I asked my husband how his day was.
 
“My mom fell and broke her elbow. She had to get seven stitches in her face.”
 
“Jeez. What happened?”
 
“She FELL.”
 
“I got that part. How did she fall? Where? And, most importantly, how many witnessed it?” Inquiring klutzes want to know.
 
“I don’t know. She fell at the bank or something.”
 
He had no interest in the particulars. As far as he was concerned, the story had only one moral: “My mother has started falling now. Soon she will grow feeble and die.”
 I could see his little wheels of despair turning, visions of adult diapers and medicine dispensers dancing in his head.
 
“You know, it’s not like she fell out of bed and broke her hip on a bedpan trying to turn up the volume on ‘The Price is Right,’” I said. “She tripped at the bank. Give the woman a break.”
 
Five minutes later he was on the phone congratulating his mother for not breaking her hip. “It’s a good sign,” he told her.
 
I’m sure she appreciated the upgraded prognosis.
 
In my mind, our parents are still young. They’re physically and mentally fit. They have careers. They have dinner parties. They have the original hips they were born with. They’re just like us, without all the raisins ground into their back seats. So I’m not going to let my husband ship his mother off to the nursing home in his mind just because she slipped and broke her elbow.

Not that I don’t think about the future. When my parents bought their three-story townhouse a few years ago, I made the mistake of asking my mother how long they planned to live there.
 
“Awhile,” she said. “Why?”

“Well, what about all the stairs?”

In lieu of stabbing me in the face three times with her chopsticks, she replied, “WHAT. ABOUT. THEM?”
 
Point taken.

And yet, those stairs are steep. Not fit for amateur climbers. Even I have to suppress the urge to scream, “On belay!” before beginning my ascent.
 
My dad knows. Last summer when he was in a motorcycle accident … OK, it wasn’t a motorcycle, exactly. It was more of a moped. Oh, fine. If you must know, it was a scooter. Go ahead! Make fun! But that poor man had to go up those stairs on his butt and hands for six weeks, dragging his broken leg behind him.
 
Before he was released from the hospital, we talked on the phone.
 
“It’s a miracle I wasn’t killed,” he said. “I guess someone upstairs wants me to be around awhile longer.”
 
“And speaking of upstairs,” I said, “it’s a good thing it was just your leg that broke. Imagine if it had been your hip.”

“I don’t even want to think about it. When I start imagining how bad it could have been ... ”

“I know. It gets old.”