Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I know what I’m doing. You don’t. I can have fun. You can’t.

As a kid, I used to see wild stunts on television. They always prefaced them with, “Don’t try this at home.” Why not? Why could they do things, but I couldn’t?

Of course they had years of this and that and expertise and equipment that I didn’t. It seemed, however, that they were having all the fun. They were experimenting. They were learning. They were growing. I was sitting on the floor staring up at a black and white TV doing nothing, going no where.

“You need to learn a bunch of things before you learn this.” I think that is what they were telling me. But how would I learn if I didn’t try what they did on TV?

“But you need to go slowly. This could hurt.” As if going to first grade at age 5 with a bunch of kids who were all bigger than me and none of whom I had ever met before wasn’t going to hurt—a whole lot.

Everyone else needs to proceed with caution. Everyone else needs to go slow. Everyone else needs to watch me for a long while before…

Really? Who decided that?