Flip has often remarked that I am at war with the material world.
I prefer to say that I am not mechanically inclined. Fixated on the physical aspects of life, like door jambs, which have always had it in for me, curbs on occasion and low-hanging objects that go bump on my head.
Today, I caught a large section of my own hair in the vacuum cleaner while leaning over to vacuum under a low table. I have long pieces of hair fluttering down my back well below the point it presently grows to. And while I am grateful that this shocking hair loss is not due to chemotherapy or hereditary alopecia, the idea of being partially bald on one side does not enchant me.
I have always been materially challenged. When I was 13, I was lying on the floor under a telephone table chatting with friends when I yanked the cord, bringing the heavy, 50's instrument down on my head, which bled profusely. My mother heard me yell, told the two boys I was talking to that "Susan just dropped the phone on her head," and hung up.
All the years of my childhood, she watched me run into walls like the Helen Keller doll, even though I had excellent eyesight and was, my mother admitted grudgingly but with some wonder, so graceful. She was unable to comprehend how a person who moved gracefully, which by all accounts I did and do, could initiate so many collisions with stationary objects.
It's part of my mystique.
