Our first house in Stockton, which was actually one-half of a duplex, was right on the edge of town in an area being developed. Directly across the street was a large empty field, a perfect place for us neighborhood kids to play. With this huge field of dirt, all we needed was a shovel. I provided the shovel, and we took turns digging. We all wanted to see just how big a hole we could make.

The project took weeks. At first we called it "The Hole," as in, "Let's meet at The Hole after school." "Mom, we're going to go play out at The Hole." "I did more work on The Hole than you did!"

The Hole became quite large, and then someone came up with the coolest idea. With all the construction going on in the neighborhood there was plenty of wood around (scrap and otherwise) so day by day we were able to start covering The Hole with a roof. As the roof was built, dirt was piled on top of it so that it couldn't be seen. It was at this point it stopped being The Hole and became "The Fort."

With The Fort in place amid all the weeds and tall grass, it was the best place on Earth for war games. We armed ourselves with cap guns, squirt guns, plastic battle axes and swords, and the filled that field with wars, insurrections, rebellions and general free-for-all mêlées. The Fort was a nexus for our little armies until summer, when a rival gang of kids (older and meaner) took it from us. Our interest in it waned, as we'd discovered new places to play (a creek with a railroad bridge, God help us) and so we finally gave up on The Fort. We let the bullies have it.

Then I remember the day we spotted a Caterpillar tractor out in that field, lumbering and squeaking through the tall grass. I stood on my front lawn with my friends, watching in fascination as the tractor pulled its plow back and forth across the field, edging closer to The Fort with each pass. Then there was this magic moment when the tractor completely disappeared from our view. From across the field came a terrific Wham!.

Little did we realize that we'd created the perfect tractor trap.

The tractor driver came up out of that hole hopping mad, and we ran. Later someone came door to door, inquiring about whose kids had dug a big hole in the field. My mom kept her mouth shut, no doubt fearing a lawsuit or something. Later it came out that the bullies who'd taken it away from us got blamed, and were in big trouble. Even to this day I still think: That's what they get for taking it away from us! The jerks.

They had to have a big semi-truck looking rig come out and pull the tractor out of The Hole. We stood on my front lawn watching that, too. Come next summer, they'd started building more houses there and soon the field was a block of brand new triplexes. It didn't take five years for the whole area to deteriorate into a slum.

Frankly, I liked it better as a field.

A warm spring day in the 4th grade, out on the green grass of recess, we carried our binders out to the baseball diamond and stretched out on the ground to fold and create paper airplanes. Several designs were in our minds, but one seemed to fly the best on a moderately windy day. I made mine, threw it around a while, and the bell rang and we headed back for the classroom. One last throw, straight up, and the little white airplane glided in a large and perfect loop and was about to land on the classroom roof, but it didn't. Something unexpected and amazing happened.

The airplane hung suspended, bobbing in the air, right at the corner of the building. "Whoa! Look! Hey, guys, look!" The airplane just hung there in mid-air, still bobbing, surging forward and falling back, caught in a wind pocket created by the corner of the roof. It was a happenstance, once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. "Look!" I yelled. "It's still there!"

The wind was coming in from the west, as usual, and wasn't gusty  –  it was an even, steady flow of air. The angle and speed of the flow and the shape of the roof were just right. The airplane just happened to insert itself into a kind of invisible bubble, trapping it, keeping it aloft. It hung in the air like a miniature kite.

My friends and I stood around it, looking up in amazement. A few of them, mindful of the bell having sounded, tore themselves away and went to class. I remained there in a sort of hypnotized state. I had never seen this happen before, and knew it would probably never happen again.

"Hey," I told one of my friends, "go get the teacher!"

He ran off without a word, and a minute or so later returned with our teacher. She was a very kind, caring woman who was concerned that something had happened. When she first arrived she didn't understand what we were looking at. When she realized she'd been pulled away from class to look at a paper airplane she was angry, but as the airplane continued to hover, her anger drained away. She, too, got caught up in the amazing sight, especially as it became apparent that it wasn't going to end anytime soon.

"That is something," she said. "Look at that."

The paper airplane stayed where it was for maybe ten minutes total, then the wind gusted and broke the spell. The airplane surged upwards and then turned, and floated off to land in the dirt. I ran over and picked it up and then went with my teacher back to class.

