Juggling

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for 31 March 2008
Use Juggling Technique

JUGGLING

It was a dry and sunny morning. Streams of icy wind whistled around the skyscrapers and down the canyons between them. The City’s thousands of windows magnified the early red and gold rays and returned them to the sun.

With teary ears and whipping hair, Yidi pushed her face into the frigid gusts to peer over her left shoulder and squint at the scene below.

This was always the best part of the job, seeing everyone and everything down there, below. The people looked and ebbed like the iron filings in an Etch-a-Sketch and packs of bright yellow taxicabs jerked and jockeyed for space in the rush hour traffic. Here, in the center of the city, the streets and avenues were laid out in a tight grid. At the edges, the rigid pattern unraveled.

She felt like God must feel when looking over earth; sometimes laughing softly and kindly, sometimes frowning with head shaking.

About God - all she could say with full confidence is that she did not know, and she was just fine with that. It seemed that most people needed to explain what they could not see, however.

Quickly, Yidi did a mental check of her equipment. The cables and platform of the unit looked fine and her safety harness was secured. Safety helmet, tool belt, first aid kit, buckets, squeegees, rags, extension pole, lunch - all there.

Acknowledging the possibility of God? - Fine. But insisting on explanations? And why did people come up with so many different explanations for what they can not see? Why did they use these differences as reasons for wars? Why did so many people always seem to support the wars?

If Yidi had her way, she’d put all the leaders of wars inside a cave, block the entrance with a boulder, and let them duke it out while the rest of the world went on with the business of living. But it wasn’t up to Yidi.

One day, people might not use religion as a reason to destroy civilizations. Not in her lifetime for sure, but perhaps one day – if people didn’t destroy themselves first.

Uh- Oh. If anyone heard her thinking like that, they’d look at her funny and laugh in that nervous way that they did. Why, she could be blacklisted. But they couldn’t hear her. She was alone up here with the sky and the pigeons. That was another part of this job she treasured – the time to think through whatever she wanted.

One more floor to go and she could start polishing glass. Whoa! Her safety harness dug into her armpits as it took her full weight and for an instant, she dangled seventy-nine stories above Manhattan. The platform she had been standing on had dropped a few inches; part of a cable had snapped. A polisher’s worst nightmare; high winds and metal fatigue on-the-job. As soon as Yidi felt comfortable sizing up what had happened, she shifted her weight upwards - away from the weakened cable, readjusted her footing, and radioed for help.