Red and Rover by Brian Basset for August 12, 2013

If scraped knees are fun, a broken neck must be a hoot! Forget the wise guy and listen to Rover, Red!

I read somewhere that 70% of British kids have never climbed a tree. Climb Red! Climb! (I am 57 and climbed a tree last summer… admittedly small tree easy to climb tree, but a tree nonetheless – my grand daughter was most impressed!)

Couldn’t climb the trees in my NYC neighborhood (Sycamores, 4 or 5 feet around) My knee band-aids were due to trying to Roller Skate on sidewalks “Heaved” by their roots. Metal Clamp-on Skates with steel wheels, BUT I DID IT! (for a little while, anyway)

I hope that I shall never seeA day I have to climb a treeAnd then succumb to gravity Only to fall and scrape my knee.

I’m glad to say I never climbed a tree in my life.

the last tree I climbed, I got Vertigo! old age ain’t fun.

Climbing up is fun. Getting down is the hard part!

This will be known as “the summer with the borken arm”!

lightenup

True, climbing up is the FUN part, and the HARD part, against gravity you know. Getting down is mostly easy, just LET GO! The hard part of getting down is the sudden stop at the bottom.

When I was a kid, we rented an apartment over a store. The building had a Big willow tree in the so-called back yard (it was full of waist-high weeds)…I spent many summer days climbing that tree; however, once my mother discovered me up in the tree, that was that, no more tree for me… ;)

Being up high in a tall tree was like being in another world. I’d take a book up with me. sometimes I would have a squirrel for company. Ahh youth, it comes for such a brief time.

I climbed a tree this morning. It was at least a hundred feet high and when I got to the top I jumped off into a pile of hay with nary a scratch to show for my efforts. Full disclosure – I was playing a video game at the time. I’m not crazy, you know.

I climbed lots of trees as a younger man, and quite a few rock walls from the Canadian Rockies to the Chilean Andes. I always found it simultaneously terrifying and exciting. One’s suitability for climbing is inversely proportional to his imagination.