Raise the Roof

I was at dinner the other night with my wife and for some reason this incident came to mind. My wife was understandably disturbed when I told her about it.

If there’s one thing I’ve come to appreciate while remembering these stories it’s the old saying that, “idle hands make the devil’s work”. About half of us were living in single parent homes and as a result we were more or less on our own after school until our mothers got home from work. But the fact remains, if you leave kids to their own devices bad things will eventually happen. This is another one of those cases.

I’m not even sure how this whole event happened, it just did. We were hanging out at Ben’s house after school and before I knew it we were all climbing out his third floor bathroom window to climb up onto the roof of his house. In retrospect this was not the smartest thing to do. Ben lived in a 3 story house with a pitched roof. To get to the “top” of the roof you had to climb out a window onto this ledge, then you’d climb 15 feet up this 1 foot wide section of roof – it was so steep that you had to hold onto the edge of the roof line while you climbed up. One slip and you were literally dead. It was a 40-50 foot drop off the side of the roof into the neighbor’s driveway.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise that this isn’t the end of the story. Once on top of the roof we once again got bored and started ripping the shingles off and throwing them. If you’ve never thrown a shingle (and why would you have) they are GREAT for throwing. They are heavy enough to get some good speed, but aerodynamic enough to really travel good distances. So we started chucking shingles at kids walking by, and then cars driving by. Being idiots cracking up the whole time we weren’t exactly hard to spot. But you never think about the consequences when you are a kid. The scariest part about the whole ordeal was trying to get down from the roof. You basically had to go backwards down this 1 foot wide slope holding on with 1 hand with a 40 ft drop to your right.

I think we did the shingle throwing thing 2 or 3 times before someone informed Ben’s mother and she put an end to it. Man, if my kid’s ever ripped up the shingles on my house I’d kill them. What were we thinking? Oh yeah, that it would be funny to hit kids walking by with shingles.