I FELL DOWN AND BROKE MY JESSIE: A PSYCHIC MYSTERY

I haven't been swimming in more than three years, so when the opportunity to take a dip offered itself yesterday, I lept upon it with glad cries.  Needless to say, wrestling knee-length boobs with matching belly into a ten year old piece o' shit swim suit was the most difficult part of the enterprise, but I avoided PTSD by studiously avoiding all mirrors and other reflective surfaces until full immersion was accomplished.

Rampaging COPD prevented walking the two blocks to the community pool, so I jumped upon my more or less trusty scooter and made my way to the almost empty recreation area where the reigning home owners association nazi was waiting to let me into the locked clubhouse.  After greeting me with a stern, "You're late, young lady!", he admitted me to the sacred waters which hosted one other hot body, a young Colombian fellow with whom I worked out some of the kinks in my rusty Spanish.  We chatted, haltingly, as I transformed into a lithe mermaid, plunging, gliding, lolling and feeling as though I had left fifty years on terra firma.  It's no accident that I'm a Pisces...water is the home of my heart.

And so I cavorted until my skin began to sizzle and prunify and my stomach sounded the dinner gong.  Hauling myself out of the delicious buoyancy took all my strength, since someone had apparently attached fifty-pound weights to each of my legs while I was floating happily in my chosen element.  After dripping dry for a short while (well, of course I forgot a towel!) I once again mounted my little vehicle and wended my way home at around four.

I made it without incident, unless you count the part where that car missed me by an inch, and just as I turned into the garage, my meek little steed turned into a bucking bronco.  Evidently, the front wheel tripped on the door ledge and the sonofabitch threw me.  As I felt myself falling, the thought "broken hip" began to flash like a neon sign in my mind.  Followed by "what a fucking cliche!",  I landed with a resounding thud on the scorching black macadam driveway, splat on my right elbow and yep, hip.

As my fellow geezers and geezettes will attest, trying to regain an upright position in that situation was a feat of gargantuan proportions.  Tangled in the scooter, acquiring second-degree burns from the pavement, unsure of what kind of actual damage I might have done to my poor old body, I struggled for what seemed like days to get up and limp into the house.  In accordance with my lifelong proclivity for lousy timing, my caregiver had been sitting blithely on the toilet while I was outside yelling for him and wasn't aware of my plight until I finally came through the door.

After a cursory examination, we determined I had an interesting bloody scrape on my arm and was a bit shaky and shocky, but in sum, it didn't appear that I had done any real damage.  And here comes the spooky part:

There wasn't a mark on my hip!  It didn't even feel tender to the touch.  Nothing.  Nada.  Zilch. As good as it was before the accident.

Shortly thereafter, Jess called and we chatted about our respective day, as is our wont.  When I mentioned my spill, she gasped and was momentarily silent.  Then she asked, "Your right hip?"  "Yes", I responded.  "Why do you ask??

"Because," she said, "I was playing cards this afternoon and suddenly felt a baseball sized lump on my hip and it's beginning to look bruised.  I have no idea where it came from.  I didn't fall or bang into anything.  It just showed up suddenly.  Around four o'clock this afternoon."

Anyone else hear The Twilight Zone theme?