stories – Go Retire Psychiatrist

I’ve got one thing in common with a lot of people who say they’ve seen things like Bigfoot and UFOs. I’ve seen someone beat the Dollar Bill Jump Challenge but I can’t prove it.

I know there are a lot of people who say they’ve seen the Loch Ness Monster, ghosts, little gray aliens, Sasquatch, and who also claim to have eaten delicious fruitcake. That is to say I’ve seen a lot of blurry photographs, videos, and I’ve thrown out more than my fair share of fruitcake.

However, I also don’t have any video evidence for what I saw a guy at the YMCA do over 40 years ago, which was to jump forward over a broom handle while holding his toes. Don’t bother asking me why there was a broom in the weight room at the YMCA. Too many questions get in the way of a good story. This middle-aged jock was telling me and another youngster about this strong man stunt of jumping over a broom handle laying on the floor. He never mentioned a dollar bill, but it looks like this is usually part of the game.

He looked right at me and said, “You look like an athlete, let’s see if you can jump over a broomstick.” First of all, I was a skinny kid and didn’t look athletic—that’s why I was in the weight room in the first place. Furthermore, the guy had several conditions for jumping over a broomstick on the floor I didn’t know about before agreeing to try it.

You have to bend over in front of the broom handle (dollar bill) and grab your toes, keep your knees slightly bent, and then all you have to do is jump. Most of the time, the challenge is to jump over a dollar bill. I think you could injure your feet on a broom handle, so I advise against it.

There are variations on this game. It probably makes no difference if you lay the dollar crosswise or lengthwise. You always have to grab your toes, not let go when you jump, and land upright. There’s an ankle grabbing variation which I don’t think makes much difference, but the classic rule is you have to hang on to your toes.

The other kid and I tried to do this about a dozen times and we invariably let go of our toes or fell over or both. Then the middle-aged jock did it flawlessly. No, I didn’t have a camera. It’s too bad because a video would prove one way or another whether this stunt is possible.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of videos and snapshots of Bigfoot on TV that are so terrible I can’t tell if I’m looking at a Bigfoot or a man in a monkey suit. I’ve never seen an alien, not even the corpse of one. I know, there are a lot of videos of UFOs, but they look like tic tacs and make me think of someone shaking a mini laser pointer in front of a cat to make it chase the light around. And I have not tried to eat fruitcake since I was little and my mom made me eat it because it was a Christmas gift from our church.

What would impress me is seeing a video of a Bigfoot ghost stepping out of a flying saucer while eating a big slice of fruitcake.

The one explanation I’ve found on line for why the dollar bill jump stunt is considered impossible is that your center of gravity has to move ahead of your base. The same article says you can jump backward easily because the support base moves first and the center of gravity stays in a balanced state. I can’t do that either. There are a couple of YouTubes that show a lot of people falling over. None of them tried it backward, although one guy tried it sideways and fell on his side.

For the record, my story of witnessing somebody beat the dollar bill jump is just that—a story. If you have a video of you or somebody beating the dollar bill jump challenge, let me know.

I remember when we were kids, we used to get gifts of fruitcake from well-meaning older ladies in our church. I think that’s where I first learned how to lie. If my little brother and I didn’t praise the weaponized loaf of glazed, syrupy candied fruit studded with rotten walnuts, we caught hell from Mom. Lying gets a bad name, I know. But if you don’t learn this essential social skill early in life, you end up with a sore backside from the paddle in the corner of the family room. Ironically, the paddle was a repurposed paddle ball toy we got for Christmas—which was always the time the old ladies from church would gift us with fruitcakes from outer space, obviously via wormhole vortex.

Speaking of friends, we occasionally had dinner with an older couple, RellaMae and Ray, who owned a gargantuan mongrel dog, part bull mastiff and part mastodon. His name was Moose. When he was tied to a post out in the back yard, he spent a lot of his time barking and snarling at anything living that passed by, especially the paperboy. On the other hand, he played like a puppy with me and my brother. At the dinner table, he would lay his head on my knee, mournfully staring at every forkful and leaving a pond of drool on my pants.

RellaMae was tickled to death with her old Chrysler which had a push-button transmission. I bet you thought that was a modern invention. I know next to nothing about cars, but Chrysler made some of these in the 1950s and 1960s. We went for a drive in it and I half-expected it to fly. It was pink, if I recall correctly. Ray was a cab driver with bad heart disease who chewed on but did not smoke cigars the size and consistency of Black Angus bull turds. The cab dispatcher where he worked had a singular talent. The phone was always busy but because she was the only dispatcher, she had to make her bathroom breaks very speedy. The legend was that she could be in and out in less than a minute.

The push-button Chrysler reminds me of a car my wife and I owned for a while sometime in the 1980s to 1990s which talked to you. I believe it was a New Yorker. It said things like “A door is ajar” which everyone made jokes about (When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar). Har! That chatty car got me across Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio when I was interviewing for residency. I got stranded along with a lot of other motorists at a rest stop on the way back from Ohio because of a snowstorm. That was brief, uneventful, and we were on our way after the plows went through in a couple of hours.

But that does remind me of another time I got stranded in Wyoming on my way back home from college in Texas. I traveled by bus back in those days and me and my fellow passengers were stuck in a hole in the wall sandwich and gift shop at the bus depot. A couple of us sat at one of the tables and were entertained by what sounded like tall tales from a couple of local guys bragging about their criminal exploits. One of them finally pushed up his sleeve, exposing his arm which was covered with about a half dozen or so wristwatches—which he hinted were stolen and he was trying to sell.

You can tell when somebody is in his anecdotage. Anybody out there with a story?