Whoa! And there he was…
I kept trying to ignore the ropes while eating my breakfast. It wasn’t easy. I was in a window seat, 25 floors up, and they were dancing, jerking, vibrating and jumping around, about a foot away from my head.
I knew there was a fellow human being at the end of them, dangling far above the sidewalk, washing the windows. And I couldn’t help identifying with his precarious state…
My fear of heights is such that normally, I can sorta kinda ignore that I’m so high up if there’s a nice, solid window between me and Kingdom Come. Like on an airplane. I think some trick of the brain pretends that it’s just a video screen or something. As long as I can’t feel the wind, I’m good (I was definitely NOT good atop Blarney Castle, where I suffered unprecedented vertigo the instant the wind hit my ear, and I was doing well not to throw up, much less kiss some stupid rock… let’s not talk about Blarney Castle…).
But the ropes kept reminding me that it was real, and there was a person just dangling out there….
Then, when I got up to leave, a few tables away, there he was! And he was reaching out to clean this way and that as casually as though he were standing on the ground. I just barely got my phone out before he dropped out of sight.
There is no amount of money that would induce me to do such a job. I would starve first. My body would just betray me, my acrophobia is so bad.
If it depended on me, the windows would all have to just stay dirty…
And then before I could take a second shot, he was GONE…
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What’s my line? I’m happy cleaning windows.
When I arrived in South Carolina in 1980, I was 19 and looking for a job. I came across a listing for a job paying $75 an hour. It was painting radio towers. I passed.
Several years later there was a news story about a badly decomposed body that was discovered along the edge of some woods in the upstate. They were the remains of a tower painter who had disappeared a year or so earlier. He had apparently fallen and rolled or crawled a short distance in search of help.
I’m good with heights if there is a barrier between me and forever.
You should see the guys who do that in Chicago. When the wind kicks up, things get dicey. You’d have to pay me a whole lot to do that.
I guess we can cross you off the list of the top men. We’ll keep you down below decks as a gun captain.
The bottle stands beside you.
Architects. Don’t get me started.