Age 9
One Saturday when Dylan was nine years old, he and Papa went to Altitude, the trampoline park. He had a membership there, which meant they could go pretty much whenever he wanted — and he almost always wanted to. His favorite thing wasn’t the regular trampolines or the foam pit or the dodgeball court. His favorite thing was the high dive. There was a big platform he had to climb up to, way up high, and then he jumped off into a giant pit full of soft foam blocks. Most kids went once or twice and called it a day. Not Dylan. He would climb up, jump in, climb out of the foam, and do it again. And again. Papa sat in the bleachers and watched and lost count after a while, because it didn’t really matter — what mattered was that every single time Dylan jumped, he grinned. Nobody knew if he was trying to get it perfect or just liked that one second of being in the air before the foam swallowed him up. Maybe both.