Out Among Humans

There was a time when a man was needed.

He may have enlisted or he may have waited for the draft notice millions of men received:

“Greeting: you are hereby ordered to report for induction in the Armed Forces…” He sacrificed years, and sometimes life itself, because he was needed.

There was a time when a man’s muscle and endurance were needed on the job. When a working stiff could pull back-to-back shifts and come home bone-tired, knowing that he and his wife could support their family, knowing he could face his in-laws and his neighbors.

There was a time — before our families were turned upside down — when a man was needed as a father.

That was before nearly one out of three American fathers, for reasons better or worse, no longer lived with his children, before sons suspected they wouldn’t be needed as parents.

There was a time when a man would be trusted to lend a hand in his community.

But that was before Harvey and Bill and Bill and Bill and Garrison and Donald made innocent men guilty by association. As if there wasn’t already enough to deal with.

A man is not needed now the way he was in the past. We have our work cut out for us.

Even though some of them were married and had children, there was still a touch of adolescence running through the group.

They worked on the thirty second floor of the very art-deco skyscraper that inspired the Empire State Building. It was constructed just before air conditioning came on the scene and was equipped with vertical-sliding windows.

The six of them worked on assignments with little supervision, at their own pace.

When projects dried up in the summer the co-workers would sneak out to a newsstand to kill time. They often stopped at a gag shop that sold hand-buzzers, sneezing powder and whoopee cushions. That’s where they happened upon the balloons

A little physics enters into the story.

Water weighs .036127 pounds per cubic inch. A balloon filled to the size of the grapefruit (100 cubic inches) weighs around three pounds. The vertical drop from their office windows to the street was 380 feet. The acceleration of gravity near the earth is expressed as g = 32.2 feet/sec^2.

Most of the water balloons smashed harmlessly on the lower concrete portion of the skyscraper. But every once in a while, with proper thrust and just the right trajectory, one would hit a bus as it was taking on passengers directly below.

A violent shockwave would radiate out from the center of the roof of the bus and then bounce back to the middle again. The hollow interior of a full-sized municipal bus is essentially a metal drum. The impact inside must have been deafening.

We are all allotted a certain number of do-overs in life. Those bored people working up on thirty two were young enough to have a supply mulligans and get-out-of-jail cards left to draw on. Sirens never sounded on the streets below and the police never showed up in their reception area. They were lucky.

Some years later one of the culprits woke up in a cold sweat. It wasn’t until then that he realized he may have missed committing involuntary manslaughter by only a few feet or a few seconds one way or another.

Nothing good ever comes from objects that fall out of the sky.