My daughter often sang along with television commercials when she was very young. She didn’t always get the words right. When the Chevy Silverado commercial came on, she sang, “Mike the Rock, ” a version I’ve come to prefer with apologies to Bob Seger.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, we went to our lyrically challenged daughter’s home to see our grandchild…and her. The front door was locked so Karen and I decided to check the back door. I closed the backyard gate behind us and realized the mechanism was a little wonky and I couldn’t re-open the gate and get out of the backyard. We were imprisoned by a six-foot-tall privacy fence. We heard the dogs barking inside, but apparently no humans were home. The only way out was to climb the wood privacy fence and jump into the front yard. On the flight down from atop the fence, about halfway I suppose, it occurred to me, “This is poor judgment.” And then I landed, and my fears were realized. Don’t tell my orthopedic surgeon who replaced my left knee that I jumped off a six-foot fence. I picked myself up and walked gingerly towards the car. The vertical distance from which I can fly through the air and land unharmed back on earth is diminishing by several inches each year. I blame my jumping on my friend David Burns who quotes a story about his brother Eddie. During a Bible Class, the teacher was making a point that 99% of the things we worry over and lose sleep over, never happen. To which Ed Burns immediately commented, “See, it works!” I knew then, with the 99% certainty that despite tweaking my calf muscle the day before playing pickleball and having a $40,000 titanium knee, that everything would be ok, even if I jumped. And I was correct. Right after landing and rolling back up to my feet, my wife yelled from across the yard, “I got the gate open!” 

Even so, there is something primal about the competitive will to perform physical acts of bravado, some borne of necessity, but nevertheless, spurred on by the pride and knowledge of what once was. Namely, youth, strength, and flexibility. Bruce Springsteen once sang about two high school friends he saw in a bar later in life. The first friend could throw a fastball by you and make you look like a fool, and the other was a girl who could turn all the boys’ heads, but all they wanted to talk about was glory days. There is something deep inside us that makes us long to go back to the primal days when our futures were filled with possibility and our bodies were lean and powerful, like Bob Seger singing about running track in high school, “boldly, sweatin’ in the Sun, felt like a million, felt like number one, I was 18, lean and solid everywhere…like a rock.” 

When you are 18, lean and solid everywhere, you jump off fences, sometimes over them. 

When you are 63, and you jump off fences, you are simply stupid.

In a few months, on my birthday, when I’m 64, things will calm down, according to the Beatles, and on Sunday mornings we can go for a ride and work in the garden weeding, who could ask for more? But I still kind of hope the garden has a fence, maybe a three-footer…