The event caused a paper airplane craze at the school, much to the consternation of the janitorial staff. Try as we might, though, we were never able to duplicate this stunt. Sometimes the airplanes would hang for a moment or so at the corner of a building, tantalizing us, but then turn or drop away. It never happened again.

I was about 9 years old when my dad took my mom and I on a business trip to Seattle, Washington, and we stayed in a high rise hotel. I had never been in a high rise hotel before, and I was fascinated with the view.  Especially since, directly across the street, giant cranes with wrecking balls were smashing away at an old building.

What is so fascinating, I wonder, about the sight of a building being torn down?  Especially to kids.  I watched for hours upon hours.  The huge ball of metal would swing, smash into concrete and brick.  Dust flew, debris fell.  I waited breathlessly for large sections to break loose and tumble to their doom.

Back then, you could open high rise windows.  You can't do that anymore, they're all bolted shut.  When I found I could open the window, a whole new world of fun blossomed.  I proceeded to take all the hotel stationary, fold it into paper airplanes, and send them flying through the air toward the deconstruction site across the street.

Again, why is this so fascinating?  But to a small boy such as I was, I couldn't imagine anything more fun.  Every scrap of paper I could scrounge flew out that window as one type of airplane or another.  And then, watching one, it flew right into a window across the street, right into the doomed building being torn down.  In my excitement, I forgot the window was wide open, and I leaned forward and fell out.

We were about 20 stories up.

I heard my mom scream and my father jump. He caught my legs as I was going out the window. I have a very vivid memory of seeing the gray sidewalk below, my hands stretched out in front of me. Little people walking on the sidewalk and small cars driving on the miniature street. Then I was flying backwards as my dad yanked me back through the window.

That was close.  I mean, really.  If my dad hadn't had such quick reflexes, this would have been a really short life.

 
My father's friend, the opera singer Ted Novis, gave me my first fishing pole. It was just after we'd moved to California. In Tucson the only open water you'll see is either in a swimming pool, or raging down an arroyo during a flash flood. Neither is good for fishing, and so I had never fished before. This is why, when Ted took my father and I out fishing in the San Francisco bay, I didn't have a pole to use.

Ted picked one at random out of his huge bundle of poles and handed it to me. "Here!" he said. "You have a fishing pole."

"You mean, for keeps?"

He laughed. "Yes, for keeps!"

He and my father showed me how to set up a hook and sinker, and helped me bait it, and we threw our lines out and sat waiting. Not only had I never been fishing before, but this was also my first time in a boat. It was cold out in the bay, and I wasn't used to the rocking of the waves – it made me a bit seasick.

Dad and Ted were talking about adult things, which excluded me. I kept peering over the side at the water, wondering how deep it was. Minutes passed, then a startling thing happened to my fishing pole. Something down in the water was yanking hard on the string, and the reel began spinning and making a whining noise.

"You got a bite!" Dad was yelling in his loud, exited way. "You got a bite!"

"Reel it in, boy!" Ted yelled.

I was flustered and excited and didn't know what to do, and whatever had a hold of the other end was threatening to yank the pole out of my hands. So I said, "Here!" and handed it to my Dad.

Dad laughed and cranked on the reel. "Whoa! You got a monster!" The fish was fighting hard.

"You're gonna lose it," Ted was saying. "Play it out a bit."

"No, I got it." Dad reeled it in, and Ted netted it. It was a fish about the same size and shape as a large frying pan.

"A halibut!" Ted said. "Look at that!"

Talk about a weird fish. My dad pointed out to me that it had two eyes on one side of its head. Born looking like a normal fish, one of the eyes migrates over time from one side of the head to the other. It was like a freak of nature, and it made me nervous.

Under my Dad's direction, I baited the hook and let the line out again. It wasn't ten minutes later I caught another fish. It was a 2 pound catfish, which confused Ted because he was sure there were no catfish in the bay. He'd never seen one in salt water before, and he didn't like the yellow color of its belly. We threw it back.

I got bites for the rest of the trip, but no more fish. Dad and Ted didn't catch anything at all. That night, Ted cooked the halibut and I ate some of it, but back then I didn't have much appreciation for seafood.

I was hooked on fishing, though.

