pogo stick

POGO STICK
Another little adventure I had involved a pogo stick. My father used to get toys from a catalog retail store called Alden’s, similar to today’s Montgomery Wards and Sears. He would buy toys that were returned to the store from their mail order outlet. They would have large wire carts about 3 feet wide 6 feet long by 6 feet high filled with items that were returned because they were broken, missing parts, or something people did not want. My Dad would buy it as a job lot of about 10 carts for 20% of the original cost. Then he would pay my friends and I to go through all the items to use parts from one to make 3 or 4 of the games or toys complete. Then he sold them for 30% off the original price at his secondhand store.
This is where I found the pogo stick. For those of you who do not know what a Pogo Stick is, it is a metal tube the length of a broom stick, only larger in diameter. Inside it has a spring that compresses when you jump on the two small foot pads fastened to the stick about 12” off the ground. When you jump on it your weight pushes the spring down, then the spring comes back up pushing you into the air as you bounce along trying to keep your balance.
At first it was a challenge to stay balanced on it but I soon had the hang of it, and could bounce up and down as long as I wanted. I soon became bored of just bouncing, and started to look for other ways to use the pogo stick. I started to go up and down the 5 stairs in front of my house, in the dirt, the street up and down curbs, and over wooden ramps, but still could not find anything challenging, until I decided to bounce up the stairs to my friend Larry’s apartment on the third floor.
I started up the old wooden stairs in the back of his house bouncing up one stair at a time. I made it up to the first platform between the first and second floor when the bottom of the pogo stick hit a knothole in the wood making me lose control as I slipped off the stick. I went back down and started again. One by one I would ascend the stairs sometimes going up and then back down one to maintain my balance. Finally I reached the top of the third floor without falling off. I knocked on the back door, and when Larry came out I told him what I had done. He was surprised, but wanted to see it for himself. I said, “Okay, watch me go back down.”
I started down but soon found out that going down was not as easy as going up, because my momentum, and the fact that I had to lean forward to stay on that stick made me pitch forward rather rapidly. Down the stairs I went bang, bang, bang, down the six stairs to the platform between the floors where I thought I could gain control. Across the four-foot platform in two bounces to the short railing I bounced up into the air, and crashed into the wooden railing. As my body started to go over the edge I grabbed the railing just in time to keep myself from falling over the edge.
This ended my desire to bounce on a pogo stick having almost propelled myself to my death from the 2-1/2-story building. I never have lost my taste for adventure, but I do know I have an Angel looking out for me. I just hope whoever it is that is watching me never takes any catnaps.