The Man in the Tree

I have still been thinking about our visit of our friends from the “Old Country.” It has been reminding me of the few memories I have left when I was a child. Snippets here and there float through my memories of the days gone by. I cannot help but think of one memory that I shall never forget since it was such a traumatic experience for me.

It often behoves me how people can do the stupidest things known to man. We often hear the question, “What the hell was he thinking!?!” after we witness what a human mind can get a person to do.

At about the age of four or five, I was standing in the laneway of our house on Brunswick Road, watching a man cut down a tree. Now just picture this . . . Here is this man, sitting on a large limb up in the tree and leaning all his weight on the smaller limb that he is about to cut down. You get the picture? Well, at the age of five, I don’t think I did, but the man in the tree should have easily seen the problem with this! Needless to say, his back will never be the same again.

Now this wasn’t some small branch he was cutting; it was a fair size of about eight to ten inches in diameter. One would have thought that the considerable time it would have taken to cut through this bloody thing would have been more than enough time to figure out that this was not the best way to tackle this job.

So here I was in awe of this man as he tackled such a challenging task at hand. I heard the crack at the end of the cut and witnessed my first experience of watching a man, or anyone for that matter, doing a nose dive into solid pavement! Now I know for a fact that his flight into the ground was a hell of a lot quicker that the time it took to cut through the branch but I have no doubt he realized his mistake well before he hit the ground!

I don’t remember what became of this man. It is as if everything that happened after the nose dive was hidden from my memory. I am told there are reasons why this happens but as to why the aftermath of the fall is no longer apparent to me, I can only assume that that man took the fall pretty hard.

I suppose that the mind has the ability to protect us from tragedies as well as memories of them. During that experience, my mind protected me, the mind of the man in the tree didn’t!