One Saturday afternoon in late Winter I decided to take one of my usual walks. I put on a jacket with a hood, Levis, sturdy shoes, and gloves. It was chilly.
One walk I sometimes take goes down Prospect Street out of the university, to 33rd Street in Georgetown, across M Street, which is the main artery leading to Key Bridge into Virginia on one end, and to Pennsylvania Avenue and downtown Washington on the other. Once across M Street, I cross the foot-bridge over the C&O Canal, go down to K Street under the Whitehurst Freeway, and on to the river. I continue along the Potomac by Georgetown Harbor which has a lovely fountain. This is at a bend in the river. The Watergate and the Kennedy Center are on the other side of this bend, with Roosevelt Island across the water. I return along Rock Creek Parkway into Georgetown by the Four Seasons Hotel, and cross M Street just at the Meiggs Bridge over Rock Creek which separates Georgetown from Washington proper. There I turn back to the university along N Street to cross Wisconsin Avenue. It is a most pleasant walk. Some wonderful vistas along the way never cease to delight me. My theory is that no one, but no one, should stay on a university campus all day and forget that the rest of the world is out there — even if it is the rather odd world of the Nation’s Capital.
On this particular Saturday, however, to return to my story, I cut down a side street between 34th and 33rd to M. As I came to 33rd, there were two fire trucks blocking the street, with ladders up over a building. I could see no smoke or fire, but, with everyone else, I gawked a bit at what might be happening. I walked around the fire truck, to cross M Street at the light. When the “walk” sign went on, I stepped off the curb only to feel my right ankle buckle. I fell into the street, though, as I think of it in retrospect, with a rather graceful fall. Naturally, when I fall I worry about my one good eye, but I fell head-up on my knees, stomach, and left hand. Needless to say, I was grateful all the traffic was stopped. Feeling that I may have scratched my knees a bit, I got up and continued across M Street before the amazed eyes of several drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. Once on the other side, I checked my knees, but nothing seemed wrong. I took off my glove to find my left thumb was bleeding at the nail, but I had no trouble moving it. I wrapped it in a handkerchief, put my glove back on, and, undaunted, continued my walk across the Canal and down the hill to the river.
The reader would like to know why I fell in the first place. I have told this story to several friends and the same speculation comes up. My youngest and most critical brother in California first heard of this incident from my sister in Medford, Oregon. In a feeble attempt to be amusing at the expense of his oldest and, in at least one quarter, wiser sibling, conjectured that the fall might be due to inebriation. I assured him that such conjecture was totally contrary to my well-known character — I was, as always, perfectly sober.
The real cause of this now famous fall on M Street was a bout of what appears to be gout in my right ankle, for which I was dutifully taking medication. However, forgetting the ankle was still tender, I stepped off a rather high curb without paying much attention.
It is at this point wherein the theoretical speculation about the cause and events surrounding the fall become interesting, and why I am recounting this momentous incident in these august pages. Several of my friends and my other brother in Spokane have also joined in this wild speculation. To test their virtue, I initially asked them: “Let us suppose that some old man falls down on M Street at 33rd during a relatively crowded Georgetown noon hour. Two fully-manned fire trucks stand right there. Would you not expect an alert citizen to rush over to help — as no one did?” Since I am the one asking this question, most of my friends and my brothers have sense enough to realize this is a trap. The key word here is “old” — that is, if they admit to the situation as I describe it, they know that they will be accused of calling me an “old man”! Most of them, to their credit, skillfully avoid this pitfall. However, several other not unfriendly critics have taken up my brother’s ungrounded suspicions from the another angle. They reply that the reason folks did not rush out of their cars and shops to help me was because they presumed that I, as the fallen gentleman, was indeed “loaded,” as they say. They did not want to be “involved,” as it is put today. They did not want to hassle the whole thing with some senior citizen who obviously did not know what he was doing. I assured them that this weak justification was also completely invalid.
Next, like a good Christian, I brought up the case of the Good Samaritan as it is applied to the streets of Georgetown, however mind-boggling that supposition might appear to be in the murder capital of the nation. I suggest that here we have a case in which someone falls down off a curb in front of stopped cars. Mine is the perfect case — no Levite, Priest, or Samaritan appeared to pick me up off the pavement. Not even the firemen, who are supposedly equipped with all sorts of resuscitation equipment to deal with such things lifted a finger. Am I to conclude that there are no Good Samaritans in Georgetown? that we are in a wholly pagan and secularized society?
