oh god! i think i was about seven and half when my sisters and i pulled this stupid stunt. i remember watching television with them and the show on happened to be our favorite program to watch. all of a sudden we heard my brother, chris, yelling from the backyard. so we all headed out there to see what happened. when we finally located him, he was in a tree hanging from the highest tree branch. crying, he explained to us that he had climbed up the tree and couldn't get down. we thought, okay, one of us should climb up and get him off, but we couldn't manage to get him moving down.

it was then my youngest sister, ka, who was five and a half at the time had seen a similar situation. she suggested we grab a sheet, hold it under the branch chris was hanging off of, and tell him to drop so we can catch him. my other sister, yams, who is one year younger than me, peered at me to confirm the idea and i said "yeah, let's try that".so we grabbed a sheet from the closet and went to hold it beneath the tree. now mind you, the ages holding this blanket were ranging from seven and a half to five and a half, thus the sheet was probably being held up to our waist and also close to touching the ground. but we were confident it could work.

we looked up to chris and he looked down at us a bit hesitant. i don't blame him the poor guy. it was then we told him to let go and to fall on his back. chris looked at me and asked "are you sure i'll land on the blanket?" now, my brother at the age of four, had a cute squeaky voice. but because of a problem at birth with his tongue being a bit attached to the mouth, it came out more like this, "ah you sho awill lan on da blanked?", "yup!", i told him, "we're sure!" and he let go.now when i think about chris letting go of that branch, i think of his faith in me and my sisters and i also think how stupid he was to trust us, cause when that boy let go he was in for a big surprise. chris fell right through that sheet and landed right on his stomach. and no matter how tight we held on to the sheet, he still managed to get through.

we were shocked and a bit worried and we looked at the ground where he landed. this tiny seventy pound boy had made a hole right through the sheet and landed. he was positioned like one of those chalk drawings you find after a homicide, with one arm near the head another to the side and the knee bent a bit. we might as well have drawn an outline because he wasn't moving. so we bent down to check if he was still alive and when we asked him if he was okay he uttered these five words… "ah stee hi da flow" in other words, "i still hit the floor!" poor little man! but before you condemn us, chris is fourteen now and he still bugs us about it, any tree he climbs he gets down on his own and, strangely, he wants to be a fireman when he grows up. now he can write that he had personal experience about jumping and catching. see, no harm done…