The end of the movie True Grit involves a spirited and dedicated horse called “Little Blackie” running itself to collapse and death against the moonlit sky to save the life of the protagonist, who named it. My first car was a blue two door Pontiac 2000. I never named it, but that car carried me to the homecoming dance, college, from Maine to Georgia, and to the Pacific Ocean. Eventually it took me to Texas where it died in a Walmart. The beginning and end of the story involve little old ladies.

I didn’t want a car. I wasn’t keen on driving; still am not; and only registered for my drivers license test when my dad got frustrated with me eleven months after I’d turned sixteen. This particular car came to me through my Uncle Mike, the nexus of most crazy stories.  He was listening to a coworker gripe about a problem that had landed in his lap. This guy’s elderly aunt had a car with some random electrical problems. After it stalled out and stranded her in a number of intersections, she declared it possessed and swore never to drive it again. Her nephew, not being crazy, took it to a couple repair shops without satisfaction. He told Mike he was willing to dump the whole thing for his sunk costs of $400. Uncle Mike called my mom and asked if I was looking for a car. She said “No I wasn’t”, but the deal seemed compelling enough that my parents decided it was worth looking into. Now the real glory of this tale is that our friend, Mr. Tom Oliver, who lived directly across the street from us, was the senior mechanic manager at a GM dealership.  He blessed the car, told us he could fix the problem, and I had a vehicle that didn’t need pedaling. 

I’d like to stop a moment and once again acknowledge the ridiculous chain of good fortune that this series of events documents. Even at seventeen I understood that this is not the experience most people have in life. Thirty-plus more years has only caused me to be more grateful that the world seems to go out of it’s way to make things easy for me. I understand that optimism is easy when the world keeps walking by to refill your three-quarter-full glass. I pay it forward to the best of my ability.

My expenses were gas, my parking place at the high-school, and maybe part of the insurance. I left the car at home freshman year at Binghamton, on my parents’ insistence, saving me from being the kid in the freshman hall who had the car. That meant poor Dan Rafael had to drive us everywhere. My Pontiac could carry an impressive amount of camping and rock-climbing gear, and one spring break, took three guys, three bikes, and almost a quarter mile of climbing rope to West Virginia to escape a late spring storm. I neglected to tell my parents about the sudden change of plan, and came close getting grounded for the first time in my life as a twenty-one year old. It did ninety mph after I jumped out of a plane. Following college graduation, Jenn Goetz and I loaded it up with six weeks of supplies and road tripped across the country and back. It got the dirt of at least ten national parks in it’s tires, suffering only one flat, outside of Corvallis, Oregon. 

As its last great journey, my mother and I drove it down to Texas, so I could start my life as a teacher. We stopped in New Orleans, got hustled for money, and spent a considerable fraction of the car’s purchase price on breakfast at Brennan’s. Mom and I told stories, and bonded our way across the Southeast before I started life as a responsible adult. I remember crossing the state line into Texas and instantly understanding the lyrics to “Deep in the heart of Texas”. 

The Pontiac 2000 died on Garth Road in Baytown, Texas not long after. I had only been teaching for two or three months when an unobservant older lady pulled out of the Walmart parking lot into oncoming traffic. There was no time to react.  Every person was unhurt. She didn’t have insurance. The car was sufficiently messed up and I wanted to spend some of my newfound teacher money. I donated the Pontiac 2000 to charity, because it wasn’t’ even worth enough cash to trade in. I got a red Isuzu pickup. I put  a cap on the back, and I could stretch out and sleep in it when I went camping. Eventually I named it Chucky.

For my 26th birthday, while I was working at Chinquapin School in Baytown, Dave and Sandy Bartholome (and maybe some other faculty) took me out to see the Mission Impossible movie. By the last week of May, we must have been done, or close to, with the school year. I can’t remember if we went because it was a big, generic summer blockbuster, or specifically because I am a huge Tom Cruise fan. Because I am a huge Tom Cruise fan. I just looked at IMDB, and I’ve more than 75% of the 45 movies to his credit. I own more than I can comfortably confess at this time. 

