When I was younger I had a pogo stick, a birthday present, probably, or maybe Christmas. It was red and shiny, and I never was big enough to make it pogo. That certainly never stopped me from trying, of course, so for months I spent hours, bare feet black from the pavement, hopping on to the pedals of my pogo stick and immediately careening face first toward the ground. I lost more toenails during my fight with that pogo stick than ever again since in my extremely clumsy life.
The pogo stick was eventually abandoned in the shed for more amiable pursuits: hanging lizards from my earlobes, and reading in the jacaranda tree, and sticking purple wild petunia flowers in my hair. I found it a few years later, rusted through with holes, the mechanism all oxidized and so even more difficult to budge. I remember looking at it, unsure of what it even was, before I recalled all those steaming afternoons and tossed it casually back in the box I was rooting through.
The truth is, if it had been a book about pogo sticks, I would probably still have it.
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