There was this one time back in, I don’t know, maybe grade six, when I was playing football with some friends during recess. Back then, all we did was play football; it didn’t matter if the snow banks were seven feet tall, because we didn’t care. We just wanted to play football. We would play tackle football as well even though the teachers told us not to. But we did anyways, and every day we would be called inside for a scolding but the next day we would play again. This repeated everyday for the whole year.
Anyways, we were outside as usual when my friend John sends a long bomb that was completely mis thrown and went way too high. We laughed at him for what seemed ages until we saw John’s face. He was looking up at the roof of the school with a kind of sadness you only get when your dog dies. We realized the ball and landed on the roof and we all knew what that meant; The ball was gone. The roof was a no-go zone where we thought at the time was someplace you should never go because horrible things happened up there. This was only bolstered by the fact that the teachers didn’t want us to go up there.
We knew we had to go up and get our football down because we knew we didn’t have any other options. Of course there were actually other options but back then every kid was jostling for the position of alpha male. Everybody wanted to be cool, Everyone wanted to be a hero, but we were still afraid of the roof, But our love of that ball gave us courage and that overrode our fears of going up on that godforsaken place. We needed that football. So we did what any kid our age would do. We all played rock paper scissors until we found the loser.
I was the loser in this case so I had to go get the ball from the roof. There was no safe place to get up on the roof seeing as there was no ladder to climb, and to a sixth grader like me at that time the roof seemed as high as mount everest. But we needed that ball. So I grabbed a recycle bin: The large blue kind that you can find in industrial areas. I climbed on top of the blue thing and sat there eyeing the ledge of the roof for a while until my friend Roger said just go for it. I suddenly knew that I had positioned the recycle bin too far away from the school to easily grab the ledge and climb up.
I could have come back down and just moved the bin closer; but to my sixth grade brain, that was not an option. I stood atop the bin crouched and took a deep breath, then I jumped. As I jumped the bin wobbled and fell right as I left the bin and crashed into the pavement. At that moment I felt I could fly: I felt like freaking Michael Jordan. I stretched out my arms and grabbed the ledge of the school roof and pulled myself up. I had done it; I had made it to the roof. Then I saw the ball, shining in all it’s glory. I picked myself up and ran towards the ball. I picked that ball up and ran to the edge again with it high above my head.
My friends all cheered, because we could all play football again. I threw them the ball and thought to myself, how am I going to get down. Eventually a teacher had to come with a ladder and get me down. I felt kind of embarrassed that i couldn’t get down myself but I had got the football so I still felt proud of what I had done. I had got the ball, I had faced my fears and conquered the roof. I had become a legend. I got a pretty good scolding for that but I really didn’t care because I felt like a champion. I could have probably just asked a teacher to get the football but where’s the fun in that?