This is not a persuasion piece. I’m not advocating that you should like Tom Cruise. In fact this is more of a Scared Straight kind of thing. I’m telling you it’s too late for me, and you should probably never start. You don’t want to feel incomplete with Tom. You don’t want to feel the need.

Hello everyone, my name is Kevin, and I’m addicted to Tom Cruise.  Feel free to stop reading now, but if you don’t, if you keep reading “remember…you wanted this.” 

“Tom Cruise, really?”,  you might ask. This week’s theme answer is “I don’t exactly know.” My best guess at my fascination with the man is that he’s trying so hard to be (portray) the exact opposite of who I aim to be. Tom apparently comes from the “paralyzed mannequin with internal screams” school of acting. I’ve never seen anyone else act effectively with all of their emotional blast shields cranked up to maximum, and except for the eye holes. It’s possible he’s a robot, and just on this side of the uncanny valley. I am for all intents and purposes, an open book. I have almost no inexpressible thoughts or emotions. I may attempt to delay demonstrating what I think or feel if I think there is a better time to share them, but I have very little skill in covering my feelings, nor do I wish to. My ability to modulate the volume of my voice is virtually non-existent. I am blunt almost to the point of insult, but not in a “let me tell you what’s wrong with you and/or America” kind of way.

I know almost nothing about Tom Cruise’s personal life. Although I’ve never heard of anyone commenting: “Boy that Tom Cruise seems like a healthy, adjusted, normal man.” His characters all seem so brittle, and just barely hanging on. Even the ones that think they have their shit together. My empathy with the rest of humanity is based upon the belief that everyone is as flawed and broken as I am. I appreciate people who acknowledge that, who attempt to grow and improve, and who extend that recognition to others. I don’t demand it of other people, or even expect it. I have found that many people aren’t safe enough to acknowledge their fragility, let alone demonstrate it. I think they’ve been damaged too much already to expose themselves. 

Tom Cruise’s acting fascinates me because he is so bad at hiding that. Not that he’s a bad actor (I’m not objective), but that his characters are almost always men who are so desperate to hide themselves within a facade that they wind up doing just the opposite. Decades ago, I read an article in Discover Magazine about the designers of the underground cave-vault that was intended to store nuclear fuel rods. Those rods will be deadly to life for tens of thousands of years, and no “Do not enter” sign will last long enough. The problem is that anything big enough, bold enough, scary enough to say “Don’t come near me” is also exactly the kind of thing that gets the attention of anything curious enough to be warned away. The very warning light draws the eye too closely. Almost every “great” character Tom has portrayed was a broken person, who desperately needed the therapy Tom himself is famous for denigrating: Maverick lost his dad, Mitch McDeere (The Firm ‘93) had a neglectful parent and secret shameful brother. Chief Anderton (Minority Report ‘02) had a murdered child. He’s been a bad father, a coward and a drunk fighting aliens, indians, samurai and more aliens. In each of those he plays a man to whom the end of the world is often the only thing big enough to face the past he’s hiding from. He twice failed to portray the humanity of literal monsters: in Interview with a Vampire (‘94) and The Mummy (‘17). I don’t know if all of these characters had huge emotional holes written into them to explain Tom’s own wounded acting style, or Tom was perfect for these men as written. 

My Tom memories go back well before Top Gun (‘86). I’m sure I saw Risky Business (‘83) on HBO, probably while I was babysitting Sarah and Nathan. I hope they were already asleep. Tom had a supporting part in The Outsiders (also ‘83) which was based upon the book of the same name, which every kid in Colonie read as a pre-teen. My youngest memory of Tom, though it’s possible, but not likely that I saw the movie later and recognized him, is from Taps (‘81). In Taps, in which the students at a military academy high-school, Tom plays a loose cannon with his own code, who can’t work with leaders, but who’s value outweighs his obvious flaws. He found his stride early, didn’t he? The film’s better actors carry the story and emotion of the movie.  He’s the Colonel Kurtz of this particular high-school apocalypse, and his mental breakdown literally triggers the movie’s last act. It’s beautiful man, beautiful.

