Zorro

“Out of the night when the full moon is bright, comes a horseman known as Zorro!”  This was the theme music to one of my favorite TV shows when I was a child.  In those days the most popular shows were “westerns.”  They were full of cowboys and Indians riding and fighting across the western landscapes.  They were easy to understand because there were good guys and bad guys.  The good guys were very good and the bad guys were very bad.  In the end the good guys always won and the bad guys usually got shot or hung.

Zorro was a little different because he was a Spanish aristocrat in early California.  He had to hide his identity, so he wore a black mask and cape.  His weapons were his sword and whip.  He would routinely fight a dozen evil Spanish soldiers, defending the poor and dispensing justice with his signature “Z” carved into the belly of the fat sergeant of the guards.

Like many TV shows, there were always toys kids could buy to act out their own adventures and when I was about six years old I got my Zorro set.  It had a plastic hat and cape, a metal rod for a sword, and a plastic tube for a whip.  I played Zorro pretty hard, so it didn’t take long for most of the pieces to tear or break.  Finally, all I had left was the black plastic tube of the whip.

One afternoon I climbed up into my favorite ash tree, which had several trunks all growing at angles.  The one I liked best made it easy to shinny up the trunk and sit about seven feet off the ground.  When I was secure on this perch, I tied one end of the plastic tube around the trunk of the tree and the other end around my neck.  I then proudly called to my mother, who was working in the flowerbeds, “Look Mom, I made a hanger,” and jumped off the tree.

For some reason I didn’t die that afternoon.  I could have easily broken my neck or suffocated before anyone noticed me hanging there.  It was just by chance that my mother was working nearby, as I often played in our yard alone.  But, I didn’t, and it wasn’t until many years later that I realized how thin the line between life and death can be.  An innocent childhood game could easily have become that day’s tragic news story and a sad statistic.  Instead of a long and fulfilling life, a crushing blow to my family.  All the things I have done and all the people I have affected would be altered.  I sometimes wonder how many other times I have been that close to death without even being aware of it.  I’d like to think I didn’t die that day because the good guys always win, but I know that isn’t true.  Good guys are often the victims too.  Instead, I think it was just chance that I happened to survive to tell the story.