Over the next few years I caught a whole array of strange fish using that pole. I caught baby sharks, sting rays, rock cod, and a really odd thing called a needle fish  –  a yard long but only an inch wide, and boy did it fight. Every time I went fishing, I caught something, even when no one else did. In Sacramento, I caught a 15 pound striped bass (my father was very proud of me for that). Up at one lake I even caught a turtle.

I thought it was normal to catch a fish every time I went fishing. This was truly a lucky pole. There's no other explanation.

Years later, up at Lake Tahoe, I was I huddled in my sleeping bag on the back deck of my Dad's boat with my fishing line out. My lucky pole was all the way in the boat, with only about 5 inches of it hanging over the transom. It was within easy reach of my right hand in case there was a bite.

I was just barely awake when it happened. My parents were asleep. I was squinting up at the stars, because they're bright up at Tahoe.

Something grabbed the line of my lucky pole and yanked it out of the boat. I heard and felt it being dragged up over the transom, and I sat up in time to see it sail off through the air and splash into the water about 20 feet away. My yelling and screaming awoke my parents and my dad came scrambling out onto the stern, dressed in his flannel pajamas. "My pole!" I was crying. "My pole is gone!"

After I explained the details to Dad, he shook his head and said it must have been a giant mackinaw trout. He'd heard tales of these giants, and he was sure that's what took it. Since then I've looked them up: The biggest on record is 37 pounds, but divers have reported seeing 50-pounders. Clearly these are big enough to yank a pole completely out of a boat. 

Also, there's an ongoing story of Lake Tahoe having a monster. This monster is probably the result of some sturgeon that was released in the lake years ago. Sturgeons are known to reach lengths of 10-14 feet in the right environment (longer, actually – the record is 24 feet!), and they DO look like some sort of pre-historic monster.

Searching through the Internet, you'll find dozens of Lake Tahoe midnight-pole-stealing fish stories. I have no doubt there's a big nocturnal creature in that lake dragging dozens of fishing poles around through the water … and one of them is mine! My one and only lucky pole.

I've since wondered, what makes a lucky pole lucky? The smell on the line? The sound the reel makes when winding – does it attract fish? I wish I knew.

I haven't had one since.

I woke up at 5 in the morning and couldn't go back to sleep.

Positive person that I try to be, I labeled this as an "opportunity" and made myself a strong cup of coffee, and sat down at my word processor and put in a good chunk of work on my novel.

Color me pleased with myself.  And now, off to start the day.

Hope yours is a good one.

I'd never seen so many green trees in my life. It was
like an alien planet, with an alien culture living in structures of alien
architecture. After having spent my entire 8 years of life in that desert
environment, moving to the California Bay Area was an extreme shock to my
system.

My whole life, and the lives of my parents, had been
completely changed by a bearing.

The business Dad ran in Tucson had been very successful. He designed
and manufactured revolutionary, portable conveyer systems for mining
operations. From what I understand, another company had approached him with
their own "revolutionary" bearings that never needed to be oiled, and
which would further revolutionize Dad's conveyer designs. Unfortunately these bearings,
which never needed oiling, really could have used some oil after all.

There followed catastrophic breakdowns. Lawsuits flew in
all directions. My dad ducked and ran, carrying us with him. We were torn from
my happy home in the desert and landed on this alien planet called Los Altos, California,
just months before the historic first moon landing. Dad had gotten a design job
with a company that manufactured automation equipment for beer companies, and
started working hard to rebuild his life.

Through some wonderful business contact (or perhaps a
sheer stroke of luck) he managed to find a two story, 4000+ square foot rental
house for only $50 a month. Even back in the late 60's this was an incredible
deal. He got this deal because the house, which was a beautiful Victorian over
a hundred years old, was slated to be torn down to make room for an apartment
complex parking lot. We weren't really tenants as much as caretakers, watching
over the doomed house until it was leveled.

The house sat on four acres of land, in the bay area,
right next to a major freeway. There were trees all over the yard, including
several large pine trees, one of which grew right next to my bedroom window and
made a perfect ladder for me to climb out and down to the ground. Another pine
tree – the big one – allowed me to climb up higher than the roof of the house
and gave me a great view of the entire neighborhood. I had never really been a
tree climber before, but I adjusted quickly. It's a wonder I never fell and
broke my neck.

