The Fall

The boy is the father of a man
Whose desire has never waned
After years of reaching up,
Forgetting the fall that he once took.
Grasping the next bar in the ladder tight
He reaches up toward the sky.
Was it the ladder that the dreamer witnessed
In the desert of Bethel long ago,
And by climbing toward blue heavens
Perchance will he meet the One
Who came down to Bethlehem to be born?


* Michael fell from a water tower when he was about three years old and, by God’s mercy, he survived the big tumble. I guess he forgot about the fall.

Well, this was what happened. I took Michael out on the college campus where I taught. As many of you know, watching kids can be pretty boring sometimes, so I went to pick up a current copy of Readers’ Digest from the library and started reading. After becoming immersed in one of those lowbrow true stories for a while, I looked up to check where my boy was and the sight I witnessed nearly petrified me. Michael was half way up the school water tower! Instinctively, I cried out “Michael!” not knowing that was a serious mistake. My shout startled the boy and he fell straight down. He flipped in the air once and landed squarely on a small rock and blood gushed out from his head. Michael was screaming at the top of his lungs and I ran straight back to our apartment to Kathy, for I simply didn’t know what to do. Amazingly, Kathy was pretty calm and we took the boy to the ER and had him fixed up. The incident probably shortened my lifespan a few years and, from then on, I dared not read any book when I was watching him. Even with my extra vigilance, he still managed to have a few more accidents and visits to the ER. He knocked out five baby teeth and acquired scores of stitches. One time he ran on the sidewalk with eyes closed, ran into his brother, and lost one tooth. Another time he jumped from one bed to the other in a motel room, knocked heads with his brother, and another tooth was lost. I guess it’s no accident that he wants to be an ER doctor to save himself, as well as other accident-prone people like him.