From the time I was in elementary school until Jim went off to college, a regular Saturday afternoon activity would be my dad,  my brother and me loading various athletic equipment into dad’s car and heading to the nearby State University of New York at Albany campus. The earliest memories are of baseball mitts and batting practice and learning to catch fly balls, but both boys transitioned out of baseball for our own reasons fairly quickly. 

There was the occasional frisbee, lacrosse sticks briefly. The giant acres-square empty field is the best place in the world to throw an Arrobie you got for a birthday if anyone remembers what those aerodynamic super frisbee rings were, but the vast majority of my memories involve a soccer ball.

I can’t think of any particularly interesting physical descriptions of what a 12-year-old , a 15-year-old and a 40-year-old look like when they’re kicking a ball around. It was nice. Sometimes we’d go so early in spring that we’d have to retrieve a poor pass from a bit of snowdrift. Other images are sun drenched, and we’d bring along a Pizza Hut thermos full of ice water. I can see now that my dad played a hero’s game of voluntary goalkeeper and coach, and I can’t fathom the well of patience he demonstrated over the years. I will need to ask him about the experience of being on the athletic decline while your sons are on the ascendancy. Not having children on my own, I’ll defer to the reader, many of whom can speak to this from experience.

There are two indelibly vivid details of trips to SUNY that I want to mention. The first is the fascination with the difference between the speed of sound and the speed of light that came to my brain watching my brother as he kicked shots with the soccer ball against the giant backboard on the edge of the practice field over and over.  From the other side of the huge practice area, seeing the ball rebound off the giant green wooden wall and then hearing that particular hollow thump arrive so late to my ears, as the ball coursed it’s way back to his feet, set my mind abuzz with wonder and questions that I would only understand years later.

The most visceral memory comes as a direct result of our frequent post-session stops at the Dairy Queen just off campus. We would order Mr. Misty‘s, which were a frozen slushy fruit drink. Invariably I would suck mine down with such ferocity that I would give myself a ”brain freeze“, that stabbing pain behind your eyes and sinuses that results from drinking cold things too quickly. It would happen to all of us so often and we never didn’t do it. I know now that laughing-at and being laughed-at-by the others was part of the love and bonding that underlay those afternoons.

Today I watched my brother Jim’s change of command ceremony, where he turned over the command of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island to his successor, Brigadier General Julie Nethercot. There is no way I can adequately describe my pride in him, and my respect for the dedication and professionalism they try to live daily.

So I will tell you a story about the time he tried to waterski behind my bike: 

Picture an eight year old toe-headed bowl-cut with big ears and horn-rimmed glasses. Imagine his rail-skinny older brother wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey (that’s right Jim, I was there; I remember before you loved the Giants). Among their assets they possess one two wheel pedal-bike, with blue flames on the white seat, one yellow plastic skateboard, and one length of clothesline. Equipment – check. The older boy explains to the younger that he is going to tie the rope to the back of the bike seat (probably avoiding the four foot long mounted neon safety flag), and hold on to the other end while he rides the skateboard. Little bro’s job will be to pedal his skinny legs off, generating the speed to allow big bro to do tricks and look cool doing it while we cruise up and down the street in front of our house. 

You’re already ahead of me aren’t you. You already have a pretty good idea of how well this went, so I’ll just go ahead and confirm your instinct. Within an almost immeasurably short time, Jim has lost his balance and is no longer on the board. But here’s the part you may not have pictured. Jim, as you know, is incredibly stubborn, and not one to give up on an idea quickly, so he held onto that rope like he was hanging above a scorpion pit. Kevin as you know, is not a possessor of the quickest of reaction times, and when older brother says “pedal fast”, little brother does not ask “for how long” or “under what type of  conditions would you empower me to exercise individual judgement and cease thigh-pumping”? So picture a stick-figure wearing a mop, being dragged across the gravel and blacktop while  the summer-clothed version of the kid from “A Christmas Story” is gawking backwards and still trying churn butter, all the while thinking “boy, this is not going well at all.”

