Gravity Isn't Just A Good Idea, It's The Law

 Forty years give or take a month ago, I experienced what has become over time a defining moment for me as a human being. 

I jumped out of a swing. 

Many of you have heard this story before. It is significant in the annals of "Why Doesn't Dave Drink?" Because I did. 

A lot. 

And on that one particular July night in the year of our lord 1986, I polluted my brain chemistry enough that the relatively simple act of jumping out of a swing, which I had been doing since I was a small child in a variety of settings, caused me to question not just my place in the universe but also my participation in the prevailing culture. 

Whew. 

That was the first week, anyway. It would still be another few years of bacchanalia for yours truly as the laws of physics seemed to need my attention as did the status quo. Jumping out of that swing meant that I would spend another semester in college to complete the fringes of what would become my Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing. It would still be those few more years figuring out that knee surgery was probably the least intrusive way that I could have received the message: Slow down. 

I wasn't listening then. 

I'm listening now. Each time I have to manage my hop down from a set of stairs or the dull ache that comes when the weather changes I think back to that night and wonder why I needed to live so close to the edge for so long. Nothing that I couldn't bounce back from. Not back in the day. The payback, as it turns out, came much later. 

George Bernard Shaw once suggested that youth was wasted on the young. I'm guessing there was a swingset somewhere in George's past.