(Editor's Note: Jerry Robinson is recovering after slipping in the shower and breaking his left hip on July 13. He had a partial hip replacement a few days later and rehabbed at Des Moines Caldwell Health Center.)

This is not the first time a slippery deck has changed my life.
When I was 12, my Dad and some friends owned a gold mine in Bandon, Oregon. This was in the early thirties in the heart of the Great Depression.
Talk about riches and bragging rights at school.
Dad was the promoter and fundraiser and he and a gaggle of engineers and builders created a large ungainly barge above town on a small lake.
The barge had a huge ungainly superstructure sporting a stork-like neck at one end that extended out over and into the shallow lake. It looked like a prehistoric beast.
The plan was to suck rich gold-bearing mud up from the bottom and pump it over a sluice chute, collecting particles of gold on its way back into the lake.
It was a brilliant idea that was good enough to get a bunch of investors. Trouble was they could not keep the hose from plugging up like an elephant with a bad cold.
I had no idea the whole bunch were pretty right guys who fortified themselves with rotgut whiskey every morning.
My dreams of riches, which included a ranch with ostriches that laid huge eggs for breakfast on a luxurious horse farm run by Tom Mix and his horse Tony, came to a halt when my father slipped on the front porch of the lake cabin.
Shortly thereafter the great Bandon forest fire came through and wiped out the whole scheme, cabin, ostrich eggs, prehistoric monster with the long neck and all.
They did find gold in recent years in Bandon.
Not on my lake, though.
They built wonderful golf courses on the oceanfront and now guys with lots of gold play them.