Down past the hill at the end of Braintree St, if I turned left, instead of going to Stephanie’s or Fred’s houses,  onto Newton Ave, I would be only about a hundred steps from the entrance to the West Albany Pocket Park. It wasn’t completed when we moved there in 1976, because I remember it opening, but it must have been very soon after, because I simultaneously remember it being there the entire time. It had the usual fields for sports: the Pop Warner football team played there every fall. It had batting-ball fields, though I don’t think I ever played on the baseball diamond. By the way, my recollection is that the baseball Little League’s were all affiliated with the Catholic Church in Colonie. That can’t be right. Clearly just selection bias on my part, but I would happily take input from someone on the subject.

For all it’s amenities, if it was a local hangout for the kids in my neighborhood, it wasn’t when I was around. I can’t remember ever meeting friends down there to throw a ball or ride a swing. I guess I disconnected from the neighborhood scene fairly young, now that I think about it, and tagged along with Jim when he’d go visit his friends at their parks or driveway hoops.

I have two really strong recollections from the Pocket Park. One makes a decent story.

The other is this one: When the park opened, it had the most magnificent slide. It was built into the slope of the landscape (I’m sure all the earth was moved to make the slope actually) so it could be simultaneously dangerously tall from top to bottom, and never more than 6 inches above the ground. There were no stairs/ladder to fuck around on and fall off of and break your arm or neck. Just railroad ties on grass you’d ascend to the top of a hill, and a 6 foot? wide metal slide down the other. It owed it’s design inspiration to a good sledding hill or ski jump. It’s the kind of thing northerners would design, in my opinion.

To a little kid it was a mountain. I’m sure it’s actually not that big. The first time I slid down it, it must have been facing just the right angle that the sun had been heating it up like a hot-plate. It was also perfectly dry, and I was wearing shorts. I recall the sensation of the back of my thighs being cooked by both friction and conduction by that metal, and reaching the bottom in excruciating pain. We learned to get handfuls of water from the water-fountain to cool and lubricate it before going down. That also apples for the slide we had in my back-yard pool. I may be conflating or confusing those stories. Either way, that slide at the park felt like it was as big as the Matterhorn.

The better story captures the fundamental essence of difference between my brother and I. Regularly, we would go down to the park to shoot hoops. If he could pick up a game with other kids he would, but he was perfectly happy to shoot baskets and play a game of H-O-R-S-E, where you have to copy the shot of the original shooter, or you get a letter. Loser is first to get the entire word spelled. So…me. Or play one on one. He’d spot my three, or five, or nine points, and we’d play to eleven. After I’d get tired of sucking, he’d shoot layups or jump shots or free throws while I pressed my face against the chain link fence to give my face a waffle texture.

One particular evening, he challenged himself to get 10 straight free throws before we left for home. I don’t know if it was before dinner, and I was hungry, or after dinner and it was getting dark. It definitely was after I was well and truly bored and before he was willing to give up. He’d get five or six in a row, and then miss, and start again. He must have gotten eight or nine at some point, or at least super close, because I know I popped up like a cartoon devil-on-the-shoulder, to advocate that whatever his achievement was, it was basically the same as his stated goal, and could we please go home and get a snack? That is so me. Close enough, let’s go. Now that I think about it, someone please have that engraved on my tombstone. “Kevin Glynn May 24th, 1970 – Close enough, let’s go”. I felt I made a strong case for popsicle time, but was he swayed? No. He stayed and shot that stupid ball, through that stupid hoop, while the stupid chain-link net made a jingling sound every time he made a basket. I really want to say the light got dim as the sun set as he practiced, but perhaps that was just ennui and low popsicle levels in my blood. I was young enough that I couldn’t walk home alone, so I was a captive to his perfectionism. I’m confident others may have similar Stockholm syndrome situations with him over the years.

I don’t know if he ever got all ten in a row so we could go home. We might still be there. It’s possible I’m hallucinating all of this from the park at the end of the hill, forever swinging around the metal pole holding up the backboard, while he’s stuck on nine.

U2 sucks. 

