FEAR OF FALLING

What follows will be of no particular interest to anyone apart from the archeologists of cyber space, who when un-ethering this text some time in the 24th Century, will note that at least one ordinary 21st Century dude sure liked to run on a bit.  That warning given, should you recklessly read this anyway and find yourself fallen into a boredom induced coma...don't blame me. 

I dreamed last night that I was roofing.  This is not an unusual  occurrence as it happens to me two or three times a year.  These dreams often end with me falling from the roof and being startled into wakefulness, so they are not among my favorites.  Last night I was in and out of the awareness that I was dreaming, so I was able to exert some conscious control over the dream, but not completely; just enough, though, that I could make falling unlikely.  This, however, did not fully mitigate the disturbing elements of the dream.  I was on one side of a very high, very steep roof.  Steep enough that it was barely walkable. I had finished shingling about two thirds of my side when my father, Walt Walton, who had completed roughly the same amount on the other side, climbed over the ridge to challenge me to a who can finish first bet.  

I am going to interrupt my narrative here, because I am reminded of perhaps the greatest off-the-cuff pun I have ever heard.  On another roofing occasion, not a dream, my father stood on a roof just below the ridge, but above me and my step brother, Ray Hoffman, who were working there.  He read us the riot act for one thing or another - I can no longer remember what - and then left. As he descended the ladder to the ground, Ray turned to me and said, "That was a ridge over troubled Walter."  I laughed until tears.

In my dream I was reluctant to take the bet.  I could see my father's side of the roof from where I was - dreams are like that - and most of his unfinished part was from the middle up, the safest part of the roof.  Mine, conversely, was near the bottom where I could see over the edge the long, long way to the ground. 

I was instantly adrenalized: racing heart, electric spine, sweaty palms, the whole litany of the fight or flight glands.  How this can happen while you sleep and not cause you to awaken seems impossible, but it is in fact, what occurs.  Ask anyone who has had nightmares and you will note that it is not until the threat has gone from immanent to actual, which is to say when the monster that has been chasing, reaches for you, or, in my case, when I fall, that reality arrives with a start!  Adrenaline has been present for the many moments leading up to the dramatic finish.

Why falling is the substance of my nightmares has its basis in reality.  As a kid and then a young adult, I had grown up working for my father's roofing company with its unusual name, Roof Coating Company of New Jersey.  I say unusual because most small companies of its kind had names like Bob's Roofing and Gutters or Big Ed's Roofing and Siding.  Although our company had been created by my grandfather as a service that applied an asphalt based paint as a preservative to wood shingles, it had grown under my father into a company that did all types of roofing.  The name remained the same because "coating" roofs was still a large part of what we did.  

After high school, I had gone into the Army for a six month stint before being released to the N.J. National Guard for an additional four and half years. After the Army, I took employment with a Food Fair supermarket as a shelf stocker and began attending Upsala College in East Orange, N.J. at night. The $1.40 an hour I was earning at Food Fair was insufficient for my needs, so I returned to roofing where I could make $3.00 an hour and afford school, dates and the 25 cents a gallon gas for my '51 Mercury.  Bad mistake. 

The reason, forgotten at that moment, I had not gone immediately back to roofing after the Army was that the work was hard, heavy and dirty.  I really didn't like it at all.  I also didn't like working for my father who was a tyrant on the best of days and worse so as an employer. Add in, and this I only realize in retrospect, that I am a monkeymind, which is to say often lacking in focus, awareness and attention, and the idea of continuing to work at heights was clearly not a good one.  

(Something here about the idiocy of the young in general would would make me feel better about my own stupidity, but the truth is, I was at the time, apparently, dumber than most.)

