How long have you been married? Was married for 4 years

Tales from the Outdoors

by Pat Armstrong

If you think back years and years ago, you might have memories like I do of being the “master of your universe.” As a kid growing up in the heart of Dallas (Oak Cliff) in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the world was our oyster. There weren’t any places that were off limits to a band of curious, smart, agile, BORED kids, except the “mean lady’s house down the block, who would yell at us kids for even being on “her sidewalk”… the original Karen!

I’ve already introduced you to my brother, Ben, he’s three years younger than I am and was on the fateful boat sinking adventure (see last month’s newsletter). Coincidentally, not the only boat sinking adventure he and I have been on, but that’s another story. This story introduces another sibling, Sara.

Sara is the oldest of the “little girls,” meaning that since there were six of us kids, there were the older three and the younger three. All three of the younger kids were girls and Sara was the oldest of them. If you’re counting, I’m #2, Ben is #3, and Sara is #4…all fairly close in age, and old enough for her to play with us boys. (Side note: Sara is now a VP at a very prestigious insurance firm in Dallas with four kids and a good husband.)

On to the story though, now that we’ve established who the characters are. So, like I said, anything outside was ours to conquer, and by that I mean destroy (or repurpose) and since my family has always been in the trades, we always had building materials of some form or fashion. We had woods, hammer, nails, screws, saws, etc… and we were always coming up with ways to “improve the current design of something.” This particular day though, with all the tools and supplies at our disposal, my brother and I put our engineering minds together to create a ramp in our rough concrete alley, so we could jump it with our bicycles. This colossal feat of engineering consisted of a 5 foot long 2x4 and a metal trash can laid on its side… That’s it. In hindsight, it was instability and stupidity at its finest, but what the heck, what’s the worst that could happen? A scraped knee, no biggie.

The ramp was shaky, to say the least, but with enough speed, skill, and confidence, Ben and I made the jump several times (although we had to prop the board up again after every jump…minor detail).

But here comes Sara, demanding to play with us. We obviously found excuses to deny her the joy of sailing thru the air, high above the ground, and making an epic jump like the one we had just made. But, she wouldn’t take “NO” for an answer, and went to tell Mom on us two.

That worked. Mom yelled at us from the back door to let her do whatever it was that we were doing… “OK Mom” we replied. Ben whispered to me, “She ain’t gunna make it…” I knew that, but there was a chance. She was decent rider, not like the masters that Ben and I were, but decent. So Ben and I gave her careful instructions on speed, weight distribution, wheel alignment, and balance. Then she was off to the top of the alley to set-up for the jump.

This was the biggest moment in her eight or nine years of life. She was about to attempt a death defying jump that would carry her two feet off of the ground, for 1.2 seconds, in front of her two brothers that said she couldn’t do it. She was about to show us “how girls ride bikes!” She backed up about a hundred yards and started pedaling, and pedaling, and pedaling. The wind thru her hair made her feel like she was going a 1,000 miles an hour… she was not! Not only had she failed to gain the needed speed to make such a treacherous jump, she actually slowed down at the point of contact with the half-ass, homemade ramp.

It’s like in the movies when things go in to slow motion and the inevitable outcome is so clearly seen, but no one can do anything to stop it. She hit the ramp at a crawl, went half way up the 2x4, it shot sideways, and she proceeded to go over the handle bars. Luckily, her face broke her fall. Unlucky for us, she required a trip to the doctor and stitches, and we got a whippin’ for allowing her to do something so dangerous and stupid, that we should have known better. We didn’t get in trouble for doing it ourselves, just that we let her do it. I guess Mom was so mad and scared, that someone was getting a whippin’, and she couldn’t very well whip a kid that just got hurt, so Ben and I were it.

To this day, whenever Sara tells a story about an event in her life that didn’t go as she planned, Ben and I look at her and say the same thing, “If you’d have just sped up, you’da made it!”

Life is full of bumps, bruises, and sometimes stitches and casts. Sometimes you just gotta hit the ramp, at full speed, with all the nerve you can muster, and hang on. Oh…and learn to fall, so you don’t land on your face!

Cheers! - Pat