The Roessleville Elementary School library is a mixture of muted blue and gray metal shelves and similar colored carpet in my memory. I’ve already talked about how bad I am with colors, so one of you corrects me to neon purple and black in actuality, I acknowledge my error.  My relationship to the physical recall of the space comes mostly from formative early years, so while I’m sure the shelves werre actually no more than five or 6 feet high they seemed to reach the sky. Beyond those meager details, I cannot trust that this particular library hasn’t been blended in with almost every other library I’ve ever visited into one amalgamation.

The distinct memory I have is of the one (or two?) times a year that the library would host the Scholastic Book Fair. For a few days, every flat surface in their would be covered with books we could handle and browse to get our little brains excited about buying books for home. I think we could go before school, or at lunch, and we definitely went as a class. We had a magazine sized catalog to pick from, in addition to all the copies we had greased with our PBJ stained hands.  I distinctly remember the tiny print and check boxes on the order form. 

I rummaged through my memory for “the first book I ever bought“. When I Google search the likely candidate, it’s publication date was 1980. I probably got books from the book fair earlier than that with mom’s help, in fact writing this brings a Clifford the Big Red Dog book to mind. But the book I can see in my mind, titled The Watchers of Space,  is perhaps the first, or certainly a first, book I got without adult input. I had it on my shelf at home for years, along with my collected Hardy Boys books. It was a science fiction book, in which a boy and girl on an interstellar space ship receive help from the constellations Orion the Hunter and Cygnus the Swan to reach their new home, overcoming the obstacles of a generically evil space squid monster. I can see the drawn cover with the ship and it’s big habitat ring, and the hunter’s bow and graceful swan. A field of stars. One of the watchers dies, aiding the kids; I think that was the first time I cried alone reading a book.

The publish date of the book is predated by both the Battlestar Galactica original and Buck Rogers television series. I saw Star Wars in theaters in ‘77. I’m almost certain I bought the book because I’d already seen those. It’s likely I judged the book by it’s cover.   I’m going to guess that this book was the first sci-fi “novel” (it was probably the same size as a goose bumps or babysitters club book) that I remember reading.  It’s safe to say it was a formative moment for me as a sci-fi reader.

I think a first house is like a first love. You’re probably more in love with the idea of it than the reality, you probably don’t know what you really want, and you probably don’t have the skill to treat it right. Possibly I’ve revealed too much.

When Michele and I moved from Athens, TX to Seguin in 2005, we got to shop for our first house. Or we had to shop for our first house. I’m still a little iffy on home ownership. It depends upon the day whether I like owning a house. Some days I would trade the whole thing for a tent or comfortable back seat, rather than mow my lawn or crawl under my sink to fix a leaky faucet again. These days, though, while many of my patients are huddling in their apartments waiting for COVID to pass over, I recognize how lucky I am.

We were moving from just far enough away that we really only had one trip to see as many houses as we could and to make a choice.  At the time, we were living in a 2 bedroom duplex in Athens. We were never sure if we’d stay in such a tiny East Texas town, and we had serious school debt, so we lived cheap and temporary, and near work, to save expenses. Up to and including Athens, our criteria had been “Is it safe and clean (y/n)”? We’d never really been confronted with meaningful aesthetic choices before, which meant I barely had the language to express my preferences, let alone understand Michele’s, when she could voice them. 

For example, I am colorblind. Not physically. I can see all the colors. I just can’t imagine them. If you want me to imagine what a space will look like if it’s painted red, you need to paint it red, then ask me to tell you how I feel. That’s the only way. Seriously. We’ve tried for twenty years, and that’s it. I can picture the quantum state of an atom in my head, but not a red wall. I’m a real catch. Twenty years on, Michele just comes home with sample squares of a few things she’d like an entire room of, and if I like the 2 inch card, she can move ahead. During our first house shopping day, every time she said “we can repaint it (fill in blank) I crashed like an overheated Xbox, and she had to give me cookie. Old houses were out. Our realtor took us to new houses, and we realized that unpainted white walls say  “Buck Rogers” to me and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to her. Also, neither one of us actually knew what 2000 square feet was. Too big, too little, just right. Rinse and repeat.  