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you dragged a pre-teen boy over a cheese grater? It’s not fun to watch. Apparently it’s not fun to experience either. This moment, ladies and gentlemen, is the very moment Major General James F. Glynn, USMC first developed his “command voice”. That masculine, gravelly, sound that “has a tone, cadence, and snap that demand willing, correct, and immediate response.” 

Jim yelled “Kev, stop!”

He’s fine. Why just last summer I saw him standing up on a tow-tube behind a boat and doing back flips and look cool doing it while we cruised up and down the river in front of our vacation house. I was not allowed to drive the boat.

I was born with a lazy eye. Technically the medical term is amblyopia, and let’s be honest that term at least has less judgement to it. What’s the use in insulting my left eye? For those of you who are paying close attention, yes I’m hearing impaired on one side of my head, and visually Impaired on the other. In case you’re interested there are two reasonably important things that happen when you have a lazy eye. They’re in a bit of a chicken or the egg relationship. The muscles in my left eye never bothered being good at focusing on the same position as my right eye, so I get double vision. My brain learned to ignore the information it gets from my eye, since it’s confusing and unhelpful. Which, full circle, means that the muscles in that eye don’t get good feedback and look wherever they want, making the information worse and more ignored. Lather, rinse, repeat, as needed. 

Here’s a list of interesting and entertaining vignettes:

There’s an amazing picture of me cousins and brother and I visiting Santa. I’m probably 3. My cousin is on Santa’s Lap, and I’m at his knee, and it looks like I’m giving Santa this “What you talkin’ ‘bout Willis?” side-eye. It’s actually just late in the day, and my eye is just bonkers.

Doctors often patch the “strong eye” to see if they can get your brain to learn to use the “lazy” one. Considering that the next step is eye muscle surgery, a patch is “better.” It doesn’t work, but it beats getting stabbed in the eye. So the picture of my 5th birthday is me on a swing, dressed up as a cowboy, wearing an eyepatch. Amy Vore Moorehead is in that picture. 

Depth perception is dependent upon stereo-vision. Having two eyes that compare notes on where they think something is lets your brain determine whether something is coming at you, and how fast. Imagine how that works for me. Now imagine little league me. There is no story I can write that will be better than the one you just did, so we’ll move on. When I was younger, I was a surprisingly good Ultimate Frisbee player, and volleyball player. Until dusk. Everyone’s depth perception gets worse in dim light. Mine gets egregious. The number of times I’ve been hit in the face by a dimly lit frisbee or volleyball is unpleasantly high. I look great with a bloody nose thanks for asking.

My left eye (the lazy one) actually has better visual acuity, because it’s done so much less work over the years. However it sees things all scrambled. For most of my life, when I took vision tests, I could read farther down the eye chart with my left eye, but I couldn’t read the letters in order, so I would just tell the doc, “there’s an E, a T, an O in there somewhere.” Brains are amazing at learning to adjust. This was all a fun game/personal party trick until I renewed my driver’s license last fall, and had to take an eye-test. I put my face on the giant eye-test binoculars and the nice lady told me to read the entire 4th line. I read all five letters no problem. 

Silence. 

She repeated “the entire 4th line.”

I said “O, F, P, Z, D.” 

Shorter silence before “all the letters.” 

Me: Give me more letters, but that’s all I have. (Getting worried).

She long pauses, like she’s trying to decide if I’m fucking with her for fun, or something. 

I take my head out of the binocular-scope, and look at her like I’m not fucking with her for fun. She stands up and twists a knob on the blind-o-meter. Try again. 

I look back inside, and suddenly there’s an entire grid of letters on the left side, top to bottom, on what had been a blank white space. I read them, no problem, and look at her. She flips a dial, and the letters I originally read appear on the right side. I read those, again, no problemo. She turns the dial again, and it’s back to blank on the left, letters on the right. “Nope, they’re gone again,” I said. My brain, given the choice, had decided to completely disregard the information coming from  left eye, on a driver’s license test! She told me I’d passed, and called the next person. I was freaked out about how many people I was  going to Mr. Magoo on the way home.