I made one friend who lived a few houses down, and we got
along okay until we went to a hobby store to buy balsa wood gliders. I was
incredibly bored most of the time, because there were no lizards or snakes to
catch (this was in the middle of a city) and I missed my huge group of friends
in Arizona.
But I did persuade this one friend to go with me down the block to this hobby
store that had 10¢, 15¢, and 35¢ gliders. I loved these gliders, they were
something to do, and I wanted to share this fun with my friend. I don't
remember his name, so let's just call him Bob.

Bob didn't have any money, though, at least none he was
supposed to spend. But I had done such a good job in selling him on the fun
we'd have with these gliders, that he dipped into the money he wasn't supposed
to spend. I didn't know anything about this, I just wanted to buy some gliders.

So we're at this hobby shop, and we've chosen our
gliders, and when Bob pays for his he uses some rare old coins that was in a
collection his parents had started for him. The hobby store guy stopped,
holding the coins in his hand, and said, "Are you sure you want to use
these coins?" He said yes, and we bought the gliders, and we went home and
built them and played with them until they were utterly destroyed (this was
part of the fun with gliders). Bob's older brother saw us playing with these
little airplanes and wanted to know where we got them. Bob confessed what he'd
done and his brother's jaw dropped. "You did what?" He went to
tell his parents, and the game was over. Bob was grounded for weeks, and was
never allowed to play with me again.

Oddly I'd somehow became the evil one who'd coaxed Bob to
do this. In his parent's minds there was no way Bob would have thought of this
on his own, therefore the new kid was to blame for it. That wasn't the worst of
it, either, because the mother was the president of the PTA or something and
all the neighborhood kid's mothers were warned of this evil new boy in town,
and within a few days nobody was allowed to play with me. I didn't
understand what was happening at the time, but in retrospect it is the cruelest
thing that I've ever experienced as a child.

Back in Arizona
I had been a very social kid. Here I found myself not only in an alien
environment, void of all things dear and familiar, but also shunned by my
fellow children for no good reason. School became a complete Hell on Earth.
Spending time alone despite being surrounded by others was a hard thing for me
to deal with. As time wore on, though, an odd thing began to happen ... I
started getting used to it.

A vivid memory of this time has me riding around on my
bicycle with nothing to do, and at one point I just let the bicycle fall over
and I didn't get up. It was at a corner, in some long grass, and I was just
sprawled there and staring up into the sky. For months the loneliness had been
like an oppressive weight, but as I stared into the endless blue above me I
embraced that feeling, sought the center of it and let it consume me, and then
I conquered it. I incorporated it into myself.

A station wagon drove up and stopped, and a lady was
looking at me in alarm, and she made her kid roll down his window. "Do you
need help?" she had her kid ask me. I shook my head and said,
"No." The woman looked angry, mad that I wasn't hurt. She drove
quickly away, and for a moment I felt a bit of shame for scaring her, but then
again, I remember thinking that it was her problem, not mine.

Another thing I remember vividly was my dad letting me
stay up all night watching NASA space reports, and staying home from school so
I could see Neil Armstrong hopping around on the moon. It was all in black and
white and the pictures were fuzzy. The moment Armstrong stepped into that
freezing dust I saw my first computer graphics; ugly block letters spelling out
"MAN ON MOON." My dad, a science fiction reader and space fanatic,
was ecstatic. As his son I was ecstatic by proxy. I knew it was a big deal, but
not really how big. I tried to share the experience with other kids at school,
but continued getting the cold shoulder.

There was a big art project we were all working on, each
of us having chosen a bird and was expected to draw it as lifelike as possible.
I really dove into it, because I'd chosen a bird that represented my old home:
A roadrunner. I worked on that thing night and day, in class and at home. When
I turned it in the teacher gave me an A+ and it was hung on the classroom door
for all to see. This didn't help my standing with the other kids -- it
made it somehow worse.

I started doing a lot more creative things, drawing
pictures and writing little stories. I invented my own paper airplane designs.
I discovered there were new types of creatures to catch and study, as I had
started finding tree frogs and salamanders. The loneliness was still there but
I was dealing with it, and discovering more about myself.  Had I not gone though this lonely time, I'd
be a completely different person right now. I think this is where the seeds
were planted that eventually turned me into a writer.

It wasn't quite a year before we moved out of that big
old house. Dad moved to another division of the company over in Stockton, the heart of California's central valley, and when we
moved it was into a new duplex on the edge of town. There were lizards and snakes
to be caught, and lots of friends to be made. Life was much better. I was happy
again.

