FALLING FAR FROM THE TREE
I’m feeling old today.
On Saturday I climbed up a ladder to get on the roof of the house to take down the Christmas lights. These lights, if I remember correctly, came from Tim Storey. And if he still sells them you should definitely get some. The easiest lights to put up and take down that I’ve ever dealt with.
Mom and Dad’s house is very long and I swear it took all of five minutes to take them down.
However…
Evidently I do not use my thighs very often anymore. I had to squat down near the edge of the roof to unhook the lights, hoping and praying the entire time that I didn’t fall forward off the roof and land in the front yard with a broken neck. Two days later and they are still hurting.
I went down the ladder the wrong way. Instead of facing it my back was to it. When I got down to the last two rungs I thought I’d just jump. It was all of two feet.
When my feet touched the ground my body did not stop its downward path. I landed on both knees and elbows, which are now bruised because of the heart medications I take.
Of course the first thing I did was make sure nobody saw that. Thankfully the Lopezes were not in their yard.
When my friend Karen Pelzel and I were in high school she had a keychain that said “Grace” on one side and “Bozo” on the other. I can so identify lately with the “Bozo” side.
Other things that make me feel old: taking my pills. I’m sitting at my desk looking at the bottles and wondering if I just took them or was I about to take them?
I feed the dogs breakfast first thing in the morning. The fat one usually eats hers right away in no time. The skinny one couldn’t care less about food. But sometimes the fat one eats so fast I can’t remember if I’ve fed her or not. No wonder she’s fat.
I grew up in a time when principals and teachers could paddle children. Come to find out that is no longer allowed. I think that’s a horrible idea.
I was told from a very early age that if I got a “lick” in school – we called getting paddled a lick back then for reasons unknown – I would get way worse than that when I got home. That’s the kind of fear that makes you think twice.
It also worked because I never got a lick from kindergarten to my senior year.
At least not for getting in trouble.
When I was in 8th grade I had Mr. Zeke Alford for math class. He was an eccentric man but we all loved him and he even succeeded in making math fun. No small feat there. He had us compete in folder races from our desks to see which row could get their homework turned in the fastest. He’d say, “Physoramic Pecklumer” and we had to pass our folders up the row as fast as we could so he could declare the winner.
Somehow, on the last day of 8th grade, all of us who hadn’t gotten a lick from first grade to the present were offered a lick from Mr. Alford. I don’t know if this was an annual thing or if one of my idiot classmates asked him to do it, but there you go.
And of course since I, too, was an idiot I signed up for one. And he made sure we knew that this was going to be a real lick, not a pretend lick.
Physoramic Pecklumer that hurt.
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