Image by Fonzie's cousin via FlickrAre you one of those people who think that it's Superman's cape that allows him to fly? I tend to differ from the norm since I think it's the fancy pantyhose (tights). After all, Batman has a cape but he can't fly. I think it's special pantyhose that all the superheroes get from a special superhero store. The color of which determines which superpowers you get. My reason, all the superheroes always wear fancy pantyhose but not all of them wear capes. It is thoughts like this that have caused me grief on more than one occasion, for example.When I was about five years old, I was out in the backyard playing with my friends. We were playing with a kids archery set. The kind with a little bow and arrows that have little rubber suction cups on the end. As children are prone to do, we got bored and started shooting the arrows straight up into the air. This led to several arrows landing on the roof of our house. It just happened that someone had left a ladder leaning against the house and I headed for the roof to retrieve the lost arrows. Once I had retrieved the arrows I found myself unable to get down from the roof. It could have been that someone knocked down the ladder or most likely it was my lifelong problem of getting back off the roof and down the ladder.
So I am standing on the roof enjoying the view and trying to figure out how to get down when my "friends" go and tell my mother that I am on the roof. My mom comes out to see what the problem is and just happened to be holding a flyswatter at the time. Not a good sign to a five-year-old. She proceeded to use my full name while ordering me down from the roof. When your mom yells something along the lines of "your full name here" get your butt down from there right now! You have no choice but to comply. Having watched a few too many episodes of Superman and having no prior knowledge that this was a bad idea, I said OK and jumped off the roof. You can imagine my surprise when instead of floating down to the ground in slow motion like they do on TV, I landed with a thud on the concrete patio breaking my leg in the process. Confused and in a considerable amount of pain, I could not understand what had happened. All my TV heroes jumped off stuff all the time and they never got hurt. Since I knew that my TV wouldn't lie to me the only explanation was that maybe I wasn't a superhero after all. Well, I had plenty of time to think this through while laying around with my leg in a cast. I was pretty sure that I was still a superhero, I just hadn't been given my superhero outfit yet. Once I got some of those fancy pantyhose this would never happen again.