The house I grew up in had one of those slightly more than half finished but not fully second floors, where the ceiling was a little short and the walls sloped in. Technically I guess it’s a converted attic or loft, but a loft implies you can look down to a room below, and that’s not what we had. Maybe the original house was one floor and then somebody updated it with the attic conversion, but my whole life the upstairs had a small bedroom to the left, a small bathroom at the top of the stairs, and a long bedroom stretching off to the right.  Twice as long as it was wide, with a single window at the far end. The walls went up about four feet and then started sloping towards a low ceiling. When Jim got older he moved into the “guest bedroom“ on the left, but when we were young kids we shared the big room to the right. We had captains’ beds that have a chest of drawers underneath them so the beds themselves were relatively high; the height of a dining room table, I guess. That meant that the slope of the wall-ceiling came right across the bed and really made it feel like I was sleeping in a big wood lined tent. Oh yeah, the whole room was knotty pine boards. As mentioned, the room was long and narrow, and laid out so Jim was on one side I was on the other, and there was a no man’s land walkway/canyon  from the door to the single window between our two beds. That one window and the wood paneling made for a pretty dark room.

All of that is just to help you picture the heist game we invented.

We would unroll the blind down from the top, so the room was as close to pitch black as we could get it.  At the end of the room, under the window, we’d place some object on the floor  that represented “the diamond“. The iconic thing I remember using was a big green plastic dart about the size of my hand, with a suction cup. Imagine a Nerf-gun dart, but this definitely predates Nerf guns. I’m sure we use other objects because it was just a symbolic thing.  Anyway so there’s an object on the ground under the window at the head of the bed. One of us would lay in the dark on one of the beds and be “the guard.” The other one would start outside the room and be “the thief“. The thief’s  job was to creep/crawl as slowly and silently as possible the entire length of the room past the guard and get their hand on the jewel. Obviously the guards job was to stop them, but you had to catch them in the act. We both had these big, red, metal swingarm bedside lamps that let us read at night. If I was the guard, I would lay there listening for the sound that might be my older brother’s breathing or catch a different texture of shadow on darkness really close below me, and then turn on the light and yell “gotcha!” Or I’d lay there in the dark driving myself crazy, hallucinating those light-sparkles and  listening for every sound and trying to decide how close the thief was whether it was time to make a move.  Sometimes a thief would be successful and you would  just be laying there tensing when he’d yell “I got it and start laughing with glee. 

As the thief, I’d have to decide how to balance quick with quiet and wonder if the creaky floorboard was as loud to the guard as it was deafening to me. When I was far away I could keep the location of the goal and it’s guard in one field, but as I crept closer, I would be forced to divide my attention between the “diamond” on the floor, and the the guard, who’d be looming over you on that high bed, almost behind you for those last precious, tension-filled inches. The joy of triumph impending triumph paired with the fear and adrenaline spike of getting busted.

We could play for hours taking turns being the culprit or the watchman. The absolute best times were when we would be engrossed in the scenario, immersed in our roles, and our big wonderful dog, Budgin’ would galumph up the stairs and excitedly investigate and start sniffling and barking and reveal the thief’s exact location by jumping on them and licking them all over the face.

During the fall of my freshman year in college, I continued my athletic career by being by far the least skilled player on the junior varsity soccer team at the (then) Division III SUNY-Binghamton. In case college sports divisions need explaining to you:  Division I is the stuff you see on TV that feeds the pros. Division II is where the best volleyball player from your high-school went. Division III is the place they let you walk up and ask if they have any spare number jerseys. Not quite, but this memory isn’t about sports details.