And so I fell.  I climbed up our 36 ft. ladder fully extended one summer day, grabbed the rope that was affixed to the ridge  and began hauling myself to the top.  When a roof was too steep to walk, we would use ropes wrapped around one leg at crotch level to keep us from falling.  The ropes were heavy and extended over the bottom edge of the roof almost to the ground.  The weight of the rope beyond you keeps the wrap tight on your leg.  The technique is essentially one of reverse repelling.  As I made my way to the rooftop, my thoughts were far far away.  I had climbed like this a thousand times and I was doing the task similar to a person driving a car on autopilot, their thoughts elsewhere.  As I neared the roof's summit I  reached with my right hand to grab the chimney there and pull myself fully up to the ridge where it was possible with one foot on either side to walk along without aid.  When I did so, I lifted the rope off its tether with my left.  As I have said, the roof was very, very steep.  I slid down it on my belly too fast, really, to grasp what was happening.  Besides, I was 19 years old. I was immortal.  This couldn't be happening to me.  I did manage to smack the ladder top as I went over the edge and this served to flip me so that I was face up as I fell to the ground.  Because I was looking at the sky in the second that it took me to land, the sensation was not of falling, but rather of the ground coming up and smacking me from below.  Years later while sky diving I experienced a similar reality. When first exiting the plane I was so high up the ground's approach was almost not discernible.  The sensation then was more of flying than of falling.  Later, at a lower altitude, when the ground's approach was rapid, falling was the preeminent feeling.  Open chute!   

Somehow, perhaps by instinct, I got an arm behind my head before I landed and this may have saved my life.  Keeping that up-until- then useless appendage from strikning the flagstone below me was a good thing.  The other good thing was shock.  After the initial wham of the landing, I had no pain.  I couldn't move from my torso down, but I had no pain.  When the ambulance arrived, I was prone but smoking a cigarette.  I thought by doing so, this made me seem cool, calm and collected.  Let me say again, I was nineteen. 

The EMT's, I don't think they were called that then, thought it was encouraging that I could move my arms, including the big, fat, swollen one my head had landed on, and that I could wiggle my toes.  They shuffled me off to the hospital in a shiny, new Cadillac ambulance, the first Cadillac I had ever been in.  Now that WAS cool. 

I lay about the emergency room for what seemed an eternity before eventually being sent to X-ray.  Those spooky skeletal pictures showed no damage. Or so I was told.  Yeeha!  I was coming out of the shock by then and starting to hurt on a scale of ten at about a twelve and  moving rapidly to other double digit numbers.  I was sedated and given a room where I would remain for ten days.  It wasn't until a couple of decades later when, at my first chiropractor visit, the doc, looking at new X-rays, asked how I had broken my back.  I said I hadn't.  He said I had.  "See right here. No way could your spine be at that angle unless it had been broken and healed back that way."  Alrighty then, live and learn.  

The woman who was later to have the misfortune of being my first wife was a student nurse at the hospital where I was enjoying my recovery.  Because it was known that she and I had been dating prior to my accident, she was not allowed to attend to me.  Part of my rehab was to receive three or four light massages each day, hence the enjoying part, the idea being that since my injuries were mostly muscular, massages would aid blood flow to the affected area and stimulate healing.  These massages were given by student nurses, all friends or acquaintances of my girlfriend.  A few of these very hot young ladies in their sexy, pseudo nurse's uniforms were not above rubbing my black and blue ass until I achieved an erection that put me in a damn near one point stance and one student, who shall remain nameless, although it is a name I'll never forget, even reached under me and gave me what is now referred to as a "Happy Ending."  Should I mention that I proposed to her on the spot?  As fate would have it, though, and fate was definitely giving me "ups and downs," so speak, at the time, this girl was never assigned to me again.  Bummer.

Had that part of this run on blithering been the impetus for my dream last night, I'm sure it would have taken a different turn and I wouldn't be writing about it this grey, rainy, morning. I'd still be abed smiling.  But alas no, it was the fall that inspired my nightmare.  And, I suppose. I think that maybe, possibly, by putting the tale to paper, I might also put my nightmares to rest.  

Hmmm.  Let me think about that. 

After deep thought, well, medium deep, and further consideration, but not much further, I think that falling as the crux of my nightmares is not so bad. I am, after all, used to it. If I lose falling my 'mares might take a turn to something worse like, for instance, that nasty thing that chases YOU through the swamp at night.  No, forget that. I'll stick with falling.  

But I DIDN'T fall last night.  My dream, although uncomfortable for awhile, morphed into something else that I can't quite remember; something to do with Woowoo Charly and football and politics and dogs and trying to remember to write this in the morning. 

So here you have that very thing, more memoir irrelevancy to clutter up cyber space; the cluttering being possibly my principal talent. But hey! Somebody has to do it, don't they?  Else where will  the archeologists of the future get their material?

Okay, perhaps I hit my head harder than I thought.