Years later, though, when I think back to the "good
old days" of childhood, it's not California
that comes to mind. It's the deserts of Arizona.
I guess in my heart I'll always be a desert rat.

• 7 days until 11.    That is code between my love and I for, "We'll see each other in a week!"
• My younger daughter is flying up with me this time.  Yay!
• Friday was my love's birthday.  One year closer to 40! 
• I sent her a bunch of imported English chocolate.
• Melanie and I recorded our 5th episode of "Don't Quit Your Day Job" today, and we had three people call in, including our friend Delilah (if she's our friend, does that count?)
• In episode 4 we talked about Batman having phone sex.  This episode, we dealt with serious issues ... like Kermit the Frog having phone sex.  It should be available by Sunday.
• I am experiencing full-blown, all out procrastination toward working on my novel.  WTF?
• I should be working on it right now.
• But I'm not.
• I finally saw the original Godzilla today (Gojira) and it was very dark and outright anti-American.  It also dragged on, and in the end, they actually killed Godzilla.  All the sequels actually follow the more campy American edit, where they overlaid some hokey plot starring Raymond Burr (and removed the anti-American messages).
• I get to see my love in 7 days!

While I was growing up, my
parents had two deadly kid traps in the house. One was the refrigerator, which
wasn't that bad because I had no intention of crawling into it. It was never empty
enough to do that anyway. The other trap, however, was much more tempting…

As a child in the 1960's I was
a big fan of shows like Star Trek and Lost In Space. The cartoons
I watched also had space or science fiction themes; things like Johnny Quest,
Space Ghost, and the awesome Herculoids. So when I saw that
gleaming white, front-loading washer of my mom's, with that big round glass
porthole in front, I could only imagine one thing:

A spaceship!

It seemed to be designed
specifically to trap kids such as myself inside. Why else would they engineer
the latch handle the way they did? It could close and latch itself, but you had
to yank on the handle to open it. And there was no way to open it from the
inside. Also – and this is the part that convinces me – the damn thing was
nearly soundproof. It was obviously designed to be a trap. Its primary purpose
was to wash clothes, but the insidious real purpose was to capture kids
and suffocate them to death.

One of my best friends at this
age was a black Poodle/Cocker Spaniel mixed dog named Pepper (the one who
chased the rabbit out of the house). He looked like a black Poodle with hair
that was just a little too long and too straight. My constant companion, he
endured whatever boyhood tortures I administered to him and still loved me
completely, with no reservations, still willing to go where I went and do what
I did. Needless to say, Pepper was my co-pilot when I decided to take the
washing machine spaceship on a trip to Planet 12.

I climbed in first, and he jumped
in right after me. Then the glass door swung shut of its own accord and locked.
I don't recall if I panicked immediately or if I built up to it, but it was
clear to me that I was in deep trouble. You see, I was perfectly aware that a
kid I knew when I was even younger had been found dead in a refrigerator being
stored behind an apartment building. I guess it didn't occur to me until right
then that it could happen in a washing machine as well.

I banged and screamed and
yelled for quite a while, but Mom didn't hear me. Dad wasn't around, because he
was at work. It was just me and Pepper there in that space capsule, marooned
and running out of air. I don't really remember what I was thinking. I just
remember being very frightened in an I-might-really-die kind of way. I
also remember staring to feel sleepy, and that means (though I didn't know it
then) that suffocation was starting to take place.

Then I remember my older
brother, Hank, walking into the room, and he looked down to see Pepper and I
staring back out at him. "What in the Hell are you doing in there?"
he said, amused. With a quick flip of his wrist he popped open the door, and I
can still remember how unbelievably sweet and cool the outside air was. Pepper
and I fought each other to get out first; Pepper won. I tumbled out onto the
floor at my brother's feet, saved, given a second chance. I would have been
dead if it wasn't for him. I would have been another one of those sad
child-suffocation stories, a warning and a caution to others.

The really sad thing
is, I don't think I ever thanked him for it.

Come to think of it, there was
a third deadly kid trap at my house, and my brother saved my life by pulling me
out of that one, too: The swimming pool.

I wish I could have been
around to save him when he needed a hero.