I struggled at every practice that fall, and just getting onto the field during a game would become a victory that I learned to cherish. Walking down the hill to the fields of the West Gym every afternoon was a bleak reminder of my limitations, and quite humbling. So in the long run, quite a healthy lesson, but plenty stressful at the time. 

When the school year began, practices would begin and end in some light, but as the late summer moved to fall and the days got shorter, the dimness seemed to match my moods. That sense of gloom was augmented by the Binghamton autumn weather, which is generally overcast, and trends toward the gothic. A bit of suburban London or Seattle nestled into the armpit of New York State. Perpetually, there was a bank of dull, splotchy clouds that covered the sky to the horizon in all directions. Google says they are called stratocumulus clouds, the ones that look like grey-white cotton quilting, and they gave the sky a sense of roof.

On one particular day, though the day had been grey and blah as usual, and the ambience slowly dimmed, there was a sudden beauty. The edge of the cloud line started to gap at the horizon, and the late afternoon sun edged low enough to appear below the clouds. We’ve all seen it. I know I’m not describing a unicorn or the view of Earth from the Sea of Tranquility. It’s a sunset. Woop. But this one was in some ways my first. The change from black and white to color when Dorothy reaches Oz is a cliche, but it wasn’t in 1939. It was vibrant and striking. That’s what this moment felt like. The world had been dim and grey all day, and was getting dimmer and drearier, telegraphing it’s intentions.  Then suddenly, golden light bright enough to bask in but not blind. A hint of warmth on my skin. The clouds are alive with dramatic textures from the under-lighting. And miraculously, the instantaneous appearance of fields of shadow-people stretching out from our feet to infinity…The moment lasts a second, a lifetime…  I could go back to Binghamton right now, and stand on the exact spot on the field, and turn my body and head to the precise degree of angle that the sunlight came from that day. There are moments when I do, in my mind at least. 

No doubt it’s this kind of attention to the finer aesthetics of meteorology that impressed my coach so, and ensured that they would not, in fact, have a number jersey available for me the following fall.

Salem St hill, in the neighborhood where I grew up is really steep, so if you pedal as fast as your legs can take you through the intersection with Braintree, you hit the top of the hill with a head of steam, and it feels like you’re flying. I’m seven or eight years old, cycling around my neighborhood with three or four other kids my age. My bike is red, and I blow right through the stop sign without looking, and I don’t see the oncoming car on Braintree. The driver slams the brakes in time, and I fall over. I’m lying on my left side on my bike, completely under the front bumper of the car. Luckily it’s the seventies so cars have a front hood compartment large enough to land aircraft, and a huge distance from the front bumper to the wheels. I can literally still see the tread from that tire in my memory. As I’m laying there with my adrenaline pounding, under the shade of the Chevy Behemoth or Chrysler Land-Yacht, thinking about what a close call I’ve just had.  The face of the driver of the car appears sideways underneath the grill and, realizing she hasn’t killed me, yells “Kevin Glynn!” (she knows my name?). This enraged she-demon (can you imagine how freaked out she must have been)  drags me from under the car and pulls me bodily down the street by the arm to my house (she knows where I live!?!)

She tells my mother exactly what happened. I have no recollection of the content of that conversation, because of the cocktail of adrenaline and dread, or how much trouble I was in afterwards, because I was gobsmacked at the rollercoaster of luck I’m having. I’ve narrowly avoided death and disability at the hands of my brother’s third grade teacher, Mrs. Sheehan, who lives 2 streets over.

In elementary school, the last day of the school year was the day you found out who your next grade teacher would be, and you marched down to their classroom to meet them, and be told how wonderful next year will be, before going back to your own classroom for cookies and early release home. On the last day of second grade, 1978, I walked down the hall and into the classroom of Mrs. Sheehan, immediately recognizing the woman who had almost ran over me with the car and then yelled at me, and then had the gall to get me in trouble with my mother!  That’s the only summer in my life I dreaded going back to school.

