Charlie seems to do okay climbing trees, until his pygmy ego jumps out in front of his pygmy brain. Ella, the sleek intelligent explorer in our little herd of pygmy goats, is about half Charlie's size and twice the athlete. Charlie is big, compared to a pure pygmy, and powerful, but not quite as agile. Ella can clamber up and down the trees in the back pasture like she has claws instead of hoofs. Sally and Jack prefer to munch on the grass, firmly rooted in the solid ground, casting disdainful glances up at Charlie and Ella. They're thinking, dopey goats, acting like cats; just what the world needs, giants cats eating tree leaves.

I was lying in the grass, enjoying one of the last warm days before fall closed down for the winter and the goats were enjoying the last of the weeds scattered across the meadow; they were not going to enjoy munching dry hay once the ground froze.

To Ella, the few green leaves still in the tree looked particularly appetizing and she jumped onto a nearby branch to grab a taste. Charlie jumped into the tree after her and I watched them climbing over the branches, snipping off the leaves. The two little ones, Jack and Sally, stayed on the ground and found some wild onions. You can smell their breath ten feet away whenever they find onion patches.

Our son interviewed at his first choice college a few days before and remembering the warm sun on that bright day brought the same sense memory to the pit of my stomach. Children, like goats, are trouble. Both sets follow their noses into and out of trouble, while their brains try to catch up; small kids are small trouble, big kids are big trouble. Kids, the human ones, are rewarding trouble, loving trouble, laughing trouble, angry trouble, scared trouble, and every once in a while "should I call the police" or "the hospital" trouble. You start clenching your hands to stem the anxiety when they're around 12 or 13 years old and slowly let them uncoil, along with a full exhale, from about 19 through 25 or 30.

The college admittance program was unusual. You arrive at 9 in the morning with your completed application, letters of recommendation, art portfolio, and high school transcripts. You listen to a few presentations, have a nice lunch, watch your child walk away for their one-on-one interview with an admissions counselor, and sweat. The interview is only 15-20 minutes, but you perch on the laminated schoolroom chairs in the hallway the entire interval; thinking, could this lanky teenager, who communicates to adults in half-syllables and blank stares, dredge up a coherent full sentence that convinces the admissions counselor his SAT scores were not a fluke?

Ella stripped the lower branches bare then scrambled farther up the trunk, looking for fresh leaves. Charlie followed without thinking through the downside; anything Ella could eat, he would eat. This put Charlie about 12 feet up in the tree. Not so far I couldn't get to him, but far enough he'd break his pygmy neck if he slipped off. Worse, they both started nibbling on the same branch. I know Charlie, and it doesn't matter if he's 2 feet in the air or two hundred, because pygmies have no natural fear of heights. If Charlie catches Ella munching on the same tree branch he's going for, then he's going to knock her out of the tree or fall trying.

He probably would have made it on his own, but sometimes you can't resist that urge to jump in and make sure nothing goes wrong. We rehearsed and rehearsed the interview; even taking the trouble to type up a list of likely questions and answers; standard preparation for a Presidential press conference. We needn't have worried; he's got that casual self-confidence some people wear like a spit shine on a new pair of shoes. He always exudes just the right amount of polish, tempered with insouciance, that adult authority figures associate with untapped potential rather than consummate street-smart salesmanship.

I watched as Charlie swung at Ella with his sharp horns, missed, and start teetering back and forth; one back foot stabbing for the trunk and finding air. I jumped, and scrambled up the tree after Charlie, grabbing him around his withers, dragged him down from the tree and landed on my back in the grass with 50 pounds of unhappy goat standing on my chest. From Charlie's perspective I was conspiring with Ella, leaving her, and all the fresh leaves, up in the tree. Jack and Sally just kept munching on the onions. Now the dopey human is imitating the dopey goats imitating cats, and doing it pretty poorly. Charlie dug his hooves into my ribs and leaped back onto the tree branch. No good deed goes unpunished.

At 2:00 pm we were called back into the admissions office and walked out holding a felt pennant emblazoned with the school's name. We started shaking hands with everyone in sight. I felt like my son had taken one big, sure step forward; I didn't need to rush in to catch him.

I remembered the time I saved my daughter's life under similar circumstances. Well maybe it was entirely different, you can judge. She was only four at the time, but a precocious gymnast. We were visiting the Winter Garden, a public space, near my office. Everybody says, "Keep your eyes on your children at all times." It's an impossible standard, but everybody is right; tragedy often waits just a few seconds off your left shoulder. I turned around, and when I looked back, 2 or 3 hundred milliseconds later, she had grabbed the rubber handrail on a nearby escalator.

Problem was, she grabbed the rail from the outside of the escalator. This particular escalator was freestanding, and ran up to the next level of shops about 40 feet above our heads. So there was my precious daughter, all 25 pounds and flying red dress, shooting up toward the ceiling, hanging on to the outside of the escalator, hands glued to the rubber rail. I knew as soon as she got to the top, sometime in the next five seconds, the railing disappeared into the side wall and she'd be ripped free, dropping 40 feet to the marble floor below. I've done a lot of dumb things in my life, but I have at least this one smart decision to hold dear. I ran under the escalator and screamed at her to "let go." And screamed and screamed.

Each foot she went flying further into the air reduced the probability that I'd catch her and increased the probability that something would break even if I could catch her. Thankfully she was four and not fourteen, so she still had that absolute faith in parental authority that fades out as puberty floods your brain with the hubris of omniscience. About three or four screams in, the message registered and she flipped her fingers open, plummeting off the side of the escalator and into the air. Do we find this faith often in our lives, where we're so sure family will catch us that we just leap into the air and wait? I don't have any clear recollection whether she let go 10 feet up or 20 feet up, it felt like 500 feet. I do have a clear recollection of how she felt in my arms when that plush red dress and cherubic face landed right side up, big smile on her face, in my arms.

Absolute economy of reaction, bolstered by endless hours on the practice field during those two-a-day football workouts so long ago, converged with precision and certainty about three feet above the marble floor and 40 feet below misfortune.

At times the right steps seem less certain; you're stumbling forward in the gloom for so long your eyes get used to the dark and you start to disbelieve the dawn. There's that first crack of light and the expectation of more floods your perspective. After my son was accepted, I had to go outside and wipe the tears out of my eyes before we gathered for the final orientation. Naturally, he called me a "big baby" on my way out, but I could tell he was as proud as I was that the branch he'd reached for was firmly within his grasp.

You don't always have to catch them; sometimes they don't want to be caught, sometimes you can't make it in time, but you always want to catch them. They never think that falling is a possibility, but, then, perhaps they've never fallen as far as we all have.

I still lie in the meadow, on occasion, and watch Charlie and Ella snip the leaves out of the trees. I try not to grab Charlie too quickly, but I also try to let him know when he's following Ella in over his head.

Copyright (c) 2008, Lotus Pond Media

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