It’s May 26th 2017, and we’re at Dallas Cowboy Stadium with our friends to see the best band Michele has never seen, and the only band that could lure me back to a large arena show. The last time I went to a big concert was The Police reunion tour, and we had seats within spitting range of the band. After 45 minutes I begged Michele to text her sister sitting in the nosebleeds to switch with me, so she could have more fun, and I’d stop getting stink eye from Andy Sumner. It was loud, OK? I don’t like loud. I have hearing problems anyway, and spending two days with ringing in my ears isn’t cool. Also, I’m old and boring.

So here I am at the concert. I don’t like concerts. But Michele loves concerts, and I love  her. The best part of my night has been walking Michele’s not-remotely-see-through-enough purse all the way back to the car. So I got my steps. The stadium pretzel was OK. Other than that, this night is not going well. It’s not Bono’s fault. I’m kidding. Of course it’s Bono’s fault. If he hadn’t been so damn compelling in the With or Without you MTV video, I wouldn’t be here, musing on the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound, the speed of video monitors, and the speed of the audience singing along, but we’re not there yet. So 1) everything in my life since 1986 is technically Bono’s fault, and 2) this isn’t a metaphysics lecture, so let’s move along.

This is definitely Michele’s fault. (Because I’m not confident in my ability to write satire properly, and because my wife sometimes only skims my narcissistic writing exercises on FB, because she has to put up with this crap all the time, I’d like to get out front here and say it’s definitely NOT Michele’s fault at all. Having unequivocally stated that it’s NOT Michele’s fault, let’s move along.) It’s Michele’s fault in the way that it’s Charlie Brown’s fault he keeps missing the football. Sure Lucy’’s a gaslighter, but at a certain point, kid, just walk away from the football and get some therapy. And not from Lucy. She’s hardly objective. Also, she only costs a nickel. Save up and get a proper therapist. Now I’ve just analogized myself to Lucy, AND called her (and by the commutative property myself) a gaslighter. And not worth what she costs. So let’s be straight, I told Michele I would accompany her, but she knew the risks. I’m on record as saying the most I can do at a big live-music show is not detract from her good time. And it’s worth it to see U2. She shouldn’t have to do that alone. She wants to share the experience with her husband. So here I am. None of THAT is her fault. That’s my baggage. 

What’s her fault is that she bought the tickets. These horrible, horrible tickets. We’re so far to the left that we’re behind the line of the stage. I can see the Edge’s ass. Well, I could, if he wasn’t so far away. We’re also in the fourth row from the top of the stadium. Our friends Vic and Sonya are one row further, but several seats less back stage. Later, they’ll tell me it didn’t make a qualitative difference. These tickets up here in Section Omega, Row ZZZ..ZZQ.784x’click-sound’B. These are her fault, we can all agree. 

No, they’re not. She bought bargain tickets, because she had an imaginary, but very lifelike version of me in her head when she was on Tickets-for-Kidneys, or whatever legitimated mafia-scam is in charge of selling tickets in America. The prices were so insane, and she knows I’m so cheap, AND she was buying tickets for Vic and Sonya. She didn’t have the guts to squander all of our retirement plans for seats that didn’t require a safety briefing on fastening our lap belts and how to put on our oxygen masks in the case of sudden cabin depressurization. So here we are  where the only ass I can see is the ass of the spot-light operator, who is literally closer to the stage than we are. Up here where we are above and behind the stadium’s speakers, we’re getting sound  reflection interference patterns so complex that I can build 3-D maps like a bat. I don’t remember what I did to her to make her so gunshy when she bought these tickets, and neither does she (I checked). So it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just one of those things. Everyone agree? I’m sorry. No time for further questions.  Let’s move along.

The opening band is the Lumineer’s, who, in addition to being responsible for the funniest joke in the Parks & Rec TV series, have other qualities. We were very much looking forward to seeing them as well, but since Michele had to wait for me at the front gate while I completed the “why should I have paid attention to where we parked-I wasn’t the driver” half-marathon with her purse, we experience the best of their set through four-hundred million dollars of concrete. As we ascend through layers of now-deserted concourses, their haunting lyrics feel like their inviting us “to come play with us, Danny.” We have not yet realized that this will be the musical highlight of the night, the best the music will sound. For the rest of my life every time I hear the song “Ophelia”, I will want to pay too much for pizza.

