"The Height of Foolishness" by Mary Clements Fisher
– I became daring in the dark.
My grip froze. I gulped the moist night air and licked my lips.
Mary Clements Fisher celebrates her current mother/grandmother, sweetheart, student, and writer status in Cupertino, California. Two writers’ groups Taste Life Twice and Daughters through the Decades support her mad, muddled, and magical moments of writing. She’s published in Quail Belle Magazine, Adanna Journal, Passager Journal, The Weekly Avocet, Prometheus Dreaming Journal, The Closed Eye Open, Capsule Stories, They Call Us Magazine, and gratefully in several Personal Story Publishing Project books. Join her @maryfisherwrites and https://maryfisherwrites.squarespace.com/
Author’s Talk
Mary Clements Fisher
In early childhood, taking minor risks leads to greater self-esteem. Psychologists called it the “exuberant period.” A child’s synapses pop two million times a second trying everything new. In adolescence, an imbalance exists between the regulatory system and the sensation-seeking system. In other words, teens take foolish risks with less insight and oversight. Parents don’t know all the risks taken—until someone tells them.
Climbing high on the jungle gym or shinnying up a tree in grade school gave me freedom and developed my ability to reach beyond my comfort level. Learning to take risks paved the way to my self-confidence and resilience. After a fall or failure to reach the highest rung, I’d try again and again. Fear stifles creativity. I live with that fact every time I sit down to write. Harnessing my anxiety gives the writer in me the courage to experiment and to fail. Momentary trepidation saved me from many mindless mistakes during my life, but my imprudent moments produced the best stories and revealed my greatest fears and strengths.
Being a preacher’s kid demanded a certain proper decorum. In my household my mother and father expected me to make them proud—not to embarrass them. As a teen, I admit my “what they didn’t know won’t hurt them” attitude would have shocked them. Knowledge of my riding on the back of a motorcycle going eighty miles an hour or drag racing in my dad’s old Ford Fairlane at midnight on Highway 49 would have blown my cover as a sensible daughter. However, even I doubted my good sense when I took a dare to climb our town’s water tower. Hanging 165 feet in the air terrified me.
In writing “The Height of Foolishness” I relived the psychological pull of risky behavior and physical barriers to scaling a water tower. I felt the sweat, the breeze, the dry mouth again. I regretted being goaded into doing something dangerous, but at the time needed desperately to flaunt my fearlessness. The ultimate realization of the recklessness of my teenage act lay in the number of witnesses. But I wouldn’t have done it without my audience. Hence, my readers, you will know how foolhardy I was.
