CHALLENGE ONESELF

It’s good exercise, challenging yourself both the mental and physical.

Putting yourself out there, knowing there might be consequences.

I think back to a scary moment when, being freelance, I talked my

magazine editor into me writing about a first parachute jump.

Mind, I wouldn’t get paid, he said, if killed myself.

There I was 3.000 feet up in a small plane with my buddy yelling at me

when I hesitated, “Jump, God damn it! Jump!”

A static line opened the chute split seconds or so ,after I left the small

the airplane. I was tumbling in space yet with no sense of motion.

Then bang. I looked up to see the chute billowing above me.

The same friend talked me into two more jumps the following weekend.

Author’s comment: I‘ve done nothing like that ever since. That was some time ago. Other

challenges have come along. None quite so dramatic. Yet, I get my heart pumping one

way or another. It’s good for me. And you.

TWO FINGER FOX TROT

If there is anything I’d like to have learned in my life

is typing with more than two fingers. Looking down

at them, it’s the forefingers who do all the work.

Why is it in all the time I spent in school no bright,

thoughtful teacher didn’t look around her class and

decide what had to be done. They should learn to type!

Then again, why didn’t I, fresh out of university and wanting

to write for a living, think it might be helpful to type with all

all my fingers instead of two of them?

Writer’s comment: Is it too late, I ask myself, to learn how

to type the real way? How? By picking up one of those

books telling me HOW TO TYPE IN FIVE EASY STEPS?

It’s a thought. If my four fingers can all work together.