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When I was turning 50, my Mom, G_d bless her, said to me, “Now that you’re 50 isn’t it time that you stop climbing?” I told my mom, “It’s more dangerous on the ground than it is up there!” A little less than two months later I was walking down 13th Street, hit a patch of ice, slipped, and broke my hip. After that my mother never said another word to me about climbing.
Just recently, I was sitting at my desk working late on Memorial Day. I was crumpling up a letter I had just written, and I leaned back in my chair to throw it in the wastebasket. Since it was trash day, my wastebasket had been put a couple of feet away from where it normally is. I had to reach back and when I did so, the back of the chair moved back also. Then I leaned forward and the back of the chair came forward and caught my chest between the back of the chair and the armrest. I heard a snap. I thought, I couldn’t have broken it. Then I stood up to walk and I said to myself, I did break it.
The next morning, we started a new project at Ground Zero, and you have to walk down 150 stairs to get into the pit. My assistant, Emily, had to carry both of the bags because my rib hurt so much. I couldn’t get to the doctor until two days later, and by then I knew it was broken.
I called my brother and said to him, “Too bad Mom’s not alive because I would love to have told her this one!” Everyone I tell the story to laughs and can’t believe that with all the stuff I do that I broke my rib while sitting at my desk chair.
Peter B. Kaplan
Photographer