Looking back over my life, the realization that I have no business being alive or in relatively good health is unavoidable. On more than one occasion, I have been kept on this side of the sod by whatever you wish to call it: an overworked guardian angel, good karma or merely favorable happenstance.

Such events should have resulted in severe injuries or death because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time or because I made a bone-headed decision. I make fewer of these choices now than when I was just young and stupid. However, the fact remains that occasionally I still tempt fate.

I can provide several examples. When I was 8, our next-door neighbors had a long, steep driveway that leveled out at the bottom of the hill before making a sharp right. At the end of that driveway, in a strategic position, was an old maple tree.

At that time Evel Knievel was the smokin’ hot idol for me and my friends. Unfortunately, being mesmerized by his car-jumping displays didn’t leave much room to think about the consequences of such actions. Tying my mom’s best red tablecloth around my neck, I took off down the driveway on my bike. Once gravity took over, I didn’t even have to pedal. I imagined I was flying until I hit the oak tree.

I looked as though I had been beaten by a street gang, only with less dignity.

Although now familiar, no commercial during my youth ever ended with the words, “Do not try this at home.” I’m convinced I am the idiot for who that legal phrase was invented.

When I was 14 my mom allowed me to ride a bus from South Carolina to Michigan for a family visit. We pulled into Detroit a little after midnight. When I discovered the station restaurant was closed and my bus wasn’t leaving until 6 a.m., I walked 12 blocks through downtown in search of something to eat.

Infiltrating Osama bin Laden’s traveling kidney dialysis squad would have been safer. How I got through without being knifed or worse is a memory that still sends shivers through me.

My lack of coordination has also nearly proved to be my undoing. When I was going through advanced ROTC training at Ft. Lewis, Wash. I fell 65 feet, head down, into an 8-foot pond. The medics were amazed when I came away with nothing more than cobwebs in my head and silt in my uniform.

I even tripped on the wet floor of a convenience store in Rock Hill several years ago. I used my right hand to break my fall but was too macho to go see a doctor. The hand eventually healed but not the way I had intended. To this day I still can’t give a straight thumbs-up. The digit looks like a dog leg fairway on one of Myrtle Beach’s worst par-3 courses.

But the most hazardous things I’ve ever done I still do today. I’m a newspaper writer and I’m married. This means constant criticism on a daily basis and the occasional brickbat from all sides.

I do enjoy living on the edge.

T&D Staff Writer Phil Sarata can be reached by e-mail at psarata@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5540.

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