By the time U2 comes on stage, we’ve acclimatized to the altitude and have enough energy to stomp and scream with the rest of the stadium for the opening number, which immediately begins a night long struggle between Bono and the audience for vocal supremacy in some bizarre musical anti-tug-of war, for which the best mental analogue is the scene in  Scott Pilgrim where Sex-bo-bomb battles the Katayanagi Twins. From our vantage among the weather satellites, we can almost see the high and low pressure waves of sound blasting out from the stage. Answered by the inebriated and overstimulated crowd in floor admission, at times Bono has to physically lean into the noise like he’s reporting live before the hurricane makes landfall.

My poor wife is heartbroken. This is her Moby Dick. She’s been trying to catch a glimpse of this great white band her entire life, and it’s a disaster. At one point she actually cries,  but not because MLK has been killed. She’s crying because what  we hear is the exact same thing you would get if you pressed play on a boombox containing the Rattle and Hum CD, and placed the whole thing into a metal trash can. We actually leave before the encore. Our friends agree that getting out of the stadium parking lot before it clogs up is the best part of the night.

In the back yard of the house on Braintree Street, along the right side, we had a small circular bed of plants, breaking up the line of hedges that ate the soccer ball. By luck or design, there was a hand-sized patch of lilies-of-the-valley that grew there. Lilies-of-the-valley are small, delicate plants that look like they were drawn by a small delicate child, with a small delicate pencil. They only grow to about eight inches high, and their necks bend back towards the earth with white bells the size of the fingertip of that child-artist. 

My mother, who is an avid identifier of plants to this day, introduced me to them one day when I was in elementary school. I can see her fingertip supporting the little flower, and my own reaching out to touch it. I know they smell lovely, but in my memory I can just smell growing things: grass and dirt and leaf. 

The lily-of-the-valley is the “official” flower of May. My birth flower. 

At some point when you’re a kid you dive into the zodiac and your birthstone. It must be a part of the practice of forming yourself. Assembling who you are out of not quite spare parts laying around, that people say should fit. An Emerald. A rock you can look at in a book. It’s hard and colorful, things a child can understand. A Gemini. A list of traits you can read in a book. Adaptable, impulsive, outgoing. These are words we try on like Ray-Bans, or Chuck Taylors, or Jams-shorts.  Before you can really explore your own, delicate, squishy, undefinable parts of yourself, you can take pre-made attributes off the rack for fit.

Growing up, that little patch of flowers would return every spring. While occasionally it would be trampled by a chased dog, or errant soccer ball, it mostly grew a few shoots in the shade, for a while. It was a quiet, private, nook. Not hidden, but not commented upon. A little piece of me in the back yard. A little peace in the back yard. 

I am not a believer in the zodiac. I think the list of traits, or a horoscope, are written sufficiently vague as to be self-fulfillingly generic. But I am a believer in my birth flower. Not some associated myth or symbol. I never bothered to read up on that. I believe that I keep a patch of small, delicate flowers nested up under the protection of the hedges.

“Feet out!”

My feet are the closest of the three of us to the open door, so I ease forward and aim my them at the black non-skid surface of the platform. The next object beyond that little foot-square is a couple thousand feet below.

“Get out!”

I lean my body forward past my feet, and reach out to grasp the strut of the wing. Now my feet are dangling behind me.

“Look at me!”

That’s for the picture, showing me grinning from ear to ear with joy, fear, and an almost- hundred-mile-an-hour wind.

“Let go!”

I do. 

Bill Church, his girlfriend Patti, and I all shelled out a hundred bucks to take the first day of parachute/sky-diving lessons. We left from Binghamton in the dark, and drove a couple hours to get there on time.  In a few years, the business model will change to strapping you to someone experienced and jumping out for piggy-back freefall and a home video. This predated that, at least in rural New York State. This was actual day one of jumping out of plane school. It consisted of several hours of physics lessons on airflow and lift, learning how to pack your own parachute, all the steps of how and when to pull your emergency ‘chute, body position in the air and upon landing, and a written test. Oh, and of course a truly horrifying waiver form. 

We passed the written test, and got to load up, three at a time, plus pilot and guy who yells at you, and circle up to two-or-three-thousand feet, gawking out the open door of a little single-prop plane, thinking about our life choices.  Despite learning to pack a ‘chute, they fitted us with pre-folded ones, and rigged them to pull automatically a few feet behind the plane. 