Our poor realtor showed us big doctor houses and little fixer-uppers. He kept telling us what school district things were in, and it took me four years to figure out he was speaking in code for “where the white kids go”. At one point Michele and I found a place we kind of liked, and stood there talking about knocking out a wall.  Our realtor stepped in, the life coach we needed at that moment, and told us that as young professionals we did NOT want to come home from a new job a to a construction site when we got home. I will alway love R.H. Garcia for that bit of crisis counseling. He knew us better than we knew ourselves. That’s a professional’s job, but still. God bless him. 

Ultimately, he took us to his neighborhood, at the end of the day, and showed us a house we fell in love with immediately. Why? Because we were tired, and the low sun cast beautiful light into an empty space. Because we wanted a house, and wanted to eat. Mostly it was a big blank canvas Michele and I could both project our own image onto. We’d already closed on the loan by the time we realized we’d neglected to share those images with each other.  

It was actually the very first house he’d try to show us that day, and I made him turn around from the driveway because it didn’t have trees. We planted trees and lived there for seven years. 

Pro-tip: if you let the grass in your yard get knee high, your next door neighbor will mow it for you to keep his kids from getting bitten by snakes.

I’m going to be blunt: I don’t know why I love running. It’s an oddity in my personality, like a weird crystal embedded in an otherwise uniform piece of rock. I’m generally a mild-to-moderate effort kind of guy. In almost everything.

When I started to get in shape in ‘09, I really wanted to be able to go for a run again. I don’t know why running was a goal, though. I was never a runner in high school or college.I remember once teasing a friend who ran cross-country that track was for people who couldn’t run and do something that took real skill at the same time.  In fact, in high school preseason soccer conditioning, I hated the timed one or two mile tests we did with a passion. For a little while at Chinquapin, while in my mid-20s I ran semi-regularly, but even then it didn’t have any particular hold on me. It was mostly to stay in shape and keep up with the high-school kids I coached. The only really positive running experiences I can point to were the Thanksgiving turkey trot races I did annually for a few years with Dad and Jim. 

Family is a part of the makeup of that strange crystal. My family has always been pretty active and fit. Doing adventurous things and playing sports, or taking long walks, or working hard in the yard is just something we always did, together. When I got out of shape, there was no active shaming at all, but my family still did talk about their adventures and exploits: mom was doing cross-state bike rides and dad’s never met a strength workout he wouldn’t try. Jim’s job. Actually the reason I decided to get into shape was a one-two punch of feeling terrible trying to keep up with family. The first was getting super short of breath swimming with Tyler and Jordan before they moved to Germany. The second was when I went home to Albany for Matt and Sarah’s wedding, which was between Dad’s 64th birthday and my 39th. Dad showed me a series of exercises he was doing to keep in shape. It. Kicked. My. Ass. 

I had a mid-life crisis on the plane ride home, and went zero to sixty to get in shape. My  new iPhone 3G let me download LoseIt, and I became such a calorie cutter that one day a coworker in the hospital pulled me aside and said “eat a damn donut. I’m sick of your sulking.”  As I moved from measuring time on the elliptical in hours instead of minutes, I kept the fantasy of getting off that hampster wheel and going for a run as a beacon in the distance. When I had lost a certain amount of weight, I could go for my first run. I wanted to be sure that I wouldn’t hurt myself by starting too early. I also wanted to force myself to keep at it until I had “earned it”. I don’t really know what that means. I’m struggling to figure it out on the fly, right here, right now. 

I talked my wife into getting me a Nike-Fuel run band, which predates the Fitbits we all have now.  For Christmas I got myself a nice new pair of LiveStrong warm-up pants. They were so the in thing back then. I’m not a clothes shopper, but I think I put more care into picking out those pants than my wife put into her wedding dress. I don’t remember if it was Christmas morning or if I forced myself to wait until New Year’s day to go for my first run. It was one of those rare sub-freezing spells in Texas, and those pants are still one of the best Christmas presents I have ever given myself. Lance Armstrong’s an ass, but he made good pants for a while. I bundled up in a hat and gloves and headed out from my front door for all of a half a mile. Everyone who’s ever started a couch to 5k knows exactly how horrible I felt. Moving frigid air through my lungs didn’t make my body feel any better. Those were incredibly meaningful steps for me. That morning I reaped a reward after 6 months of work sticking to a plan. I began something I still can’t define.

