Steps and Stairs

A series of inconsequential events:
About a dozen years ago, my job took me to a family who lived in a trailer home, kind of set into a hillside. A deck had been added to the front entrance, which you reached by climbing 7 0r 8 steps. I think the father of the family might have built it. It was a quite well-constructed deck and stairway; I knew he had re-built an entire set of second-story stairs in another home the family had lived in. Anyway, on a day in late November, I had an appointment to help the 3 kids with their homework. As usual, I parked my car at the bottom of the driveway, climbed the hill to the trailer, walked up the stairs to the deck, and found the door open. I called into the open door: no one was at home. With my pocketbook in one hand and my bag of tutoring materials in the other, I left to return to my car, intending to wait for a while to see if they showed up. When I walked to the end of the deck, and started to take the first step down, my feet flew out from under me on the slipperiest bare wood I'd ever encountered. I slid down all of the 7 or so steps as if on a ski slope. There at the bottom of the flight of steps, the builder had erected a substantial post. I latched on to that post, hugging it for dear life even as I was still in downhill motion, and saved myself, not even dropping my bags in the process. A little shaken, I went to my car to collect my thoughts. I'd no sooner sat down, when a furnace repair truck pulled up, the workers got out, and one called over to me, "Hey, if you're going in that house, watch out on the stairs-----they're really slippery." Oh, thanks, I answered; I was so glad no one had witnessed my swan dive.

Another near step to disaster:
This was an old trailer, recently plopped in the middle of a field, a distance from the farm where the family worked. They were new to me on this day when I parked my car and climbed a quite steep set of stairs that were attached to the front door of the trailer. Or so I thought. As soon as I left the ground and put my feet on the first step, the whole flight of steps reared back like a bucking bronco-------they weren't attached to the trailer at all. As it turned out, the family didn't even use that front door---the steps were apparently just for decoration, or more probably a mandated "safety requirement." Fortunately that was in the years before my knees betrayed me, and I didn''t get hurt that time either.
Even earlier, I worked at an old school in South Troy, where a young member of our staff had set up the tutoring schedule, and then had left this employment for greener pastures. I took over her job, and so her schedule. There were 6 students at our program in the school and the school had 3 floors. My predecessor was young, agile, and must have been into running track, because she had scheduled back-to-back sessions on: Floor#3, then Floor #2, again to Floor #1, back to Floor #3, and then of course back down stairs. One of the kinder teachers, knowing the route I took, suggested that I take the elevator, but I declined. Its use was intended only for the handicapped, you had to get a key, and at the time I was still vital enough that I didn't want to appear old. Besides, that was the year a young criminal had tampered with the outside fire escape, then caused a disturbance to call the principal out there, which caused him to fall with the disabled fire escape and to become permanently paralyzed. (That youth later murdered the aunt he lived with.)