I was still of an age, as was my brother, where I needed to be supervised on the odd occasion that my parents wanted to have a child-less evening out. Thus it was this night -- albeit with a sitter who was more interested in dancing with her boyfriend in our living room than actually paying any attention to her 3- and 9-year-old charges. Which was fine with us. My brother conspired somehow to have one of his friends over, and we all decided -- for reasons that lie beneath logic and hide in the realm of impulse, curiosity and stubbornness -- that we needed to explore our roof.

Not a difficult proposition: our front gate, which was a large, wooden cross-beamed structure, proved an easy climb -- especially, for a three-year-old, if you had larger helpers to lift you up to the front courtyard's wall and from thence onto the roof of the garage.

At some point, my brother and his friend tired of the view, clambered back down, and spent the rest of the evening pelting the back of our house with windfall apricots from our backyard tree. Upon my parent's return, they found their three-year-old blissfully wandering around on the roof; their nine-year-old and his friend, hands sticky, admiring the orange canvas they had made of the wall and windows; and a thoroughly ignorant babysitter dancing in the front room.

I actually remember very little of this, if any of it at all. It primarily comes from my brother's fond memories and my mother's still somewhat livid version of events (although distance has tinged it with humour).

All I do remember -- and this quite clearly -- is being up by the chimney all alone, brown shingles underfoot and a potentially fatal drop on every side, surveying the nighttime neighbourhood. In solitude, I stood looking across a dark sea dotted with lights, imagining a grand cityscape; but no memory remains at all of how I got up there, nor of how I got down.
G2(7)