I don’t know about you, but when I let go of an airplane wing, my brain just short circuits. We were supposed to practice trying to maintain that arms-out skydivey position you see in videos, but I had no control over my muscular function. By the time my brain rebooted and made the Apple Computer start-up noise, I was hanging vertically beneath a rectangle of colored nylon floating downward “slowly” over an unplanted farm field. Those few minutes between the sky and the ground were the most exhilarating hours of my life. I recall no cognitive memories; only sensations of coolness and gliding, with a soft wind in my face. It was much like coasting on a bicycle for a bit, but with a much better view.  

As I descended to where the trees became three-dimensional, the sensation of speed and the fear of heights returned. The ground transmuted to foreground from background. The school had optimistically chalked a circle target we were supposed to aim for as a landing spot. I was nowhere close. I was a football field away when I pulled the handles that stall forward progress for ground contact. Unfortunately, I was also eight feet in the air, and I plummeted like a rock onto my ass, so thank g-d for the big piles of dirt in that unplanted farm field. Could have been worse, because a few minutes later, Patti took too much speed into her landing and face-planted her helmet into the soft soil. She was much closer to the target though.

On the ground we survivors hugged and bled off adrenaline, and compared notes with our fellows, feeling oh-so-worldly to the classmates who had yet to ascend. We were still so pumped on the drive home that I took my little Pontiac 2000 over 90 mph on one straightaway.

The Polaroid of me lived on the door of my dorm-room for the rest of that year, so any visitors might see how cool I had been, and how happy I was, hanging from the wing of a plane.

In my childhood and teenage bedroom, the head of the bed sat about a foot away from the wall. That empty space left just enough clearance so the single shelf above the headboard didn’t hit my skull when I woke up every morning. It also left room for the red spring arm reading lamp to move in and out of position as needed.

On that small shelf perched above my pillow there were always two things. One was the book I was reading. The other was the digital solid-state alarm clock radio.  It was an inch-high brick of silver gray plastic, with a round radio dial on the right side. It has red eight segment LED numerals. It was purchased at the Service Merchandise on Wolf Road. I surmise that I got it in ‘82 or ‘83, because Jim moved out of our shared  bedroom into his own so he could have teenage privacy. Prior to that  we both woke up to his alarm clock radio. It was cigar-box sized, of  brown plastic . The digits were yellow green.

Every night, I would set the timer to about 30 minutes, and listen to the radio as I fell asleep. I can’t remember what stations were cool back then. That clock woke me up every weekday through high-school. One Saturday night, in high school I laid on the bed, and listened to Madonna sing “Crazy for You”, and feeling incredibly sad and alone. 

My alarm clock got removed from it’s shelf in the fall of 1988 and went to college with me, where it spent two years on a little two drawer filing cabinet that acted as my bedside table in Champlain Hall, when I lived with Steven Rubenstein. It has sat its nightly sentry perched on a milk crate next to a pile of blankets (late college), and on a rough beam in a horse barn stall in Maryland.

It woke me up for classes I got A’s in, and for an eight AM differential equation math class I barely passed. It has woke me up to teach classes, and to round on surgeries. It was my bedside alarm clock until Into the 21st-century, when it was replaced with a CD player/alarm clock, in the brief era that preceded the iPod.

Early one Saturday morning, when I was almost twice as old as that lonely boy listening to Madonna, it woke me up to begin the day I got married.

While at the outdoor learning center we occasionally had very large, multi day school groups that required a large group of instructors to coordinate. For one of these events,  I was either the designated leader, or a defacto leader due to my seniority. I don’t remember if we were having a specific problem, or a more general meeting in our instructor house, but as groups of a dozen or so often do, we began to descend into chaos and crosstalk, and voices were getting louder. Nothing crazy, but at that point in a meeting where the average person starts to know the actual issue won’t get solved, fear nothing will get solved, and want to just get the hell out of there. Since I was “in charge” simply leaving wasn’t an option, so that left me feeling frustrated. 

We were equal parts teachers and maintenance workers, and I had a hammer nearby the couch I was sitting on. I grabbed the hammer and banged on the concrete floor loudy. Like a gavel. Everyone got quiet. I don’t know what we talked about to finish the meeting, because that’s not the point of the story. 

