But I haven’t the foggiest notion which cultural tradition one old American warning comes from. I’m sure you heard it from your mother. It’s the line that goes, “Always wear clean underwear when you’re away from the house, because you never know when you might end up in some emergency room.” As silly as that sounds, it obviously resonated with me somewhere back in time; to this day, I keep my newest sets of shorts on the bottom of the pile in my dresser drawer and automatically reach down under for one if I’m going to be flying or driving somewhere.

I suppose the corollary to that rule is that you wear your oldest underwear around the house, and the grottiest sets for painting, splitting wood, or sanding sheetrock. We all know that most accidents happen around the house, but we don’t connect a pounded thumb or a gash from a kitchen knife with an emergency room.. So it’s safe, in those circumstances, to be a little gamy.

But gaminess is a subjective determination. Europeans, for example, when visiting America, are often impressed by how nice and fresh most of us smell. They notice it most in elevators and mass transport. Meanwhile, a survey in Germany found that German men change their underwear every seven days on average. That took me a bit aback; but when I considered the condition of the men at the high end who’d dragged that number up to seven days, I was really taken aback. Most of us here shower at least once a day and also change our linens, as the Brits say, once a day.

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, relax. I’m going to the emergency room.

Late last Friday afternoon my daughter’s friend, Todd, came over with his big pickup to hook onto his flatbed trailer and take it home. He’d parked it at the back of our yard before the snow. Now it was buried, and frozen in, besides. He tackled it with a square-pointed shovel, cleared away the wheels, and hooked onto it. We poured boiling water over the frozen screw jack and finally got it retracted. But quickly it became obvious that the two of them – the truck and the trailer – weren’t going anywhere together without help. His wheels were just digging deep holes.

“Let me run down front and get the Toyota,” I said. “I’ll hook onto your front, and maybe both of us can start it.” I could see that the notion of an empty Tacoma helping out a loaded Silverado was mildly offensive to him. But any port in a storm. I started down front.

Just before I got to my truck, my feet went out from under me so fast that I was on the ground before I knew I was falling. I landed right on my almost-new prosthetic hip, and Holy Toledo, did that hurt! I’ve gotta get up! Can I get up? Have I broken anything? I got up, crawled into the truck, got the foot up onto the clutch pedal, and drove around back.

“I just fell,” I told Todd, “and I can’t get out. The tow strap is under my seat. Hook it on and let’s see if we can break it loose.”

“You hurt yourself?”

“Yeah, I think so. Let’s try moving things first.” Nothing doing; the little Toyota slid around like a hog on ice, and nothing happened.

“Okay,” I hollered. “Just put the strap back on the floor. And before you go, help me get into the house, will you?” Nothing doing there, either; between the two of us, we couldn’t make it. So he bundled me into his truck, started making cell phone calls, and headed for the hospital. You can’t imagine the anxiety I felt as I recalled one of the final things a surgeon had said to me after the last hip replacement: “You break that thing, don’t bring it back. We can’t fix it.”

Todd wheeled me up the ramp to the emergency room, where I met the nicest bunch of people you can imagine: KC, the nurse; Jason, the transportation guy; Brenda, the ER doc; Bob, the volunteer; and Jim, the Xray technician. By then, of course, the phone calls had borne fruit, and my whole outfit had arrived. Plus, Todd seemed to know everybody in there, especially the other patients and their families. If it’d been anywhere else, we’d have been having a great old time.

They took two pictures, looked at ‘em and went, “Hmmm,” and took another. Yep; a fractured pelvis. That rock-solid metal-and-porcelain hip had hammered pretty hard on the bone to which it was attached, and cracked it. Nothing to do for it but manage the pain, take it easy, and call Monday for a followup appointment. Just about the best news I’d had in a while.

But I was deeply chagrined that, after all the care I’d taken for so many years, I was wearing a ratty old T-shirt and two-day-old undershorts. “That’s it!” I told Mother. From now on, it’s clean shorts and T-shirt every day!” Poor woman; she’s nursed me through six recoveries already.

“Right,” she said. “And your ice creepers every time you go off the porch.”