This is just a snippet of a memory. Another of my earliest. I’ve been dropped off at the babysitter’s house to spend the night. I’m being babysat by the older sister(s) of Jim’s elementary school friend. One of them must be a teenager, so when I do the math in my head, that makes me between five and seven years old. I have no idea why I am staying with them overnight.

What I remember is my suitcase. It’s the first time I have a suitcase. That I packed. From research/googling, I guess it was a “train case”, a little handheld thing, not much bigger than a shoebox, that a fancy lady would keep her makeup and gloves in in a fifties movie. I’m sure it was from the luggage my mom got when she went to college, or got married. It would be the perfect size for a little kid to pack his PJs and a stuffed animal in. Probably a change of clothes. It’s blue, and hard-shell on the outside. The inside lining is silky, if not silk. I have no idea what I put it in, but I remember it feeling so official that I had my own luggage. I played with the metal latch, and listened to it’s satisfying spring “clack” as it snapped open or closed.

My niece, Tyler Glynn turns 22 today. Here are some memory snippets in her honor.

It’s my wedding reception. It’s a muggy Texas outdoor evening, and I’m dancing with my new wife. A little moppet of a girl, just able to walk, is “dancing” in a flowery toddler dress nearby. Everyone, including the bride and groom are watching her instead of us.

Michele and I are babysitting Tyler and her brother for the weekend at our appartment in Temple Texas. We’ve gotten the kids hopped up on pizza and jellybeans, or whatever you give kids when they’re four and six years old and Tyler is so overtired she refuses to go to sleep. She’s crying and writhing and just so loud and overtired, that she can’t giver herself the one thing she needs: rest.  and I lay down with her and hug her tight to keep her from getting out of bed, as she yells in my good ear, until she’s exhausted and falls asleep.

Her dad and I are driving somewhere. She is six-ish, and riding in the backseat/car seat. She’s singing All Star by smash mouth, and it’s not even on the radio. She just keeps sing-chanting “Hey now…Rockstar….You’re an All-Star….Go Play…” on loop. 

It’s a family reunion, and she’s a young highschooler. Me Jim Jordan and she have been doing a track/cross-country work-out of sprints. We’re all tired, and she’s so small, and so fast-like a whippet. She came late to the reunion from the funeral of a high school classmate. She’s grieving. And she’s exhausted, and she’s still so tough and so fast as she runs her sprints and cries from a mixed cocktail of pains. 

It’s Christmas 2018, and the Glynn family is together and she’s home from college. She has received  a beer pong set up as a “gag gift“ and her dad and she have set it up and to play. She’s been talking like an innocent about how she’s played once or twice but doesn’t really know how and her dad’s talking about how he hasn’t played in as long as she’s been alive. It looks to be a wonderful father-daughter bonding experience. 

She arcs her first toss into the cup like Michael Jordan at his NBA finals best and smirks. He gives her this little squint-eye of surprise. How proud should a dad be that his kid has mad beer-pong skills? He squares up and sinks his first shot, like the old pro. They’ve both been bald-faced liars for the last few minutes! The game is on, and two beer-pong  sharks have just recognized a kindred spirit.  Like sees like, father sees daughter, killer sees killer. The smile they give each other is nothing compared to the smile I have watching them.

In 10th grade we took world history. I can’t remember the name of the teacher, I am confident one of my high school friends on Facebook will give it to me, if I don’t remember it by the time I post this. He also coached one of the basketball teams, and his nephew was one of our classmates, but I can’t member his name…

I am a history nerd. I have always liked history, I’ve read history for fun for as long as I can remember, and I was a very good history student. I had straight A’s in world history all year, and I might’ve had 100 average in that class going into the final. On the final I got an F. Or something close to an F. Super low. Not “ooh, I did so bad…I only  got an 89. Like a legit shit-show of a grade.. It is by far the lowest grade I received in high school.  As you might expect, I took it with the grace and humility that you would imagine an uptight nerdy white boy would. Meaning of course but I threw a nutty! Like a Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh “I LIKE BEER!” vibe. 

