I fell down the stairs so many times as a small child that my mother almost got used to the sound of my body bouncing its way down the stairs and the crying that followed. In her touching, personal memory of the late Stephen Jay Gould, photographer Jill Krementz recalls the time she was on the phone with Gould when she heard her baby daughter fall down the stairs. He waited patiently for her to return to the phone and comforted her with the information from the chapter in his book “Ever Since Darwin” that was about this very subject:

“If a child half your height falls down, its head will hit with not half but 1/32 the energy of yours in a similar fall. A child is protected more by its size than by a ‘soft’ head. In return, we are protected from the physical force of its tantrums, for the child can strike with, not half, but only 1/32 of the energy we can muster.”

This is likely something my mother realized as I picked myself up, time and time again, unhurt, save for the residual damage of tears drying my face, which she fixed with Pond’s Dry Skin Cream, and a lifelong fear of down escalators, which I haven’t yet found a fix for.