After the meeting, one of the instructors, Mick, who hadn’t been there very long, asked to talk with me in private. He was tense, literally, with visible muscle tension in his arms and face. He told me that my banging the hammer had been an escalation of tension and violence, and that it really upset him. He challenged me to think about how I would feel if someone else had done that, and how I would have dealt with someone further escalating the mood. I could see that this wasn’t a mere hypothetical, and that he was having difficulty controlling the emotions I had failed to hold in.

I would like to think I said something gracious and contrite at the time, but I have no memory of my response. Apparently I wasn’t a complete ass at the moment, because we didn’t come to blows. I do know that it was an incredibly meaningful intervention. I’m not a very alpha guy, so it’s not like I wave my anger around. But I am a white cisgender man, which means I get to justify my occasional emotional outbursts as the rightful reaction to the situation, in ways many others do not. I took it as an unquestionable right, until the moment he took me aside. Mick was certainly the first peer who stepped forward like that. It took real courage. 

FWIW, this particular story is “inspired” by a couple Twitter stories today of Science Fiction authors being rightly called out for ongoing behavior in their personal and professional lives, and how blind some of them seem to be to their own culpability, even after doing their public apologies. Recently I told a friend that one danger of writing myself as the center of every story is writing myself as the hero as well. I know I’m mostly a good guy, but to anyone I haven’t been good to, I’m a bad guy. That’s fair. I’ll own that.

 For those who’ve asked, I’m still not really sure exactly what I’m doing with these stories. I’m having a lot of fun writing. Many of you have been incredibly generous with your compliments. Thanks for reading, even to the less goofy ones.

I wanted to see that tornado so badly. I don’t know why. It wasn’t because I saw the movie Twister, or the Wizard of Oz, or 100 shows on the Discovery channel where people chase tornadoes down. Of course that must have been part of it, but that’s not the why. I’m a nerd, and nerds just want to see cool things. But that’s not the why. I’m very confident in the not the reason, but I don’t really know the reason.

It was a summer night south of Temple, Texas, in 2001 or 2002.  Michele and I were out in my red Isuzu pick up, way too late, in the driving rain, lost, looking for a glimpse of a tornado. The TV and radio had blasted warnings and course maps, and though she was definitely not in favor of the plan, she preferred that I not go alone, and I would have gone alone. We’d only been married for a couple of years, so we were still in that stage where one would do anything to support the other, as opposed to flatly calling the other out for being an idiot or an asshole, so she was in the passenger seat outwardly showing more nervousness than I. 

Ever since the car accident that happened in a heavy rain storm in 1982, I am the world’s worst, most nervous, person to be in a car with when it rains. If I’m driving I’m gripping the steering wheel like it’s trying to escape, and if I’m a passenger I’m tense from scalp to toes stomping on the imaginary brake and snapping at the driver, no matter who he or she is. So what was I doing out here in the heaviest rain, the darkest dark, the windiest night, trying to find a storm?

One of the best novels I ever read was The Magus by John Fowles. It’s a complicated book about a selfish, adrift young man. In the book there’s an allegorical tale about an old farmer who spends his nights standing on the shore of the lake screaming out to God and communing with the Biblical pillar of fire. He’s tapped into some force, some great knowledge in a fantastical supernatural phenomenon that gives him focus and meaning in an overwhelming world.

If you grew up in the North, you think hurricanes or tornadoes are romantic mystical occurrences, like seeing a UFO or Bigfoot. They’re not real. They’re fantastic and cool. I think people who grow up in the South probably feel the same way about blizzards. If you grew up in the North you know that two feet of snow is a pain in the ass that you have to shovel that spends the rest of the winter turning brown and making the roads ugly and treacherous. Michele grew up in Texas, and she grew up knowing that bad weather it’s just bad weather; stay inside and wait for it to pass. But I didn’t know that yet.

 I think that I was driving around Bell County from hilltop to hilltop hoping to glimpse my view of the great, mystical, meaningful pillar of storm out there. I had a budding career in medicine, a wife who loved me, and a whole world open in front of me. In some ways at that age, knowing you can be anything, do anything, is a form of not knowing what to be, what to do, where to go. It’s an incredibly privileged version of that problem, certainly. I think from here now that I can see that fear of all that choice and potential to fail is why I would be so stupid as to drive into high winds and wiper swamping rain drops. 

