Widow, even though I have much better hair than Helen Milner.
Mind you, another finger and he might tell me where the money's stashed ...
What's not sexy is that, as I write, he's passed out in the bedroom in a state closely resembling coma with a temperature of 100 and a raging infection that would have eventually gone to the bone if he'd heeded the blokey, ''She'll be right. Nah, don't worry about it'' advice of his mates.
The end of a brilliant piano-playing career is the least of it. Only a couple of months since his last broken finger (which happened during university holidays, meaning the hospital waiting room was filled with professors who'd blithely told their wives they'd clean out the spouting/cut the hedge/concrete the drive, forgetting they had a practical skills quotient of zero), I'm beginning to see a pattern.
Not the sort of pattern imagined by the policewoman who interviewed me at A&E when I fell over in cat sick that time and broke my elbow, and not the pattern implied by breaking my leg rollerskating home from a party at the surf club, rather, conclusive data in the form of X-rays and eftpos receipts for antibiotics indicating we may have reached the age of accidents: that time of life when clonking your head on the lip of the car door leads to a traumatic brain injury and stubbing your toe on a Malibu Barbie gives you gangrene. When dinner parties start to feature gory stories about amputations, tropical skin diseases and prolapsed wombs.
''And then, Marcia, are you listening? Her entire arm just fell off! In the middle of a 5-year-old's birthday party. Ruined Pass the Parcel.''
What's annoying about the age of accidents (as opposed to The Age of Adaline, which is just boring) is when we were younger, we could have fallen off the roof of a two-storey building, picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves down and gone to the chippie. This is because young people are made of rubber, and are drunk pretty much all the time.
Now, older, more sensible and with too many deadlines for 24-hour inebriation, it is Hurry, Worry, Multitasking and Stress (the four horsemen of the accident-prone) that have us in traction. But don't panic. No need to picture ticking clocks or sharpened scythes and start bucket-listing all over the place: you'll only hurt yourself. Plus, not only are we stressed but reaction times slow as we get older, meaning we duck too late or not at all and can be finished off by something as simple as a badly shelved kitchen appliance. Breadmaker to the head. Making ''died doing what she loved'' a bald-faced lie.
''Calm'' is the watchword here. And mindfulness, whatever that is. I think it's lying on the couch in your trackies reading a good book while tuning out the weak mumbled groans coming from the bedroom. In which case, I'm being mindful right now. Feels nice.
The only good thing about the age of accidents (apart from post-operative stretches of peace and quiet) is that you're still a long way away from getting up too quickly from a chair and hearing the gunshot of your hip cracking, or breaking an ankle simply by walking on slightly uneven ground. Frailty is in our future, porn-star flexibility in our past.
It's a lovely middle ground we occupy, even if fraught with danger. Which is why I said to the economist, by way of Frank Sinatra: Listen big boy/now that you got me made/gosh but I'm afraid/something's going to happen to you/Button up your overcoat/when the wind is free/Eat an apple every day/get to bed by three/Be careful crossing streets/cut out sweets/take good care of yourself/Oh, you belong to me.
Of course he can't hear my sweet words of loving concern. He's unconscious.
