
I remember as a kid living far out in the country of northern Wisconsin. My cousins and I knew of a great sledding hill near our small farm house that often beckoned us out into the subzero weather for a bit of slightly dangerous "fun." I say slightly dangerous, because, while the hill was not mountainous in size, it was still quite steep and at the bottom of the hill there was a wooded thicket with a narrow pathway leading through it. Had it not been for the trail at the bottom of the hill no one could have gone unscathed sledding down its icy slope. Only the trail at the bottom of the hill made the hill potentially sledable (a word that would be in the dictionary if kids wrote them). As you might imagine, making sure the sled missed the trees and went careening down the trailhead was a matter of no small importance. For the most part, we did OK as there was a primitive steering device on the sled and my cousin and I would drag either the right foot or the left to augment the sled's primitive navigational device. But, there was this one time when we decided to substitute the much faster toboggan for the sled. Unquestionably, we were right in assessing the toboggan's speed; it was clearly a speedy once in a life time trip down the hill. Unfortunately, there was no steering mechanism and it split right down the middle when we hit the tree at, what I estimated at the time, was 75 miles an hour; though, if I am to be completely honest and I seldom am, it quite probable that we were not going more than 67 mph.
The life lesson I learned from crashing into the tree is fairly simple: Old age is like sledding: the closer you get to the bottom the faster you are going; so in life, the older you get, the faster time seems to go, until everything stops like when the toboggan hit the tree. Now and again I will invite one of the kids to go sledding with me, but for some inexplicable reason they always seem to have something else to do.