Another school of thought suggested that I got up too quickly, that everyone was so shocked that a fine-looking specimen like myself could fall down at 33rd and M, they were initially in a state of paralysis. Had I only remained collapsed there for a couple of minutes, I would have found my wounded thumb being bandaged in some plush Georgetown shop out of the kindness of the proprietor’s heart.
Still another view of this intellectually fertile situation intimates that it was because Schall, dressed in Levis and walking shoes, was inconspicuous, if not downright suspicious. Had he been, on the contrary, dressed in formal clerical garb for his afternoon stroll, surely some good soul would have come to help, as did the kind young naval officer a couple of months ago when he saw a helpless priest, to be sure, myself, stranded with a flat tire on Key Bridge. However, these days when clerics are getting absolutely terrible headlines in the local press, I admit that it could have gone either way for me. I do not have any problem wearing clerical garb as, apparently, so many, particularly academic, clerics do. The fact is, clerical garb is not designed for a game of basketball, or golf, or a good brisk walk in the afternoon.
And yet, still another theory has to do with the gentlemen who sit at practically every corner in Georgetown, with a Dixie Cup in hand, asking every passer-by for money. Some perceptive observers remarked that the reason not one of these on-lookers helped me up was that these men with cups who saw me fall may have read my Sense and Nonsense column (“The Begging Industry,” June 1993) several years ago. Here I had rashly expressed some doubt about the authenticity or value of having so many able-bodied males at these posts, to whom, I thought, no one should ever give any money. This theory held that these young men with the cups, on seeing who it was flat on the pavement, said to themselves, “Let him lie! Serves him right!”
A variant version of the same theory is that Schall, dressed in Levis and walking shoes, does not look like he could possibly have a dime to his name. Thus, the reason why none of these begging gentlemen came out, not to mention the other criminal types who, according to the press, freely roam the streets of Washington, was that any self-respecting beggar or robber figured he could not get blood out of a turnip, as they say. They knew that even if they robbed this hapless man flung unexpectedly onto the M Street asphalt that they would go away empty handed.
What are the metaphysical conclusions to be drawn from these remarkable speculations? Needless to say, I might harken back to the title of what I call my “English” book, since it was published there, namely, The Praise of ‘Sons of Bitches’: On the Worship of God by Fallen Men. The word “fallen” in the context of that title refers to “The Fall” — to Original Sin — to the fact that even though we are members of a race that has “fallen,” we are still to praise God. In this theological sense, we literally have here the classic case of a “fallen man” who quite literally falls in the streets of Georgetown. It will be noticed that all the reflections about the actually “fallen” man, namely, myself, do refer back in one way or another to The Fall. Even gout in classical literature is said, I hope erroneously, to be due to high living and over indulgence.
A fall in a street thus can also be a symbol for The Fall. The Fall implies a standard that we know about but to which we do not rise. An accident generally has a cause that produces an unanticipated event of another kind when it crosses another cause. Had I been conscious that I might fall on M Street, I would have taken care to step more gently, hence no fall. The fall in the street was the result of an ankle not working normally, of a standard not being maintained. This discrepancy between a standard and what does not come up to it can be physical or moral. People can let old gentlemen lie in the street. Robbers can take advantage of the weak and helpless. Some people do fall because they drink too much, and some people do not want to be bothered with them in this condition because it is almost impossible to know what to do. On the other hand, they might have fallen in front of a truck when it could not stop.
The fact is that we are finite beings — we are men who fall. Moreover, we belong to a Fallen Race. In both conditions — finite and fallen — we are to praise God. This last conclusion is what I learned at 33rd and M Streets after stepping off the curb and falling, as I said, rather gracefully. I use the word “gracefully” on purpose, because once we understand The Fall, we begin to understand grace. And once we understand grace, God’s gift to us to enable us to praise Him, even as He is, even as we are, “fallen,” then we can begin to know why younger brothers are entertained at the predicament of older ones. We can begin to understand why, after all, our “fallen-ness” does not stand in the way either of our brother’s or of our own amusement at the sight of ourselves in Levis and walking shoes sprawled flat on the roadway at 33rd and M Streets in Georgetown, wondering if anyone else noticed how our fall related to The Fall.