I found myself in a bell tower. I won’t go into when I found myself in a bell tower because then the story would probably be worse, but there I was. I was led to the door to the bell tower, but we thought the door was locked. The 15-year old in this 47-year old body really wanted to go into the bell tower, but alas, it appeared a little lock was there between normal-ness and adventure. Oh well. Then an opportunity came for me to be by that door again, and low and behold the lock wasn’t really locked, I opened the door and found myself, alone, climbing the stairs. But I was torn. In my head I knew I shouldn’t really be there, the initial stairs were kind of rickety, but I continued to climb. I made it to the first level, looked up the next set of stairs, and somehow continued going up.
Then thoughts entered my head.
It wasn’t really the time nor, well, time to be an adventure-man. What if the stairs collapsed, and I would be like Nicolas Cage in an action movie careening down the tower, only I don’t think I would safely be able to grab something to break my fall, nor land nicely on the lower level? If the stairs did collapse, boy would my wife be pissed. And so on. One flight of stairs to the next level, and I chickened out.
I made it back down, met up with some of the people I was with, showed my pictures, explained my adventure and how I was concerned the upper levels wouldn’t hold my tonnage, and one person nicely said I would probably regret not going the all of the way up the stairs in a few days. She was wrong. It didn’t take a couple of days. Even though in my rational and respectful head I knew it was the right thing to come back down, it took only a couple of minutes for me to regret not climbing at least those next dozen steps to see what was up there.
Maybe it wasn’t the time nor place to be on an adventure, but in the end, after my chickening out of climbing that last set of rickety stairs, I wonder: Would you climb a rickety staircase in a bell tower?
That’s it for this one! L8R!!