Damn That Gravity! -- A "Theme Thursday" Post

Time constraints again, fellow babies. My original plan for this week's Theme Thursday entry was to regale y'all with a story about a young man sitting on a rooftop, contemplating suicide while discussing its pros and cons with an angel and a devil seated on his shoulders.

Oh, well, maybe some other time.

Instead, there'll be a mercifully short reminiscence about my own roof-jumping period -- yes, I did it on a regular basis -- and a link to an old but recommended column (from my other blog, "David'Z RantZ") about a related subject. And a nifty version of a classic (albeit predictable) tune, courtesy of YouTube.

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When I was not quite twelve, our family moved from the house we'd lived in for the previous nine years. Our new home had a rather large two-car garage right up front, a garage which we soon converted into a storefront for tropical fish and related supplies (aquariums, fish food, etc.).

Also, rather crudely tacked onto the side of that garage was another garage of sorts, with a doorless front opening that was a bit more than a car's width wide, and an also-doorless opening in back, wide enough for people to pass through.

This garage was only about as tall as it had to be to hold the average 1960s automobile, which means that the ceiling & roof were only six or seven feet from the garage's dirt floor.

Sometime soon after we moved in (to the house, not the garage), the roof of the doorless garage became my occasional play area.

Thanks to the two full-sized wagons on my family's previous piece of property, I was no stranger to games that involved leaping from what were then, to me, great heights.

Maybe I was abandoning a sinking ship, whether that ship had been victim of a volley of pirate cannonballs or a Nazi torpedo. I might have been leaping through a window, to escape from a fierce sheet of flame, or a pursuing group of enemy spies. Or I could have been leaping from a bullet-riddled, burning airplane, with or without my parachute. Perhaps I was jumping off a truck which was itself headed for a cliff.

I can't count how many times I casually jumped off of that damned roof. As I said, it was no more than seven feet high, so it wasn't exactly life-threatening to me whenever I jumped.

The thing that strikes me most about the countless leaps was how resilient my young body was, as compared to now.

Now -- today -- I wouldn't want to jump from a height of six or seven feet. My whole body aches when I jump down from a tall chair, for cryin' out loud!

Just one more sign of getting old, I suppose. And not a very comforting one.

Oh, well...

Old-time readers of my "David'Z RantZ" blog will no doubt remember the post I'm about to link to, but I think it came out pretty well, if I do say so myself, so I heartily recommend it to my newer readers. It's about a persistent urban legend involving Superman! Have fun.

And finally, the "predictable" song I mentioned... although with a twist or two. There've been, oh, about eight million different singers who were part of The Drifters at one time or another, but Rudy Lewis sang lead on the original recording of "Up On the Roof." Sadly, Lewis died before this version was recorded with Johnny Moore singing the lead.



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Sunday's post -- if I get to finish that -- will be about Father's Day.

Thanks for your time.