Pogo Sticks

     I read somewhere that if you wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, you should pick a letter from the alphabet then as fast as you can start thinking of words that begin with that letter.  It works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes when I start thinking of words of a particular letter, I will sort of fall into a half sleep, that does pass the time.

    Last night when I awoke, I picked the letter “P” and began,”Pergola”, “popcorn”, “pink”, “puddles”, “pogo stick” ....   When I got to the word “pogo stick” I stopped and began thinking about pogo sticks.

    My sister and I had a pogo stick when we were young, and I quite enjoyed bouncing back and forth from our front porch to our driveway, on our sidewalk.  I thought I was pretty good at bouncing and a pogo stick.

    Then I thought about all of my friends at the time, I don’t remember that any of them had pogo sticks, or if they did, they never talked about them.  Pogo sticks were strange that way, everyone seemed to know what they were, but I don’t think many kids had them. 

    The biggest memory I have of jumping on my pogo stick happened one summer when I was bouncing, wearing shorts.  I guess I had one leg too close to the sliding mechanism and it grabbed my skin and pinched it, puncturing the skin on my leg.   It was not a very serious wound, although I suspect it looked pretty bad as I walked back to the house with blood running down my leg.  The wound left me with two parallel scars that look like I had been bitten by a poisonous snake.  I still have those scars on my legs today as proof of my rambunctious childhood.

    I hadn’t thought or heard anything about pogo sticks for many decades. Today I did a search online and discovered that they still exist and some kids have them.  As you might expect, some “crazies” decided to flirt with death and push pogoing to its limit and created “Extreme Pogo” or “Xpogo”, which I guess is now a “sport”.  Some of the participants can get up to 10 feet (3 meters) into the air using their pogo sticks.  (That is measured from the ground, to the bottom of the pogo stick.)  If you a curious, you do an online search to watch extreme pogoing.

    

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