If I was ever to choke on something I would want it to be an ice cube. The reasons are obvious. I have never actually choked before but I have gotten plenty of the wrong foods in my windpipe and even this makes me briefly feel like I might die sometimes. So I cannot imagine how upsetting it would be to actually choke. I do have a friend who got a piece of meat lodged in his throat at a dinner party seven years ago and he literally suffered post traumatic stress because of it and was never quite the same afterward.

The only way that this is really connected with the mystery for today is because they both involve food.

The Mystery of Falling Down the Up Escalator

My husband and I are both really dedicated health food people who are also huge foodies. We like lots of good food, real food, authentic goodness from incredible sources made into delightful and artistic combinations by amazing people like elderly Thai ladies and the French. We would never set foot in most restaurants or grocery store chains unless forced. We are dedicated co-op and farmer’s market and Whole Foods shoppers. We do tons of cooking and bake marvelous desserts with complicated names from scratch and we know the best places in our city where food is served the way we like it. Everyone wants to come over to our house for dinner. Perhaps this is really why they like us.

That said, traveling used to be a nightmare for us when we were first married in our early twenties and just figuring things out. Before we had our travel camper equipped with its kitchen and fully stocked pantry, we were the kind of travelers that I imagine looked more like a biblical family of 98 people including servants  and cattle making a move across the dessert with an entire household of goods.

One such trip I remember well was a four day venture to Kansas City for a conference that our church was attending as a group. Of course while they all carpooled, he and I drove together separately, partly because we hate being trapped in a vehicle with other people for long stretches of time (especially church people all hyped up on caffeine and the prospect of talking about nothing but Jesus for the next four days) and partly because of the heft of our luggage. The tailgate of our car was likely sagging a bit with the effort.

It wasn’t that we had lots of clothing or anything like that. It was that we knew there was no easy way to get good food where we were going due to the circumstances of the conference. We knew there were few options but to eat at places like Denny’s and Subway and the very idea of what four days of this type of food would do to our digestion and mental health scared us even more than the wild herd of buzzed-up Christians.

I still wish I had gone to the front desk and pleaded with management to see the surveillance video of the hotel lobby that day.

We entered heavily burdened with our loot.

Multiple bags slung over our shoulders, two pull-behind suitcases, one very large cooler on wheels and a full-sized fan. The bags, the suitcases, and the cooler covertly concealed a hot plate, a VitaMix, pots and pans, utensils, oils, sauces and spices, dried fruits and organic cheeses, almond milk and protein powders, fruits and vegetables, and seeds and nuts and granolas, organic meats and whole grains.

Essentially, we were planning to secretly convert our hotel room into a gourmet kitchen.

My burden was heavy and cumbersome but I happen to be two things. One, a mom. We can carry obscene amounts of baggage, it is one of those gifts that comes in with breast milk. And two, I grew up a farm girl. This needs no explanation. I am freakishly strong for my size.

The hotel had a lower lobby and an upper lobby connected by escalators. At this time it was so vacant, not one person was visible, so luckily there were no witnesses. The sounds of our heaviness and muffled clanking broke through the silence creating an aura of arrival clumsiness that usually only internationally traveling tourists are capable of pulling off.

Jesse led the way, mounting the moving staircase ahead of me and I followed along behind, not even slightly suspecting how wrong things were about to go.

I got on the escalator and began moving upwards, when suddenly, three feet behind me, the wheel of my pull-behind suitcase caught on an unmoving part at the bottom and failed to begin the ascent with me.

Looking back it is clear what I should have done. But this may be the most commonly spoken phrase in world history.

Instead of simply letting go, I had a brief flash of frantic possession (My hotplate!) and I closed my fingers around my suitcase in a death grip, refusing to release it to the abyss of the lower lobby, a loss that seemed suddenly surmounting and frighteningly permanent.

Jesse was turned around facing me, up nearer the top so he saw the whole thing. Our eyes locked and mine widened in horror. I may have made an initial sound like a whimper but other than that the entire scene unfolded in near silence until Jesse’s laughter began.

So there I was, my body moving upward, but my arm attached to something that was not. My uprightness slowly tilted backward farther and farther until I finally lost my balance and began tumbling down. Except the staircase was still moving up at the same time so I really didn’t seem to move from my spot, just tumbled end over end right there as I fell down a moving-up staircase, still clinging with all my might to my beloved baggage. All the other bags I was carrying toppled around me like we were being tumble-dried together.

I want to say my husband was concerned at first before the laughter overtook him, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. I can’t say how long it was before I righted myself. The way I remember it, I was caught in the limbo of falling down the going-up stairs, remaining exactly in the same spot, about five feet from the bottom, for a solid thirty seconds, but it was likely over much quicker than that.

The conclusion is fuzzy in my memory because the laughter overtook me violently as well at some point and the two of us didn’t stop laughing for the next two weeks or so.

Every person we told the story to, complete with play-acting it out, and there have been A LOT over the past seven years, has asked me the same question.

Why didn’t you just let go?

It’s interesting to me that it seems so logical. And I even tend to be a fairly logical person. Yet at the time, logic was the farthest thing from me. Maybe God fogged it from my mind in order to give us a painfully aerobic laugh and a funny story to tell for years to come.

Or maybe, when we are faced with a choice, that is laced with panic, to let go or to cling to something we find valuable, no matter how sure we are that we would make “the logical choice”… we all most often… cling.

If we are moving, and the thing we are clinging to is not… well, we all know how that goes.

Whatever it is you may be clinging to that’s preventing your ascent to the upper lobby… Just figure out, no matter what it takes, how to let go of it.

 

 

 

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