When I was about 8 years old
and was feeling the freedom of my first bicycle, my friends and I would go out
and ride for miles down dirt roads that crisscrossed through the cactus and brush.
We explored ruins of adobe buildings where we found old coins and bayonets, and
played in arroyos where fossils were routinely sticking out of the sandstone
walls. This is where I found my first clam shell, out in the middle of the
desert. Of course, the clam shell was solid rock and hundreds of millions of
years old.

The funny thing was, we didn't
care much about any of these wonders. We were looking for lizards.

Horny toads where my
favorites, but they were elusive and hard to come by. Spiny lizards were nearly
impossible to catch unless you climbed a telephone pole or a cactus to get to
them. There were "whiptails," which were really fast and had forked
tongues like snakes. There was an occasional Chuckwalla or Desert Iguana (those
were some big lizards, especially to an 8-year-old) but they were rarely
seen, and probably would have bitten off our fingers had we tried to catch
them. I never did see one of those poisonous Gila monsters, though one time I
caught a very colorful small lizard and later found it could have been a
baby Gila monster – but I'll never know.

Every once in a while we would
run across the most beautiful lizard I'd ever seen. You'd have to find it by
turning over big boards or rocks, where you were more likely to find a
nine-inch scorpion. But every once in a while there would be this brightly
colored flash and we'd grab – and grab carefully! – because the tail would
easily come off and that would "ruin" the lizard. This amazing,
beautiful little lizard was called the Tucson Banded Gecko, a subspecies of the
Western Banded Gecko. We just called them geckos. They were
yellow and brown, very soft, had large expressive eyes (the only gecko I know
of that has eyelids), and a bulbous, fat tail. My other 8-year-old friends and
I all agreed this was a "cool lizard."

In addition to lizards, we ran
across the occasional snake. Out there in the desert, half the snakes we ran
into were poisonous, and I'd seen more than my share of sidewinders. Thankfully
I had enough sense as a child to just leave them alone. But one time, when we
were out riding in the early morning, there was this amazingly large snake
stretched all the way across the dirt road. I mean, all the way across.
We had an older kid with us (the brother of one of my friends) and he knew what
it was. He called it a "bull snake" which is a big cousin of the
harmless gopher snake. It looked like a rattler to us, but he picked it up and
showed us the tail and the head. There was no rattle, and the head was narrow,
proving it wasn't poisonous. The darn thing was 8 feet long if not longer, and
it just let us pick it up without even a struggle. We unanimously decided this
snake must go home with us, and the big brother looped it around his neck and
we rode back.

Well, his mother freaked out and
he couldn't keep it, so with great ceremony he gave it to me. It was so cool I
just couldn't believe it. Here was a snake that was bigger than I was tall, all
looped around my neck and arms like a ... well, a snake. It was just too
groovy.  [Remember, this was the 60's.  The words of the day were
"groovy," "boss," and "far out."]  So I
brought it into my house and, not knowing where to keep it, I put it in the
guest bath which was the third bathroom Mom wouldn't let us use because it was
"for guests."

I, uh ... neglected to tell
anyone about it, though. I knew if I told my mom, she wouldn't let me keep it,
just like the other guy's mom wouldn't let him keep it. I figured no one
ever used that bathroom so no one would ever find it.

I was wrong.  Less than
an hour later I heard my mother's hysterical voice calling out for my dad.
"Jiiiiiimmmiiieeeee!" she was shouting, her voice quavering so
that I knew she was jumping up and down. "Jimmmmiieeeeeee!!!!"

I hid under my bed and
prepared for the worst. I heard my father shout, "Oh my God!" And
then, "How in the Hell did that get in there!" Only a few
seconds later he called out my name. I still have no idea how they figured it
out so fast.

Fortunately my father found it
too funny to spank me for, but I had to go let the snake loose out where we'd
found it. My big brother drove me out there in his sand buggy. He, too, thought
it was pretty funny, but he didn't tell me that until years later.  It was
the last snake I brought home until after we moved to California.

One thing I did bring home
that the whole family did thing was wonderful was a young roadrunner. I
saw it down in an arroyo when we were playing with toy cars in the sand, and
chased it into a section of the arroyo where it was trapped. It tried to hide behind
a big piece of plywood, ducking down and pretending to be a weed. I grabbed it,
and it bit me, but I wouldn't let it go. This was a roadrunner, just
like on the cartoon, and I had to show my family. So I carried it all the way
home and let it go in the back yard.

