Welcome to the World of Klutz
Call me Klutz.
No, seriously. That’s my name—Klutz.
I was not born a Klutz. As a child I was not prone to tripping, falling (except on ice skates), or dropping things. No broken bones, even after falling from a tree. When I was perhaps four or five years old, I did, however, split open my chin, which resulted in stitches. And I cut my back crawling under a barbed wire fence.
Other than that, my life was klutz free—that is, until I married a Klutz.
He was not one of the popular Klutz Bird Klutzes or the Klutz book series of whatever Klutzes, or even the famed Mad Adventures of Captain Klutz by Don Martin.
My Klutz was a tall, handsome army lieutenant who just happened to jump out of airplanes and do other adventurous feats. He also had the surname of Klutz. But I didn’t consider his name odd. I knew a lot of people with strange last names. For instance, Mumper, my maiden name, was considered strange by many people. Therefore, a guy named Klutz didn’t faze me a bit.
It’s hard to imagine now, but in the late sixties’ klutz was not a word frequently heard outside the Yiddish speaking communities of Brooklyn, at least I’d never heard of it. If someone dropped something, he or she was just clumsy. If someone tripped, a remark about having two left feet was normally used.
But to call someone a klutz? Now that was something I’d never heard of until I officially became one—a Klutz, that is. I swear the moment I said, “I do,” I did. Fall, trip, slip—you name it; I did it all. I even walked face first into a glass wall at the University of Texas at Arlington, gashing my leg, nearly breaking my nose, and suffering severe humiliation as a billion pieces of non-tempered glass fell around and on me.
To make matters worse, the doctor who stitched up my leg was laughing so hard about me being a Nurse Klutz that he forgot to numb the area. I also think he wasn’t concentrating fully because the next day the stitches ripped out. Forty-nine-plus years later I still have a nice round scar to prove I am the real thing.
And now as I endeavor to keep my two left feet out of my mouth and firmly planted on the ground, I will forge ahead …
… to the story.
