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“Jimmy! Get off of the roof! You’ll fall!”

Eight-year-old Jimmy Parker had climbed out of the loft window onto the shingled roof and stood poised to fly, dressed in his complete “Superman” costume his Mom and Dad gave him for his birthday.

“I’ll be okay, Mom. Don’t worry.”

Jimmy thought Mom always worried too much. She’d been in the backyard hanging wet clothes on the line when she turned, looked up, and saw her only child surveying the horizon.

“Jimmy! Please! You know you can’t fly.”

He bent over slightly, almost losing his balance, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “I’ll only be up here for a minute.”

It was super cool to be standing on the roof dressed up as his favorite hero. Yeah, the guy on the Superman show said it wasn’t the cape or costume that made him fly, and Jimmy knew he’d been born in Omaha, Nebraska and not on Krypton, but he wanted to feel the wind rippling across his cape just once while he stood someplace high.

Mrs. Helen Parker, Jimmy’s Mom, was terrified, but not for the reasons most Moms would be. Jimmy’s Dad was at work at his job as a fireman, and this being a bright Saturday afternoon in April, anyone might catch sight of Mrs. Parker’s little boy. If they looked at the wrong instant, they’d take him away from her forever.

Jimmy saw his Mom still looking up at him, afraid to move. He felt sorry for her, even though he knew he wasn’t going to get hurt.

“I’m coming down now Mom.”

Just like Dad told him, he looked around to make sure no one was watching, then he blinked and he was standing right in front of Mom on the grass in their backyard.

From the “Adventures of Superman” television show

“See? I told you it would be okay.”

Jimmy’s Mom bent down quickly and hugged her baby boy. “Don’t ever do that again, Jimmy. I was scared to death.”

“Okay, Mom. I just wanted to feel like Superman a little bit. I won’t do it again.”

He also wanted to see if he could teleport all the way from the roof to the ground. He’d never jumped more than from one room in the house to the next before.

Jimmy Parker wasn’t an alien born on another planet, but being a mutant born in the midwest still had certain advantages.

I really did have a Superman costume complete with cape when my family and I lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa in the early 1960s. I didn’t go up on the roof of our house, but I did run around my backyard with my arms stuck out in front of me pretending I could fly.

I wrote this just for the fun of it.