highjinks

My family is complicated.

We all got together last weekend at my parents' house to celebrate my sister's birthday.  Everyone was there except my brother-in-law.  Hi Matt!  It was a beautiful spring day, so of course all my two nephews wanted to do was play outside.  The oldest one has always had an enduring love of throwing and catching balls, and I must say for eight years old, he really has quite an arm on him.  Gone are the days when playing catch meant throwing the ball to him, waiting for him to pick it up and throw it back, then fishing it out of the bushes.

Anyway, somehow or other a big red ball found its way up to the roof.  It may or may not have been my dad's doing, as he has a way of scheming up things that will be "neat."  It got stuck in a truly improbable looking place, on the very peak of the roof.  It turns out that there was actually a section of flat roof up there that the ball was sitting on, but it really looked like if you took another ball and threw it at the first ball, you could knock it right off and it would roll down the other side into the front yard.

I knew that there had to have been a section of flat roof, but still, I was fairly confident that if you threw a second ball hard enough you could probably manage to knock it down.  My dad, the engineer, believed otherwise.

I thought I'd give it a try.  Ted positioned himself in the front yard, and I stayed in the back yard and we had a few rounds of roof catch.  Even though I could see him through the windows of the house, there was no good way to indicate to him where the ball was, as he could not see it from the front.

You can't play roof catch in front of an eight year old boy without him wanting to play, too.  But time was of the essence, for several reasons.  The first is that my parents live in a retirement community.  It galls my dad, but my mother really enjoys it, on account of its being really lovely.  It's about thirty years old, so the flora is really grown in and it looks a little like a fairy tale, with ponds and winding paths and flower gardens.

You only have to be fifty-five to live there, it's not assisted living or anything, but there is the slightest feeling that the greatest generation is all around you, peering out lace-curtained windows, frowning suspiciously on anything that looks like fun.  So I really wanted to get the ball down and start playing badminton or croquet.  But naturally, I kept missing the ball, as did Ted, on account of his poor sight-lines.  The nephew was too wrapped up in the excitement of it all to aim the ball properly, and that, coupled with the need of constant assurance that everyone was watching him before throwing, resulted in some truly off-the-marks throws that all took way too long.  Then the ball would roll off the roof and he would insist on another turn.

So it was taking some time, and as we were using two small, slightly hard-ish balls, the chaos seemed destined to produce injury.  Ted was really hucking them back at a rate and trajectory that was simply unpredictable.  My sister got pegged good once, and, as she didn't understand that Ted was on the other side of the house fulfilling his uncle-y duty, promptly blamed it on the nephew.  I explained the situation.  Then my mother came out.  I explained it to her.  I think my brother was sleeping.  The whole scene was a study in frustration and misunderstanding.

The one family member unaccounted for was my dad, which is really no good.  He's the FIRST one you should watch.  His head appeared at the top of a tall wood fence attached to the house.  He was standing on a lawn chair.  Remember what I said about time being of the essence?  Okay, come on!  Ball come down now!

We aimed again.  A miss.  No ball.  My dad was suddenly, mysteriously, on top of the fence, clutching the eave of the roof.  BALL COME DOWN NOW!  Swing and a miss.

The fence wavered, my dad wavered, then recovered.  Then my mother broke out in a moaning, wifely harangue. "Oh my god!  What is he doing?  What is that stupid man DOING?  He's going to kill himself.  I'm not watching this.  I can't watch this.  I'm going inside.  If he wants to kill himself, let him. I don't care.  But I'm not watching. I'm going inside."  But she didn't go inside.  She continued on, loudly and continuously, which merely fueled my dad's fire.  Up he went, first one foot, then the other, then slowly he was up in the roof, crouching at the edge, unsure of his footing, not wanting to stand, not wanting to crawl, not wanting to get back down.

Really, it didn't look that dangerous to me.  It didn't seem like that steep of a roof, nor was it that high off the ground.  Never mind that there were four able-bodied young people around the house, who could have scampered up and down more easily if not more safely, but my dad was a Marine, and he lives in a retirement village.  He had something to prove.  My mother can be very proud, but she simply doesn't seem to understand the role of pride in other people's behavior.  It also enrages her (and I think rightly) that my dad won't get out of his chair to move a box out of the hallway for her, but damn if he isn't up on the roof to get an inconsequential toy off of the roof for anyone who isn't her.

So, I think she was awash in mixed feelings, which is probably the most charitable way to put it, as was I, because I was annoyed that he didn't even us very much of a chance to try to knock the ball down, and the nephews were excited because, hell, Grandpa was on the roof!  Ted didn't know what was happening on our side of the house, and I think my brother was still sleeping.

My father climbed to the peak of the roof and, once at the flat part threw the ball down then took a look around, walking back and forth on the flat part.  I was slightly curious as to how he was going to come back down, but didn't really give it much thought, as he had the whole fence/chair setup, plus the ground on the other side of the fence was a considerable amount higher than the side we were on.  But a while later it slowly came into my consciousness that my dad was still on the roof.  He sat perched up on the peak and was taking off his shoes, at my sister's recommendation.  He threw the shoes down, then paused, like he was done.  He gave his sock feet a couple of tests.  He said tentatively, "No..."  I suggested barefeet.  Everybody agreed that it would be worse.

My mother stayed, shielding her eyes from the sky, looking up at the man, who stayed, up on the roof, looking down at the ground.  He may as well have been licking the air nervously (see last post- skittish floor cat Ibby).  Then he turned and disappeared down the other side of the roof.  My sister and I ran around to the front of the house.  On the way she exclaimed how surprised she was that he would climb the roof in the first place, being so afraid of heights as he was.  I stopped dead in my tracks.  "What?"

"Yeah, he's really afraid of heights."

"No," I said, "He gets seasick on twirly rides and swings."

"Yup.  And he's also really afraid of heights. Remember at the old house when the bathroom vent on the roof had to be cleared, and he convinced Ted do it and he was chased by all those wasps?"

No, I hadn't remembered.  But Ted did. 

Hmmmm.

He chose the front of the house because the roof seemed to be less steep, and came much closer to the ground.  Also, there were bushes and grass under it, not a stone patio.

When we got the the front I offered to get my dad the chair.

He said casually, "Um... sure."

When I got back with the chair, he had one foot on my brother's shoulder and one foot on the little roof that covered the electric meter.  I went back inside with the chair.

When he was down everyone came inside.  We had cake.  The roof was never mentioned again.