This morning, I heard a centuries-old cliche quoted. It has been around for at least as long as I’ve paid attention to what I hear. Who doesn’t use it? I have.
Listening to an audiobook, whatever the author’s subject was, he said that it “fell between the cracks.” This is what ideas, suggestions, corrections, or intentions do when ignored or neglected. They “fall between the cracks.”
The phrase caught my attention, and I remembered long ago being coaxed to the center of the Columbus Junction swinging bridge—wide cracks to fall through between wooden slats. At least it seemed that way to me. I was fifteen, visiting his Iowa hometown with my boyfriend and his parents. Once I had been sweet-talked to the middle of what was already gently swinging, once I was far enough away from either beginning or end of the bridge, the future fighter pilot furiously pumped his planted feet against the outside edges of wooden slats as if he were pumping the pedals of Sebastian Bach’s organ while the Brandenburg Concerti flew from the keys. The effect was not classic, but, definitely, moving.
And I? The only thing I planted was my behind. I locked my hands to the side rails in a death grip. My earnest, loud, high-pitched, seriously meaningful pleadings for this fun to stop “fell between the cracks.”
This morning, when I heard the phrase (first used in 1390), I thought back to that swinging bridge, that place where I should have known, rationally, that I was safe, but my experience is that in crisis, gut rules mind. Any good sense I might have mustered was soundly shutdown. Surely, you can understand.
“But wait.”. My morning audio reverie snapped shut. How does one fall between cracks?” What is there between cracks?
Columbus Junction Swinging Bridge
