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Writer's picture Michael C. Hill

When Gravity Calls

This Back Window Blog is all about the ups and downs we all experience. Maybe there is more to this story than just clearing the bar.


Clear five feet to tie…clear five-one and I was a record holder with my name on a list of winning athletes and a blue ribbon to pin on the front of my shirt.


Life is full of the things we want to become but those hopes get wrapped up in things our family think we should do, things friends think we should do, or things that society thinks we should do.


We can’t meet all the expectations, can’t beat them all, and can’t stop carrying them on our shoulders. Each of us fails every day to meet all these expectations. We set goals and accomplish many of them but there are those dreams that wait in a never-ending line. Every person you pass in the grocery store, in a restaurant or on the road is feeling guilty about things left un-done or under-done.


As a middle-schooler at Fort Mill Central School, I was awkward and shy. I guess that’s true of me as an adult too. A couple of times I have heard that an acquaintance thought I was aloof because I didn’t interact like a normal human. I can understand. Often, at a party or gathering with many people I don’t know, my defense is to try and look wise and witty, drink in hand like Rod Serling while I search desperately for something…anything to say.


I was a hopelessly mediocre at sports despite being 6’1” in the eighth grade. I was acceptable at basketball until the other guys grew to my size and had actually developed skills along the way. I thought I had found my niche in track and field when I found I could high jump.


The year was 1961 and I was an eighth grader who was allowed to join the varsity track team. From the time of the Greeks, the standard way to high jump was to run up and leap, lifting the leading leg high and scissor kicking to bring the back leg over to clear the bamboo bar.


Central School’s High Jump pit was located in the corner of the playground beside Henry Prior’s Ironworking shop which was demolished to build the first School District office. Two posts with graduated holes for pegs held up a bamboo cane pole. A sawdust trough, it could hardly be called a pit, held eight inches of sometimes dry sawdust. The jumper tried to land on his or her feet because landing on one’s back or butt resulted in a painful thud.


I learned the scissors kick at middle school and was able to clear, prepare to be underwhelmed, 4’ 8”. It was just enough to be competitive in eighth grade at a small school but I had a secret weapon. Times were changing for the high jump. At the high school, where I worked out with the big boys, I learned a new technique and had cleared 5’2”, two inches over the middle school record.*


Located behind the baseball diamond at the American Legion Field, the high school jump pit was a step up in technology. The landing area was made of soft foam-rubber bricks set in a pit a foot or so deep and rising about another foot above ground level. Much less bruising was involved. There was also a new style of jumping called the “Western Roll”. The high jumper would run and kick up his back foot in order to roll belly first over the bar. (Yes, I am aware that would never work for me now.) I read the track magazines and my hero, John Thomas, a young black freshman at Boston University, set the indoor World Record of seven feet using the new style.


Every year, on one of the last days of school, our principal, Mr. Reynolds, would let down his stern guard and allow the eighth graders to go outside after lunch for an athletic field day. Not one to let things get out of hand, Mr. Reynolds made sure every activity was organized and supervised. Even the three-legged races were run with exacting precision. I don’t know if it is still acceptable to tie two children together and make them run as fast as they can but I guess the skill would come in handy if they are ever trying to escape from the chain gang…wait…that is probably unacceptable too.


I sweated through all the sprints and track events until it was finally time for the high jump. The competition was good but I knew there was only one person to beat. Jerry was athletic and, while still an eighth-grader, was two years older. I had the height and the skinniness and I had, as I said, my secret weapon, the western roll.


Expectations…did I mention that earlier? As one of the last events, the high jump drew a crowd of boys and girls. I didn’t care about impressing the boys but I think I have made it pretty clear in the past that I was desperate to impress the girls, especially the one who had just taken the ribbon for the fifty-yard dash.


Mr. Case, the math teacher and my uncle, was overseeing the field events. He set the bar at four feet as a start. Nothing to that. I used the scissors kick and cleared everything easily until we reached 4’9”. I decided that it was time to take out the big guns and got strange looks when I set up my approach from the right rather than the left. I ran in and launched myself, rolled over the bar in good form and landed undamaged on the sawdust.


Undamaged, that is, until Mr. Reynolds came storming up to me and told me that there would be no more of whatever that was. He said something about younger kids trying it and possibly getting hurt. I couldn’t believe it and tried to protest but Mr. Reynolds’ domain was not a democracy and his word was law.


There were only two of us left in the competition: it was down to me and Jerry. I had just surpassed my best scissors jump and the bar was set at 4’11”. There was nothing to do but go back to the old-fashioned scissors kick. High jumpers get three tries at every height. Jerry cleared the bar on his second attempt. I missed twice and everything hung on my third jump. I took an extra long run, pushed off with everything I had, and despite stretching out as flat as I could, brushed the bar with the seat of my pants. I had pushed off so hard that I landed on my back outside the pit and scraped one of my spiked track shoes against my leg.


As a final cosmic and comic insult, the bamboo bar landed on top of me. With the wind and the hopes knocked out of me, it took an agonizingly long few seconds to stand up. It didn’t matter how long it took: the event was over and the crowd had moved on.


I brushed myself off, checked the little trickle of blood down my leg and cursed the unfairness of it all. Jerry was two years older… I was not allowed to compete at my best and I had landed in an undignified thump with a severely bruised ego. Much pain, no gain. The impact on that hard ground was enough to jar me out of my dreams of being an athletic star. I was defeated by Jerry and by circumstance and by gravity…mostly by gravity.


I am quiet and so I didn’t look like a sore loser. I was a sore loser, obviously, since such a small event from so long ago still bothers me. Life didn’t seem fair and I felt I was at the center of all its injustices. To my credit, I was young and my sense of injustice was greatly under-developed. As we grow older and face the vicissitudes of day-to-day life, we begin to see the world more clearly.


There is always someone bigger or stronger or faster or smarter and there will be times when all the forces of our personal world come against us in battalions. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try or how long we practice or how righteous our cause, we find ourselves on our backs, covered in sawdust and aching from a dream we know in our deep hearts, is over.


The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote that life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards. So there is hope. We never know what gains are made by the losses of the day. Each victory and each loss sets us on a new path. As we grow older and look back on our lives, we see, or create patterns. Whether we call it God, or Kismet or Karma, or just dumb luck, all the meandering streams of our lives seem to converge to make us who we are despite the hard knocks, heartbreaking losses and undignified landings along the way.


When I was only a couple of days old, my mother put me on a changing table and reached back for a diaper. In that brief instant, I managed to roll off the table and land on an uncarpeted wood floor. In a panic, Mom grabbed me up and rushed me to the doctor. The doctor, Dr. Settle, looked me over, turned to my Mom and asked, “Did he bounce?”


Yes I did, Dr. Settle. Yes I did.




*That was the Fort Mill Central School record, nothing more than that.

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