All year long, the class had been a rousing, almost Socratic, set of discussions between the teacher and the students about the major concepts and epochs of western civilization, and I must have been one of the most active participants in this class. The final was a series of essay questions where we were expected to integrate the ideas into essays that demonstrated our understanding and mastery of the year. I think the last week of classes were review and all we did was integrate all eras and ideas into one big picture before final. For the exam itself, we were given a big stack of blank, I think unlined, paper to write our essays on. We had a half a dozen essay questions and I wrote out my answers in rough draft form, and had enough time to re-copy them from my horrible chicken scratch to my best, mechanical drafting, handwriting.

Have you seen the movie Real Genius? At the end of that movie Val Kilmer’s character finishes his physics final and drops his paper off on the teachers desk with an asinine smirk, hands the teacher an F.U. apple, and a note that says “I aced this.” That’s the way I remember feeling as I handed in my world history final.

How’d we find out our grades? Were the posted? I don’t remember, but however it happened, I went to talk to the teacher about how I managed to do so stellarly bad on the test. He Indicated that I had completely omitted one of the five or six essay questions. The two of us quickly agreed that I had probably thrown away a final draft essay question with all my rough draft scratch paper.

I begged him to change my grade, and give me a grade I would have gotten, if I hadn’t done something so boneheaded. (Oh the entitlement) He told me he couldn’t do that, but also told me not to worry about it, in some reassuring way. I definitely was not reassured, because I had my head up my own ass, but I distinctly remember him trying to get me to chill. Probably attempting to teach me a life lesson, and maybe that grades weren’t that important in the long run. None of that was getting through to my uptight 16-year-old brain that day.

When he “refused to change my grade” (my recollection) I went with my sob story to the vice principal and principal or somebody in administration who I thought could tell him what to do. I’m such a weenie. The next thing I remember is meeting with him again where he effectively told me that I was such a weenie. And then I needed to chill. I don’t remember if he told me right then, or made me wait until the official report card came in the mail, but he had obviously taken into account the error on my exam, and my final grade for the class was a 95, instead of the 78 or some thing that I had calculated it would be. Yes, I’m the kind of kid who would calculate in advance what my final grade would be, in advance, based on various scores. (Remind me to tell you about gas-pump math sometime). 

So, another Kevin classic, in which the hero’s boneheaded behavior, and self-inflicted error gets resolved with little or no consequence, but a lesson is learned, in some very small way. Only to be repeated. I am one lucky man.

The air is a perfect skin temperature, and the sky is a brilliant clear-blue, with the smattering of clouds a child might draw to indicate “sky”. The child’s sun is also hanging perfectly, casting just enough warmth so the gently-blowing breeze can take credit for cooling me a bit without being showy. 

I am sitting in a cheap plastic chair, next to the parking lot of a hamburger joint. An odd place to achieve a moment of pure harmony with the universe, I grant you. It might make a little more sense if you know that this one is in Santa Barbara, California, which is probably one of the most beautiful and relaxing places on the planet. 

Jim is stationed in San Diego, and my parents and I are visiting him and his family. We make a quick trip up the coast to Santa Barbara to do some touristy California things. For the Glynn’s that means walking. We’ve interrupted our city-hike at lunch time, and while everyone else goes inside to order, my job is to occupy a table. This is not a difficult job. It’s barely lunch time, as my father is one of those men who will NOT wait in line for food or a seat. 

I sit with my eyes closed, and turn my face towards the sun like a daisy, and literally bask. Time has stopped. There is no asphalt or cheap plastic, or traffic. Only a toasty hug from coastal California’s atmosphere. 

A hundred years later, my family starts coming outside with baskets of food. The aura of peace will nest inside me the whole trip, and make the excellent milk-shake and decent burger even more enjoyable. 

Later there will be palm-trees and the nicest grass I’ve ever seen in a public park, and many homeless people who have made enviable choices regarding places to subsist, undermining my life’s choices.