Have you ever had a meal taste so good that you’re not sure if it’s the food or something else?  For example, there’s a pizza place south of San Antonio that Michele and I occasionally go to after we’ve done a long bike ride in the area. We’ve never recommended it to anyone, because we  honestly don’t know if it’s great pizza, or just salty food that replenishes us after two or three hours on the bike. In my friend group we have a term “gas station nachos“. We use it to differentiate between food that is objectively high-quality from food that you as an individual enjoy. The term comes from the place that Melina and her dad went to as an outing and bonding experience while she was a kid, and pilgrimage she still makes when she goes home to visit. Another example would be the Dinty Moore stew my wife likes and the canned corn-beef hash I like. Objectively, they are both one small step from dog-food. Subjectively, they are comfort food of the highest caliber. 

For a while, my grandparents had an extremely rustic cabin on a lake in the Adirondacks outside of Newcomb, NY, a place so rural that even today it barely shows up on Google Maps. When I was a kid, it was even moreso. I think when my aunt and uncle bought it from my grandparents in the nineties, they might have installed running water and a flush toilet. But I’m not certain.  When I was ten or so, my grandparents organized a family expedition that took all three daughters and the four grandson’s (this predates Nate and Sarah) out to Goodnow for most of a week. The outhouse was a treacherous root and rock path away from the cabin, but I don’t remember any other extreme discomforts that an elementary age kid would have to suffer. Maybe bugs, if we went during the wrong part of the summer. I recall that my grandmother was an accomplished camp-cook, and the taste of fresh pan-fried perch and trout are among the fondest memories I have from that era, but I can’t claim to recall what we ate that trip. I can say with certainty that my aunts are still the kind of women, along with mom, who do not skimp on the provisions when providing for the clan. I can’t imagine how many marshmallows got roasted.

The camping itself is a blurry prologue to my most vivid memory from that trip, which is the meal we had when we got back “home” to Westport. Westport is a place from another era, literally. It was “a fashionable resort town” in the mid-1800s, and “began its decline” in the 1930s when airplanes let people from New York or Boston get their beach time in Bermuda or Hawaii, rather than horse or train to a mountain lake. Their loss, in my opinion, but Westport only nominally exists today, and my aunt and uncle are among the last of the die-hard residents. In the eighties, it still had a vibrant community of locals and tourists, and even one last fancy hotel with white linen dining. Classy enough that there was no hamburger or kid friendly menu. For some reason that’s where we went for dinner the day we got done camping. That night at the Westport Inn, I had stuffed filet of sole, for the first time, and it changed my life. I honestly don’t know why. It’s fish, spices, and some crab-meat, or something. It shouldn’t be the most vivid thing from a week with the family I love. It’s probably a stand-in for something much more profound and important, but that my ten-year old brain couldn’t process. Or maybe it was all the butter and lemon. I don’t know. For years afterwards, whenever I saw sole on the menu I would order it, only to be disappointed time after time, because it wasn’t the meal I had that night. That white fish became my white whale. I’m not even sure I could tell you what it tasted like, but the memory I have of eating it is pure bliss.

How tall is a hedge? Four feet? How thick? Two feet, maybe, depending on how it’s pruned. Same for width. A row might be hundreds of feet long on an estate, or just a couple shrubs side by side helping define the edge of, say, a backyard in suburban New York. It’s important that you picture such a hedge in your mind. Now you may forget it’s existence in a moment. If you do, I will not judge you harshly, because as you will soon learn, others made just the same mistake. In everyones, there will soon be more exciting things to focus on than this mundane, immobile bush, important though it may have been to seasonal birds and hiders and seekers at other times. But remember that the hedge is there. Or not. It will come back into the story to remind you of its presence, oh yes.

