Hi, it's August 30th

The adult is more interested in the child than the child in the adult.

But it keeps getting interesting (if interesting is the right word) as anyone who's been born and arrives at an age which once seemed unattainable begins to realize.

"I fall and fall again, until I reach the ground," Nietzsche wrote somewhere, according to a friend who's now living in Berlin and would know from whence Nietzsche's words sprang.

Sports are real when you're young, a fantasy as you age, and real once more when you've fallen from your bike in the mountains far from a main road, much less a hospital.

Later, you can see the x-rays of the broken rib and actually know why you're feeling the way you're feeling. But to watch a professional baseball or basketball game on tv lacks any meaning that might be construed as substance, unless of course you're playing in the game yourself.

Having fallen might be a good thing. There's plenty of ice and an Ace bandage and those who know say all you can do is ice and rest, ice and rest. Though it hurts to sleep, which at this age might be a good thing too; there are lots of good books to be read and the time to read them. After midnight is the ideal time to open "King Lear", he knows now.

It was so sudden--the fall--so certain of itself. The bicycle's left pedal hit a small rock outcropping on a skinny mountain trail in the Rockies. Hurtling through space in one instant, a child again, riding downhill as fast as his legs and gravity might take him, in the harsh arms of mother earth in the next, there was no exit from the accident. It was nasty, brutish and short, and all the wind was knocked out of him.

Such a collision is enough to make one believe in god again. He had believed as a child, for whom god was constructed, but gotten away from the concept in later years. Or if not quite believing in god, then certainly believing in the earth, as solid, as real, as definite as he had ever felt it.

At last report, he had survived. He had fallen and survived, no small thing, and was grateful for the experience of falling. If could have been worse, though his imagination took pains not to let him 'go there', as they say in the psychological parlence of his time. He might have died and taken his place in Non-Existence where he is sure a party would have been held in his honor, complete with Bombay Gin martini's and carrot cake with vanilla frosting.

And, having fallen, would he have the courage to ask of those who wrote to wish him well, Hi? What kind of word is that? Hi?

For he was a child once again, interested in seeing himself from the position of having fallen and having felt the fall as an adult.