Since I'm a Cancer, I've always had an affinity for water. The first time I looked upon the Pacific Ocean I was six years old. I ran directly into the surf, only to be promptly deposited back on the beach by a breaker. Undaunted, I ran back in over my head. Not a bright move because I had no idea that you were supposed to know how to swim.

I recall opening my eyes and marveling at the blurred world beneath the surface. I even saw a small fish before it dawned on me that I couldn't breathe. My father, since it was the only decent thing to do, frantically groped around in the depths until he found me and pulled me back into the atmosphere. My mother, fearing a repeat of my underwater ballet, quickly signed me up at the nearest public pool for swimming lessons.

Because I was an only child, I made up games to play. One was with poker chips stacked in the shape of warships. Some hulls had a row of single chips, others two and three rows. The size of the cannon was dictated by the strength of rubber bands. Naturally, the rubber slings of my fleet always blew the chips of the enemy fleet all over the linoleum floor of my mother's kitchen and dining areas. The same basic concept was used in the bathtub, where I floated ships folded from newspaper and then dive-bombed them with marbles until they either soggily disintegrated or sank under the weight of the shooters and aggies that failed to penetrate their thin decks.

I did all the crazy things kids did in the leisurely days before television, like riding my bicycle down a hill and off a small cliff into the tree branches below, jumping off the roof of a house under construction into a sandpile, or building a makeshift raft and sailing down a rushing stream during a rainstorm. There must be guardian angels somewhere up there who watch over crazy, daredevil boys.

Amazingly, I never broke a bone until I passed the age of fifty.

Since then, I've suffered one fractured ankle while jogging; two cracked vertebrae, when thrown out of a jeep careering over a beach while I held a metal detector, looking for a buried shipwreck; and six cracked ribs, two of them surfing and one on a mountain bike. The others came from stupid accidents.