I was born on May 24th 1970. The 4th of July 1976 was the first I can remember. It was a big deal. It was the US bicentennial, and our country pulled out all the stops. Great historic ships paraded in New York harbor, and they rang the cracked Liberty Bell. It was the most memorable of my life. I don’t mean the life of a six year old; that would be silly. I mean that was the most memorable 4th of July in my lifetime. We’d begun that day, and likely prior days, listening to an album of patriot music, in the spirit of the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I knew the marches and tunes by heart, especially “The Stars and Stripes Forever”. (As yet another coincidence, this song was written by John Phillip Sousa, the most famous composer of American patriotic marches, and director of the United States Marine Corps band.) The song is “beloved” by children, not for it’s upbeat tempo, horns and drums, or the lilting piccolos embodying the blowing wind of the flag over the White House. It is loved because someone, somewhere “rewrote” the lyrics from the original “Hurrah for the flag of the free, may it wave as our standard forever” to the far more vivid “Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck could be somebody’s mother…”

When you are six years old, there are not many parts of the Fourth of July that could be described as “hands-on”. Tiny arms do not reach high enough to hang decorations, and little feet can not be trusted on a ladder. The traditional food is prepared over open flame, and by American law you must hold a beer in the non-grilling hand. Perhaps mom (assuming traditional patriarchal roles) might trust you to hold a spatula and stir the mayonnaise-y potato salad, but only because the bowl is huge and the mess is easy to clean. So food is hands-off until the eating. If you come from small town America, perhaps you attend a parade. As a six year old, too young to be a scout or other parade marcher, it is just a viewing experience. If you have a good spot in front or on a convenient shoulder, the view is of the local fire-department or high-school band. If not, the view is all crotches. Fireworks are wonderful, but not for little hands. All that flame, and fuse, and countdown and explosion, is not for wee fingers, if you want to keep the finger census high and the ER census low. Only the sparkler is considered kid friendly, because it is long-lasting, ends with a fizzle, and lit by a parental flame. We are all fools to trust sparklers. A devious sparkler once bit me on the finger pad, immediately before I learned that not-sparkly isn’t the same as not-hot.

After the hot-dogs and potato salad, my brother, all of nine, would help set off a firecracker or roman candle. But I was thrilled with being entrusted with the noble sparkler. The first time I held one, I extended my elbow and shoulder keeping the sparks as far from my body as my little arm could stretch. I’m sure my eyes kept darting between the bright crackling particles near my trunk and my parents’ faces, checking how I should feel about having such frightening power in my hands. They must have been encouraging because I loosened up, and became more dynamic. As the daylight waned, I became enamoured of the visual trail that comes with moving the arm joints. I began to skip and prance around the yard. It wasn’t long before I was dual-wielding sparklers, running to and fro in the yard, waving the gloriously sizzling fire above my head and singing at the top of my lungs. All eyes must have been on me, and my eyes were looking up to the sparks as I conducted an imaginary marching band with my glittering batons, and bellowed “be kind to your web-footed friends…”

The reason I feel comfortable saying all eyes must have been on me, is that everyone in the family was so focused upon the jumping, spark-wielding, and singing, that they lost track of the surroundings, and the speed and direction of the running straight at the hedge. 

Let’s edit that preposition, shall we? 

Straight INTO the hedge. 

I’m not sure exactly how many things need to line up perfectly for a six year old boy to run at a hedge of appropriate dimensions with exactly the proper speed and angle so as to penetrate the bush without injury.  Hard enough to wedge himself tight, with his feet unable to get purchase on the ground, and his arms trapped in the branches. Timed perfectly that the boys arms are positioned so the still bright sparklers are extended just beyond the edge of the leaves, so that the bulk of the illumination on the frozen boy is more sparkler than sunset. Whatever the odds, that’s how many things occurred just so, because I remember hovering there, in that bush, looking out at my mom, dad, and brother, as they were bound in place, consumed by laughter at my strange little arboreal interpretation of the Statue of Liberty.