Unlike the character in the Magus, despite the yelling for the storm to show itself, I never got a glimpse of a great pillar twisting from earth to sky. I couldn’t see beyond the windshield wipers in the darkness, because stories aren’t reality. Tornadoes are a giant impersonal weather phenomenon, and if you’re lucky, you fail to get close. 

I found my meaning and direction from the scared woman in the passenger seat.

The folks I worked with at Genesee Valley Outdoor Learning Center had an incredible array of skills and certifications. Two completed wilderness emergency medicine and rescue class with me just before hiring on. One had guided cross country bicycling trips. Another taught kids to hand build and paddle kayaks in the Pacific Ocean. Several were white water rafting guides. We took advantage of each other’s skills as much as possible to pad our resumes. Sally was a lifeguarding instructor, so just about everyone took the opportunity to pick up a lifeguard certification.

It was probably late April when we started training, and the first big pool session we had was indoors, and it was fine. I’ve always been a reasonably confident swimmer, except for my fear of sharks in the deep end of my pool. The only difficult thing about the first session was treading water for two minutes using just your legs. It shouldn’t be super hard, but I got the second worst calf cramp of my life during the test. I finished that two minutes with just my lips above water.

We’d had to borrow a pool from a nearby school for that session, and nearby is a relative term. The long distance swim part of the lifeguard test requires a 300 yard open swim. We did that at the outdoor learning center itself. Genesee Valley didn’t have a pool, but it had no shortage of ponds. The average water temperature in May in Maryland is 56°. At that temperature it takes about an hour to get hypothermia depending on how active you are. Let me tell you when you’re in 56° water you stay pretty fucking active. I have camped on snowy mountains, spent the night in my hand built igloo, and seen spilled water freeze before it hit the ground. None of that made me as cold as swimming across that pond. My sole mission that day was to jump off the dock, catch my breath, convince my testicles to descend, swim to the other end of the pond, turn around and swim back to the dock like I was being chased by Jaws.

As people finished that swim, we didn’t even bother toweling off. In finishing order we just ran up the hill to the cabin and piled into the single shower. It took so long to warm up that we packed our chattering teeth and shivering flesh into that thing like people trying to set a Guinness record for numbers in a phone booth. There is a picture somewhere of close to a dozen people in one shower sharing the hot water and whatever body heat we had left. I think most of us are smiling in that picture. 

Later that summer, we finished a day with a bunch of teenage boys by letting them take the zip line down the hill and into the pond. One kid released significantly farther out then was ideal and from the shore we watched as his combat boots and camo pants started to suck him down. It took longer than I’d like to acknowledge to realize that he was drowning. I had to swim out 50 yards to rescue him, and he was in full on flail panic when I got to him. I really wish I had brought a life jacket. But I was able to roll him over onto his back and frog-kick us toward shore to my partner, who had taken the critical extra three seconds to bring a floatation device. 

That is, by the way, the only life I know I can take credit for saving  in my career.

Have you ever seen me dance?

By and large, this is a rhetorical question. Most people have not seen me dance. There’s a reason for that. Here are some exceptions to the general rule that most people have not seen me dance:

1. If you ever attended an end of season soccer banquet at the Polish American community center in the 80s, you may have seen me dancing with a tie around my forehead bandana-style.

2. If you were at the Canfield Casino in Saratoga Springs New York for the Senior Prom of Colonie Central High School 32 years ago, you would have seen me dancing to the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing, surrounded by girls in humongous ball gowns that were the style that year.

3. We were at my wedding? 

4. Did you by some chance take ballroom dancing class at Rice University in 1998? If so you may have seen me trying to learn to swing-dance with my wife, and  I’m sorry.

Of course I dance to one or two songs at most weddings I attended in my 20s and 30s, because those are the rules, but by then I was doing it in begrudgingly, as per the Gen X white guy rulebook. 

