Then there was the time when a bunch of us kids tied a rope around the back tire of a bicycle, and tried to pull it to the top of the tall metal slide on the school playground. School was out for the summer, which left the playground open to neighborhood kids (and those, like me, who spent their days at neighborhood daycare in a private home). The slide was a steep, narrow, imposing structure to us, and wouldn’t it be mad fun, we thought, if we could ride a bike down the thing, do a wheelie at the bottom and, who knows, maybe even survive!

I volunteered to make the maiden trip because I was bright like that, leaving only the single problem of hauling that bike up to the peak. We’d tug the thing about halfway up, and then it would flop sideways off the slide and just swing from the rope, like it had been executed. Then, one of our number had the idea of pushing the bike up the slide on one end while the rest of us continued tugging on the rope to pull it up from the other end. He slipped (a metal slide is very slick), and fell down the slide but not before instinctively grabbing onto the bike and pulling it down on top of him. It was a spectacular crash, and we all congratulated him and said we wished we could watch the masterpiece again in slow motion. I think he was proud of his accomplishment. We were happy for him. You’d think that would’ve been enough of a day’s work for us, but we had not yet exhausted our imaginations.