December 8th is an anniversary for me. This year it will mark seventeen years since the day I fell off the roof of our house while putting up Christmas lights.<\/p>\n
I only fell eight or ten feet and I managed my fall. Knowing that I couldn\u2019t prevent it I intentionally jumped and hit the ground with a tuck and roll strategy to minimize the damage. I shattered nearly every bone in both heels and ankles. After five hours of reconstructive surgery I spent a week in a hospital. I was in a wheelchair for the next three months while receiving painful physical therapy three times a week. And now, seventeen years later, I still walk with a noticeable limp and am in constant pain. If I spend a full day on my feet for some special occasion — a family outing at Disneyland, for example — the pain can be so excruciating I can\u2019t sleep. On my best days it\u2019s just a constant, nagging reminder of one really bad decision I made a couple of decades ago.<\/p>\n
And I\u2019m the lucky one. I could have easily broken my neck or back and been in that wheelchair for life, paralyzed from the waist down. I could have died. People do, even from a fall of just eight feet. The doctors at the ER told me \u2018tis the season. They get many such cases every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And there is one thing all of us have in common: We\u2019re all, every one of us, smarter than the fools who will take a tumble.<\/p>\n
Absolutely none of us think we might fall off the roof when we go up there. I know you. You don\u2019t think so, either. You\u2019ll be more careful than I was. “Thanks for the heads up!” you’re thinking.<\/p>\n
That was my attitude, too.<\/p>\n
That morning, December 8, 1990, Carolann phoned me from a friend\u2019s house to say she saw a sign in our neighborhood for a guy who would put up Christmas lights for $20 but I said, \u201cOh, no. It\u2019s my job. I\u2019m the dad!\u201d It cost me thirty THOUSAND dollars and a lifetime of constant pain to put the lights up that year.<\/p>\n
And there are the dreams. You have occasional dreams of being able to fly? I have frequent dreams of being able to run again, to run like the wind in a baseball outfield as I did when I was young or just to chase after my grandsons at my current age. I can’t do that. I have to call after them and hope they run back to me.<\/p>\n
All for the sake of Christmas lights.<\/p>\n
I met my wife when we were teammates on a competition dance team. I haven’t been able to dance with her for seventeen years now. Oh, we can slow dance but we can’t do the show-off stuff, the fun spins and fancy twirls that brought us together in the first place.<\/p>\n
Thanks to those damned Christmas lights.<\/p>\n
Frankly, I get tired of telling this story so I\u2019m not putting much effort into it. Some of you have no plans to go on the roof so it doesn’t matter. The rest of you are going up on the roof no matter what I say.<\/p>\n
Personally, I\u2019m not going to fall off anything higher than a bed or a barstool from here on out. You all do what you like.<\/p>\n
I really hope you have a wonderful holiday season. I mean that sincerely.<\/p>\n
Merry Christmas; Happy Hannukah…<\/p>\n
“God bless us (and ground us…) every one!”<\/p>\n