Mom had a real way with birds,
and it wasn't more than a day before she had it eating out of her hands. The
problem was it liked bugs. So she was constantly sending me out to catch
grasshoppers, and that silly roadrunner would squawk and flap its wings and
hold its mouth wide open. My parents would laugh hysterically at it, and feed
the thing, and then send me out to catch more bugs.

I quickly got tired of
catching bugs for the silly bird, and the bird got hungry one day and decided
to try and catch its own bugs. Unfortunately, the bug it was trying to catch
was in the swimming pool, and the roadrunner was later found floating face down
in the pool, drowned. My mother cried, and then scolded me for bringing it home
in the first place.

It wasn't long after that when
a friend and I caught a jack rabbit. We were lifting over boards and rocks
looking for geckos, and under one big board was the rabbit. My friend dived
across the board, trapping it while I reached under and grabbed fur. It came
out kicking, and the claws on its hind feet scratched the hell out of my arm. I
quickly dropped it into the pillow case we'd brought along (it was the best
thing for keeping lizards in out in the field) and it thrashed around inside
but couldn't get out. My friend and I looked at each other and shouted in pure
glee. A jack rabbit! How cool was that? No one we knew had ever caught a jack
rabbit before!

I promptly took it home and,
once inside the house, called my mom and dad. "Mom! Dad! Look what I
caught! Look at this!" And I dumped the jack rabbit out of the bag and
onto the carpet. I don't even think my parents got a chance to see it, it was a
brown blur that launched itself toward the couch and dived underneath. Oh, but
my dog Pepper saw it, though! Boy did he! The chase was on, all around
the house at full speed, right over furniture and across tables and under
anything and into every room. They knocked over lamps and crashed into doors
and pulled curtains off their rods. My mom was yelling and my dad was laughing,
and Pepper was barking. I didn't know what to do.

Mom took matters into her own hands and opened the front door. The rabbit must have come close to breaking the sound barrier going through that doorway. Pepper tried to follow, but only got to the other side of the street before he stopped, panting like mad, knowing the fun was over. But he turned and looked at me, and I swear I could understand the look on his face. He was saying, "Oh my God!  That was great!  Can we do that again?"

My first experience with freefall was tumbling to the ground
from that hospital bed.  The next was from when I was four and my dad took me
up for my first airplane ride.

I remember him showing me the neighborhood from the sky,
wagging the wings to say hello to everyone below, then he took me on a tour of
some big puffy white clouds.  I didn't have a seatbelt on, and so wanting a
better view I stood on the seat and crawled in the back, then ran back and
forth from window to window.  Everything looked so tiny.  Everything looked
like toys!

Little 4-year-old Jerry couldn’t get enough of that
airplane.

Then Dad played a trick on
me.  He put the plane into what's now called a "vomit comet" dive,
just enough to cancel out gravity inside the cockpit.  The seat cushions fell
away from my feet, and my butt bumped against the ceiling.  "Look at
you!" he said.  "You're really flying now!"  Panic didn't come
immediately – I was in shock at being in midair, floating above the seats –
then instinct kicked in and my little brain shouted "Danger!  Danger!  You're
falling!"

When we went in for the
landing, I looked out the front, over the nose and through the spinning blur of
the propeller, and saw this tiny postage stamp thing that was the airport.  No
way, I remember thinking.  That's not going to work. 
"Dad," I said, "we can't land there!  It's too small!" 
Indeed, it looked like it could fit into our backyard.

Finally, on the ground, I felt
queasy ... but I wanted to go up again.  He laughed.  "I'll make a pilot
out of you yet," he said.

Several years later I was with
him in one of his twin-engine planes, and we pulled the stunt on our
long-haired Chihuahua, Taffy.  She looked very confused as she floated up out
of my lap, and her little legs went nuts, and she started spinning around. 
When she started crying I grabbed her.  I felt bad but we were still laughing
about it.

Another thing my Dad would do,
is he would tell me to put my hands on the stick (which in most cases was a
wheel) then he'd let go of his and say, "Okay!  You're flying!"  I'd
tip the wings back and forth, do some shallow dives and climbs, and do a few
lazy turns.

I never did get my license,
but I do love to fly.  Sure it's dangerous.  But I'll tell you something ...
you know why pilots become pilots?

Because it's so damn fun!