High Places

One of the joys of having a house in suburbia, Northern California style, is the periodic Cleaning of the Gutters. Our house looks a little like a two-story house, but it's only a single-story. With very high gutters. One (and by "one" I mean "me") has to drag out an extension ladder, extend it to about twenty feet, balance it against the flimsy aluminum gutters, and climb up into the afternoon sky armed with nothing more than a garden hose at full pressure. Since you can only clean about ten or fifteen feet of gutter this way, the scene has to be repeated many many times, and it's even more fun on the sides of the house, where the ground slopes and the ladder perches precariously.

Which brings to mind Icarus, since Icarus is one of the words that can be formed from "precarious." You have to know these things in my profession (informal anagram generator), so I tend to mention things like this from time to time. Icarus, as any child of ten knows, was the ancient Greek who built wings out of feathers and wax and then flew too close to the sun. Foolish fellow. The wax melted, the feathers fell off, and Icarus -- if I remember this at all -- died. These kinds of things happen when you elevate yourself to any extent, and that thought is never very far away whenever I ascend the Ladder of Death. And really, I wish it wasn't called that. It just serves to make anything I do on the ladder seem more dangerous. Christmas is just around the corner, and I'll have to once again ascend the Ladder of You-Know-What to decorate the house. Fun!

But I digress. I meant to mention the Good Old Days when I lived in an apartment in Queens, on the fifth floor. The windows would get dirty from time to time, and my grandmother -- who had no desire to plunge to her own death -- would direct me to clean them. Cleaning the outsides of windows on the fifth floor of an apartment involves sitting on the ledge, with one hand grasping the frame of the open window, and leaning as far as one can to reach the center panes. There were no safety harnesses available to me in those days, so I just trusted that the flimsy metal structure would hold. (And, to be fair, it did, although the certainty that it actually would seemed always to be in doubt.)

So I got through adolescence by cheating death in the windows of Queens. Whether this was to my grandmother's chagrin is something I do not know, as my grandmother (who never did plunge to her death) passed away in a hospital bed in her eighty-sixth year. I suppose it did help to get me out of the house, since I went away to college soon after that. (While I was away at college, my grandmother moved out of town. True story!)

So to this day, I have a mild fear of heights. No, make that a moderate fear. I can't, for example, walk around on the roof of my house. (It does have a reasonably steep pitch, to be fair.) And those days when I could spit over the edge of a cliff are long gone. Not that I ever did such a thing, mind you. No, climbing ladders to clean out the gutters and hang Christmas lights is as good as it gets these days. Or as bad as it gets, depending on your perspective.