Begin zoomed way in to the tip of a pencil, not too sharp, or the lead will poke through the rough brown paper and damage the surface of the book it’s protecting. The pencil is inscribing another small, lower-case letter b, in the cramped space between the packing wide clear packing tape reinforcement to the cut up grocery bag covering the math book. The little b, and it’s neighbors were each earned by doing extra math lessons on the school computer, and each one added one-tenth of a point to my final (or quarterly?) grade. It must have been 7th grade, because I didn’t have a “math class” until then, and it was definitely still at Roessleville. 

Rick Miller and I had time before school almost every day, and were competing to see which of us was most likely to get stuffed into a locker for being a math suck up. That’s not true, partially because we didn’t have lockers big enough. What teasing I experienced was more focussed on glasses, big ears, and actual deviations from the pack mentality, as is to be expected for children. I was teased occasionally, not consistently. I had no nemesis or bully to fear. I never really saw anti-nerd abuse. The toxicities my school specialised in were casual homophobia and racism against the few non-white students, shaming poor kids, and rampant teasing of girls. That last one turned into harassment by junior high, and of which I was an embarrassingly active participant. I’m sure there were other abuses heaped upon children, but those are the chart-toppers. I was successful and comfortable and safe. 

Those little b’s were an important part of the world. My safe little space of reward for effort, and approval by adult authority. I would put another little b on my book-cover, in a nice row of five or ten, and assured myself another incremental gimme from the system. I earned them by doing “extra work”, sure,  but I was already at school early, and if they were going to reward me, for doing MATH, on a COMPUTER, I was on-board. The only thing better would have been academic credit for eating those coconut-covered red Twinkies.

Narratively, there feels like there should be ominous music, or a foreshadowing of an impending overturning of my world. There wasn’t. Not in any honest recording of events. As the year went on the small brown windows between the tape filled up with b’s, and the biggest source of stress in my orderly world was finding room for more rows of letters, and could I get a grade above one-hundred. I grew up in a world that rewarded studious white guys whose values were in line with authority. It obviously still does, although so many people who look like me are screaming that it did not and does not.

A decade ago, Michele and I flew to Germany to visit Jim’s family. The visit was great, but that’s a different story. After an umpteen hour overnight flight from Houston, we had an eleven hour layover at Heathrow Airport in England. Even as we made the reservation, that seemed like it would be long enough to drive us insane if we stayed in the airport, and just enough time to get out of the airport and back with a safe margin. 

The musician to whom we owe our first date and wedding first-dance, has a lovely song called “Paris in a Day”, and I’ll trust you to figure out what it’s about. Dared to be brave by our favorite musician, and too tired to sleep, we took our first steps in Europe onto a shuttle train running into town, attempting to jam as much of a city founded by the Roman Empire into our souls before teatime. 

We arrived above ground at Baker St station, but didn’t search too hard for the famous detective. We marveled at the crazy zig-zag traffic lines, and mused on whether finding a bike-share would lead to greater site-seeing or merely a quick death. It was late September, and as is our perpetual good fortune, we experienced unusually perfect weather at our destination. By the time we found Hyde Park, the sun was bright enough that the locals were sunning on blankets, pulling their pant legs up to warm their pasty shins. Strolling south through the park towards Buckingham Palace consumed an hour but filled us with buoyancy after a long night in a tin can. The pictures we have reveal us shedding layers of clothing and emotional armor as we get our traveling groove in our first “foreign country” as a couple. Michele found a London Phone box. I imposed upon a police officer for the requisite tourist photo with a funny helmet. I had the unreasonable goal of getting all the way to Westminster Abbey so I kept us marching  away from the giant gates towards landmarks on the horizon.

We raced past the Horse Guards, but I’m going to go ahead and say we would have lingered if I’d realized at the time it was the home of His Royal Excellence Lord Edgar Darby Covington from Parks and Rec. So much history we missed. For the period of my life that includes this trip, I had an ironic tourism habit of taking pictures of the backs of statues. I thought it funny at the time, but I can’t really defend or recommend it anymore. Maybe I started the habit on a darier. Anyway, for reasons no longer relevant, when we reached Trafalgar Square, with lions and more sunbathers on the stairs of the Museum looking on, I took a picture of Lord Nelson where the sun doesn’t shine.

