You didn’t volunteer to climb up and change my dead light bulb, so I’m dragging you along with me. I love the light fixtures in the shop but when one goes poof the thought of ascending that ladder brings back childhood fears.
In truth, in my childhood I was pretty fearless. The fear came around in later years when I realized I probably should have died during one of the neighborhood-crazy-kid stunts. Like the giant firecracker we made, emptying the powder from a pack of Black Cats into a single cardboard tube – stuck a fuse in it and ran.
Whoooooomph!
The deep-kabooom echoed off every house in the neighborhood. Needless to say, we made ourselves scarce.
No one even asked us about it, although it was such a mighty explosion that it had to have been heard inside – even those houses at the far end of the block.
Then, there was the tree house. It was little more than a platform built across the gap in a Y-shaped branch. It was probably thirty feet off the ground in an old oak. A climbing kid could get to the platform by way of the tree trunk, where tennis-shoe sized pieces of wood had been nailed into the bark. Or – there was the long pipe.
It was probably a natural gas pipe, long dark metal, from one of the several houses under construction, no doubt, held to a fork in the tree by a short piece of rope wound around and knotted. Strong-armed kids could shimmy up the pole directly onto the platform.
That’s what I was doing and I had just reached the top when the knot came untied. Right in front of my eyes. Literally. I remember staring in disbelief as the last trace of the knot came loose and the rope slowly unwound. One loop, two. Three.
At that point, I was like a pole-vaulter at the apogee of the leap, somehow stopped in place. I was balanced on a long, long pole, hanging on with a hands-and-legs-death-grip, afraid to even take a breath.
Balance doesn’t last long if you aren’t a circus employee. The pole began to lean and I rode it down, finally giving that pole-vault push off ten or fifteen feet above the ground.
I landed flat on my back and – immediately – expelled every square inch of air that had been in my lungs. I was knocked so flat that I couldn’t draw the air back in. It was like a fish out of water, pursing and puckering lips in hopes of a breath, but getting nothing.
Finally it came in with a rush and I realized the worst was over.
Until my Dad came running up. I found out later that one of the gang had run to my house and hammered on the door, yammering that I was dead, having fallen out of a tree. When my father came racing up to my still-prone self, I believe he was more out of breath than I was.
Climbing up a ladder reminds me of how it feels to smack the Earth with the backside of the human body. Hard. I’m cautious as I reach those top rungs, climbing one-handed with a fresh lightbulb in my grip.
On the highest rung that is legal, I can stand on my toes and extend my arm and fingers just high enough to catch the bulb and unscrew it. Don’t like to look down, but it is worse looking up. That requires leaning back over that empty space called air.
The bulb is changed – once the twisting starts it is a pretty quick fix – but just so you can share the feeling of that top of the ladder excitement, you can click on the image for a bird’s eye view of the shop.
I’ll climb back down for you.