The only time you might have really seen me let go and  dance was in the rec-room of Champlain Hall at Binghamton University. It was with a boy. I am, and have always been, very comfortably heterosexual. This story is not about how I “experimented in college “ or “almost experimented in college“, unless you count “how I experimented with dancing in college”? It is about a man crush, because beautiful is beautiful. The real glory here is I literally can’t remember his name anymore. Hopefully one of the folks from Binghamton will chime in and remember it. It’s whoever was supposed to win the Champlain dorm presidency our freshman year, if Dan Rafeal hadn’t stuffed the ballot box, so our hall mate Adam Rasmussen won. He (not Adam or Dan) was tall and poised and well dressed and cool. I was not (am not). He was intimidating in the way that all people are intimidating when you’re not particularly confident in yourself. I think it was evident to me even then, and obvious now, that he was as uncomfortable in his outward facing character as I was in my own, and most of us were most of our young lives. I didn’t know him well. I did hang out with him one or two nights at dorm parties, but don’t remember anything about him. The solid memory I have is in that rec room.

 A bunch of us were dancing to whatever 80s music was playing, and then the beginning beat of Blue Monday by New Order began. I’m sure I knew this song at that point, because I was alive, but I entered college firmly in the REM,10,000 Maniacs, Suzanne Vega camp. I did not know dance music (despite what Michelle Yaroschuck and Patty Edwards tried to teach me in high school study hall). But this guy lit up like he was on fire and started moving with a passion and grace I had never seen before. It was electric. And joyful. He was free. And it made me want to be free. 

So this is something I’ve tried to explain more than a few times unsuccessfully. I’ll try again. You know how when I dance, and I’m off the beat, it looks terrible and foolish and like my body is moving wrong compared to everyone in the room? In the middle of the song, he got off the beat. Instead of looking like he was wrong and the record was right, it felt the other way: like he was on the proper beat, and the rest of the room, including the record, had gotten lost. Have you ever realized that when a conductor stands in front of a symphony, they are the person who controls what the dozens of musicians and hundreds or thousands of audience experience, with just the motion of their arms? When I think about that moment, that song, I feel like he was conducting the room and music, leading and making the beat with his body. In the Matrix, each time Neo starts to realize his potential a bit more, they bring up the special effects to show how uncanny it is, and the everyone else in the scene stares and realizes they’re seeing the impossible. That’s what it was like.  It was probably just me, but it was sublime. I wanted to be free like him. I danced to that song with all the passion and skill a 4th grade band throws at the Star Wars theme.  

But I danced.

I broke my leg in third grade.

The Roessleville elementary school gymnasium floor was a giant poured rubber slab, instead of wood or some other laminate. I’m sure this was some fancy space-age idea when it was built in the 70s, but it was effectively a big solidified slab of Jello, that would rip the skin from your knees if you fell. It was  the world’s slipperiest surface when wet and world’s stickiest floor the rest of the time. During an indoor PE class kickball game I kicked the ball for a whopper and had almost rounded the bases completely when someone accused me of missing a base. I reversed direction, ran back to the missing base with all my speed, planted my leg on the white square painted into the rubber floor, pivoted and pushed off to continue back around in the hopes of completing my home run. That jump plant twist push is, it turns out, the perfect way to give yourself a spiral tibial fracture. There was an audible crack. I collapsed in a heap, and in a rare show of fortitude and focus, began to army crawl my way to the next base, only to be hit in the butt by a thrown red-rubber kickball soon after. I remember making a very disturbing groan while crawling and I remember being incredibly mad at whoever had thrown the kickball and gotten me out.

I sat in the nurse’s office dreading my dad’s impending arrival while waiting to get picked up to go to the ER. I honestly don’t know why I thought my mom and dad would be angry with me for breaking my leg. I know I was more focused about disappointing him than the pain.  He was, of course, wonderful and caring. 

I broke my leg in February in upstate New York, which is a bad time of year to live in sweatpants with the seams ripped down one leg so they can go over the cast. It’s an even worse time not to be able to put socks and shoes on over bare toes. My aunt Peggy Coryea custom made me a knitted booty that looked like a sneaker, and then made another even more custom knit sneaker that matched the color and pattern of my actual green suede sneakers, so I could look like I had a match set! 

Two or three days after the ER I had to go to the orthopedic doctor for my permanent cast. His office was an old Victorian house in downtown Albany and it had a long sidewalk. I had only used crutches for a couple days, most of which had been getting from bathroom to couch. I remember looking through the car window at the icy patches and snow drifts with fear. I don’t remember if we talked about it, but dad picked me up and carried me across the ice and snow to the front door. That moment in his arms is the embodiment of feeling safe and protected from the world.