Knowing we were at the mercy of the train schedule, and the customs and security at the airport, we made our way to Charing Cross station, without browsing the bookshops, which is for the best, as my favorite, the fictional 84 Charing Cross Road (watch the movie) appears to be a vape shop. We made it back to Heathrow without drama, and had airport sushi, while Emma Watson encouraged us to buy Burberry coats. 

The entire day was a folly, and if semi-angry shame-posts come in the replies, I wouldn’t defend myself. We “squandered” London, from one perspective. We were more enthralled looking out for Warren’s Werewolves than St. Paul’s Cathedral. It wasn’t the real London we saw, but a painted background of the city.  It was an imagination of the two of us. It was the real us though. Our vacation became more concrete the more streets we touched down upon. We were waking up to our trip, growing more solid as a couple. Finding a rhythm where we centered each other. We tore through that city like a tornado that day: spinning around our own axis. Less property damage though.  We rejoined the clouds and headed east towards family.

I’m no airline pilot, but the view through the cockpit window wasn’t filling me with confidence. It alternated:  landing strip/water landing strip/water landing strip/water in a way that was far too reminiscent of a roulette wheel, a far too real example of “gambling with my life.” I was captivated by having the same view as the pilots, but I sure hope it’ gave them more confidence in our safety than it gave me.  This was my first time flying alone. I was  flying down for a funeral, and for a moment or two, I wondered if it would be my own.

Aunt Cassie died days before my high school senior prom. The funeral was going to be that Monday and we kids already had plans to go visit Sean Barnhart‘s camp on Lake Ontario for the weekend after the dance. My parents were amazing, and freeing  me to continue my young life, bought me a plane ticket to fly down in time for the funeral.

The airports in Queens, New York are only 150 miles from Albany so the entire flight takes 45 minutes.  It’s done in one of those little rubber band wind up planes where you can’t put luggage anywhere, and in 1988, that meant they could even leave the cockpit door open for the flight. I sat no more than five rows back, and might easily have spent the trip yelling advice to the pilots. During the landing I strongly considered it. I honestly can’t remember what airport we landed at, and looking at Google maps tells me that they are both built out into water, so I don’t know if I was afraid of drowning in the East River or Jamaica Bay.

Cassie (my great aunt) lived with my dad‘s mom, my Nana, for all of my conscious life. My cousins MaryBeth, Brenda and Mike grew up sharing the house with them, and had the blessed good fortune to know them as complete people, as opposed to merely the neat old ladies who gave kisses, butterscotch candies, and money when you came for a visit. I will trust them to set me straight on details that matter, as they come up in future stories. 

I can’t separate her funeral from Nana’s, partially because they were so close together in time, but mostly because I compounded “Nana-and-Cassie” my whole life. I’m not sure at what age I could have explained, if asked, that Nana was my grandmother and Cassie was my dad’s aunt, her sister. They were “Nana and Cassie” until it became totemic, not descriptive. 

Both funerals were held at R.A., their church, where we went every Sunday I visited. It was the church my Dad served at altar growing up, and where my cousins took first communion. It was so much bigger and marbly-er, so much churchier than my own post-modern suburban church. It always filled me with awe. If the funeral really took place in the manner it does in my pocket-universe of memory, the Lamb of God at the mass was sung by the same wonderful black woman in the checkered plaid shirt who led singing for many years. She was the first saint I ever saw, if you define a saint as someone who loves God so much that they don’t seem like they are fully paying attention to this world as people. So whether she led the singing at Cassie’s funeral or not, she was present to ME, because her voice was a physical thing as real as the yellow-blonde wood pews, or stations of the cross. 

I still possess one of Cassie’s rosaries. I can not say that the rituals of the Catholic Church instill in me the peace they once did, and that they brought Nana and Cassie through their lives.  I can say that the rosary is still infused with the love that those women showered upon me as a boy, and has been a comfort to me on those occasions when the only choice is to kneel and grieve with others.