Gravity, or Everything Falls Eventually

GRAVITY (or, Everything Falls Eventually)

Gravity is a scientific concept we studied in elementary school, like molecules. I never understood the significance of dropping an apple out of a tree; as apple stories go, I favor the fable about the father shooting an arrow into the apple balanced on his son’s head. Gravity and its corollaries are filed in my brain box under “O” for obvious. Age, however, has a habit of excising random bits of stored data and plopping them directly into current cogitation. Although this process interferes with concentration something fierce (which is where the stigmatic ‘absent minded’ originates), it can also produce insights that rival Newton’s falling apple observations. Gravity is more sophisticated and more malleable than science admits. Its severity is proportional to human age.
In infancy, gravity is not a bother; instead, it is a handy power tool useful for controlling adults. Babies discover how gravitational pull affects stuffed animals, bottles, blankets and rattles long before they can focus their eyes when an enthusiastic arm or foot bounces the toy over the crib rail and gravity tugs it to the floor. When the little genius realizes that his vitally necessary boo-boo bunny has failed to reappear, he shrieks in anguish. Somebody rushes to the rescue, and the vanished beloved is returned to his grasp with smiles and tickles and kootchie-coos. It doesn’t take long for the gifted infant to connect action to reaction: everything he can lift or pry loose is flung overboard for his adult Fido to fetch. It’s a good way to keep the big people busy and ready if he happens to need a fresh diaper or a warm drink.
By the time the baby ages out of the crib and onto the floor, he has experienced a familiar, less pleasant aspect of gravity. He discovers that, although dropping Teddy on its head doesn’t do any lasting harm to the bear, the same is not true for his own noggin. Falling hurts, especially when it happens unexpectedly—as it always diabolically does. Whether the injury is to bottom, top or dignity, it only takes a few experimental escapes from high chair or playpen to convince baby that gravity is lying in wait to grab his tender baby–parts and smash them into the unforgiving floor. The complicated process of standing erect is usually the cause of his first painful lesson: what goes up so slowly comes down fast, hard and sudden. Only a few daredevils who either never manage to link cause and effect or lack neural receptors grow up to be mountain-climbers or skateboarders. When these risk-takers defy gravity and lose, the results are spectacular, graphic, and televised.
Still, gravity and childhood commonly maintain a typically middle-eastern truce for many years, constantly skirmishing and never learning to respect one another as time passes. By the teenage years most kids are aware of basic natural laws and the consequences of gravitational defiance, but gravity is one more rule to be broken, and few teens have developed any rudimentary sense of caution. Even when the laws of up versus down are within comprehension, puberty has established the customary center-of-the-universe thinking patterns common to teens. Ergo, they may very well know that gravity works, but cannot accept that it applies to them. Climbing out a second story window and counting on a narrow limb as an escape route should be a safe method of circumnavigating house arrest. Inevitably, when the apple (or escapee) hits the ground, the teenager is surprised. Cue the skateboard ramps, the motocross tracks and the four-wheeler terrain. Gravity can be grim when it wants to.
Serious young adults sigh and feel superior to ignorant children. Gravity has become more a matter of decorum than a force of nature. One has a reputation to maintain and a future to control; there is no room for elementary school simplicities. On rare occasions, such as the office Christmas party, the upwardly mobile professional may try to run up the down escalator, but at this age a dignified image makes defying gravity a bad habit. The scientifically-minded work to conquer gravity by the power of jet engines and horsepower, metal struts, aerodynamic wings, rubber tires, and volatile propellants. Sensibility and logic prevail. Only a few insignificant anti-gravity eccentricities are condoned. For instance, female hair is expected to resist gravity and remain fluffy even when humidity is in the triple digits and each limp lock drips moisture. Even more gravity-defeating is the model breast, which remains at right angles to the chest without discernible structural assistance. For males, hair expectations are less unreasonable, but saggy pectorals are still a grievance; also, relying on inadequate male hips and posteriors to hold up a pair of pants is clearly in defiance of all known definitions of gravity.
Middle-age signifies the triumph of gravitational force. Saggy breasts are joined by chins and buttocks, bellies and knees. Arches succumb and shoulders slump. The tree branch leaning so invitingly near that second story window is only a bump in the night and no longer a ladder to mischief. This is the age when our youthful illusions slither off like throw-covers on furniture and reality delivers a quick punch we don’t see because of our new bifocal lenses. Gravity is a bully. We may have denied its power in our youth, but rack up a few decades and it moves in for revenge. Double chins subdivide into wattles and Alfred Hitchcock jowls; eyelids manifest excess skin that piles up like throw rugs in corners. Everything that can, sags; some things that can’t do so anyway. Females worried about breasts slowly descending to waist levels must rely on those French engineers who designed complicated support platforms especially for aging mammaries. Today’s woman also has access to a variety of butt lifters and tummy tuckers; but what about those half-filled water-balloons under your upper arms? Or the sine wave of your spine which gravity is squashing into an S, soon to be Z and heading for a sideways N?
We are getting old; we are buckling under the weight of the world. Our children are beginning to look like us and reproduce small replicas to teach us to fetch all over again. Getting out of bed is no longer a jump or a bounce; now we must cautiously test sitting up, then easing one foot at a time to the floor, and finally standing more-or-less erect. Rubbing the small of your back and stretching announces what hurts where. Your knees creak and your feet feel round on the bottom, making your balance tentative and your progress erratic. In the bathroom mirror, gravity has plowed another furrow or dredged an old one deeper. Aging men are not the only victims of hair loss; gravity indiscriminately pulls it out by the roots for both sexes. The bouncy feminine coiffure has flattened and thinned, and instead of a poof on top you grow bristles on your chin. Even your nose has lost to the pull of gravity, and you are sure the once pert tilt will soon overhang your upper lip. In place of high cheekbones, gravity has endowed you with baggy lower lids and bulldog jaws.
Gravity changes distances, too. Stair steps are steeper and taller. The mailbox has snuck a couple hundred yards further down the road. What used to be a smoothly level lawn is corrugated with hills and steep ravines. The household garbage is heavier, although you don’t have a trash compacter, and you have to trek it uphill and boost it over into the roadside receptacle with sides as high as your head. The dog is stronger than you are, and wins every tug of war. It is further to the bottom of the washing machine, the back of the dryer, the rear of the closet and the other side of the bath-tub. The weed-eater is weightier and the yard is a dozen mountainous acres of maniacally growing alien plant life. Nothing can resist the ever-increasing constantly downwards tug.
But we mustn’t think gravity is all bad. Consider the simple things. It makes us far more appreciative of a comfortable chair or a good mattress at the end of a long day. Gravity forces us to slow down whether we want to or not so that we notice many small beauties we missed in our busier, self-important youth. Miniscule spiders suspend half-inch hammocks from blades of grass that glitter with the heavy pearls of morning dew. Spring shoots do their shooting up and up out of the earth and into the sunlight, in defiance of gravity, popping into leaf and bloom. No cat is subject to gravity; puppies are comically surprised by it. Dolphins throw their sleek heavy bodies into the sky and birds by their very impossible existence defy gravity without a moment’s birdly thought. We can lie down with a reasonable certainty that we will not float off while asleep. We throw balls and shoot arrows, depending on gravity to return them to us. Up and down are comfortably dependable and constant directions. Our feet may be slowing, but they are planted firmly on the ground, thanks to gravity.