An Up and Down Summer

My best friend Eric--well, at least he was the kid I hung out with most--became the Slurpee-slurping champion of the neighborhood early that summer. His eyes bulging, he snatched the paper cup from my hand, then sloshed all the green slush down his gullet in just 14.3 seconds.

It was a stupendous feat, but nothing like the triumph of Eddy Fitzsimmons. On the eighth day of July that summer, Eddy sunk to his hands and knees and crawled a full mile without stopping. And in doing this, he'd nearly made it into the book that Eric and I read through every day, annotating and memorizing: The world's record for crawling, as chronicled by the Guinness Book of World Records, was 5.53 miles.

Doing the pogo
Eddy had nearly become famous. Now it was my turn. My own forte, as a skittish, skinny 10-year-old growing up in a Connecticut suburb, was obscure. I could pogo stick. I could clench the stick's shaft between my thighs, tense my abdomen, and bounce 17 times with no hands (and only one foot) touching the stick. I was the best pogo sticker in the neighborhood, but I was silent about my prowess. Until, that is, the muggy August morning I stepped into our garage and started in on those sewing-machine hops. And kept going--past Eric's consecutive jump best, 478 pogos, then past 1,000, past 2,000, past 3,000, and on up towards the exhausting, exhilarating heights of five-digit pogo-stick jumping.

17,323 and Counting

When I hit 5,000, the staccato beat of the pogos was smoothing out. Eric sauntered into the garage just after 8,000 with a clipboard and pencil. The world's record for consecutive pogo stick jumps was 17,323 --set, of course, by Danny Kloster of Clinton, Michigan.

Eric biked home to get some decent clothes on, just in case the press decided to cover this. I just tried to stay on that pogo stick until 17,324. I was on the verge of making history--and I was also on the verge of crashing to the garage floor. My stick was squeaking for lack of oil, and the muscles in my thighs were shaking. And I knew this: Anyone who made it all the way to 16,000, and then fell off, was a loser.

Mom, I'm on TV

"Seventeen thousand three hundred and nineteen, 20, 21." Eric was squatting on the driveway, his hands pressed prayer-like before him. "Twenty-two, 23, 17,324!" He burst from the asphalt, his arms high over his head, and then bounded up and down, keeping pace with me as I eked out a few insurance pogos. At 17,354, I stopped. I limped to our porch and we waited--Eric in a resplendent white shirt and I in an undershirt that he had emblazoned "World Champion."

Only one TV crew came, actually, and they left after ten minutes of filming. They made no promises, so we were in mortal suspense watching the news that evening. My mom was carving potroast in the kitchen when the anchor said, "A 10-year-old boy...". And sure enough, the guy in the white tee-shirt, the one flying all over our TV screen, was me.

Big Dreams

I am 33 years old now and, of course, I am not famous at all. I have never even been in the record book; Guinness, we learned, only acknowledges feats witnessed by impartial adults. I'm not entirely jaded, though. The other day as I sat in my house trying to write, there was this kid pelting a tennis ball at the brick wall across the street. I went outside, to shoo him away. But when I got out there, I was not quite sure what was running through the kid's mind. Maybe he was angry, and just venting steam. Or maybe (who knows?) this kid was driven by some vague and blind hope that, by ceaselessly tossing a ball against a wall, he could launch himself out of kid world, out of the world of chores and broken toys, and become a world champion, a star.