The very first position I got after graduating PA school, and relocating for my wife’s residency program, was the first offer I received, which was to work at a women’s prison in Gatesville, TX. I’d been looking for almost six months at that point, and had driven to towns as far as 70 miles away to cold-call practices and drop of resumes. I would have taken anything at that point, as evidenced by the fact that I took work at a women’s prison in Gatesville, TX. 

Now honestly, there are quite a few good things I could say about the experience, along the vein of the “every cloud has a silver lining.” 1) My supervising physician was so checked out and incompetent that after two weeks of barely training me, I was left to my own devices and learned to depend upon myself. 2) There were lots of abscesses and ingrown toenails, and so I got incredibly good at minor surgical procedures, and plenty of practice with donning sterile gloves (see 0.01644). 3) I got really good at identifying lice. 4) There’s almost nowhere safer to be on 9/11 than a razor-wire enclosed compound with armed guards in the middle of nowhere.

So that was a fun 6 months – because I got the hell out of there as fast as possible for at least FOUR reasons.

But the fifth, and the most entertaining, reason for leaving, is actually the first thing that happened to me: on my very first day of seeing patients, the last one of the morning, just before lunch, a very nice convicted lady looked me in the eye and said “Doc, you know the crotch of your pants is split wide open, right? We’ve been laughing about it in the waiting room all morning.”

P.S. At lunch, I sewed my pants crotch back together with wound suture (it comes pre-threaded!), and had to work out the rest of the day.

There was a time when I could tell you the longest river in Africa, or the leading crop or state bird of Montana. At least there was a time when I could ask you those questions, and check to see if your answer was correct. That time would have been in the evening, on a Saturday, while we ate take-out pizza, from the Pizza Nook. 

For many years growing up, the Times-Union newspaper in Albany, NY had a 5 or 10 question trivia quiz in the back pages, near the crossword and chess problem.  I think it was only a summer feature, though I have no idea why that would be. Our family loved doing those trivia quizzes. Naming Cy Young winners or President’s wives or whatever, honestly I have no recollection of those questions, because after a while, we started making our own trivia quizzes for Saturday night dinners. I suspect I probably annoyed my parents into doing the first ones, but soon it became a rotating responsibility.  Again, I suspect that I annoyed people with requests for “more questions” until they just made me make my own. My parents say I was eight or nine when I started to comb through the World Almanac looking for ten things I could ask my brother and parents. I recall tables of Gross Domestic Products, Presidential Birthplaces, and Best Actor Oscar winners and runners-up, and can see the little text under my fingers like it was yesterday. 

I have vivid memories of the distinctive scribble of my dad’s questions on his beloved 3×5 cards, and how thrilled I was when we replaced the 1976 World Almanac with one from ‘81 or ‘82. The eighties book had world flags IN COLOR! 

I think one of the most personally profound changes technology has wrought is that as a child, my prodigious memory was a huge part of what made me a successful student, and therefore a happy and successful person, since school was the defining part of who I was. Modern day use of the Google means that keeping facts stored in my brain seems a waste; the mental equivalent of keeping receipts from McDonalds. Anyone can seek information out faster with a keyboard, or a yell of “Hey Siri, Alexa, or OK Google”. Lot’s of my fellow olds may be uncomfortable with this, but I don’t mind that my superpower is no longer impressive.

I’m still an active trivia guy: A few years ago, Marsha Nagorsky invited me to join the Learned League, an online trivia/knowledge quiz that arranges people into groups of about 25 other folks with similarly spongy brains in head-to-head competition for about a month at a time, a few times a year. It’s enough fun that I’ve recruited a few others into the cult, and made some real friends among competitors.  It’s a wonderful way to frustrate myself for a few minutes each day, and the best part is complaining about the fairness of the questions, with my compatriots. The most impressive thing about it is that every day  you click a box as you submit the answers to the six questions, affirming that you did not cheat. Any community that trusts the honesty of 18,000 strangers is worth being a member of. We’re about midway through a season currently, but if you think it sounds fun, let me know. Another Rookie League will start in August. 

Nile, wheat, western meadowlark

Feel free to chime in with a favorite bit of trivia, OR your favorite pizza place.

When I was 25 I had arthroscopic knee surgery, and because I was living in Texas, one of my coworkers at the school was the person who came and picked me up and helped me fill my prescriptions. The evening after my surgery she took me out for dinner and as I crutch walked into the food court, still a little high from meds, I remember showing off to her that if I flexed my knee real fast I could make liquid shoot out of one of the incision holes. I definitely recall telling Janet “and it doesn’t even hurt!“ 

Anesthesia is an amazing thing. If you look at the Greek word translates literally as  “without sensation”. It means you can’t feel what is happening to you. Technically there are diseases that will leave you with the condition of “anesthesia.” A spinal chord injury might leave you unable to feel parts of your body. However most of the time when we use that word we’re talking about receiving an external substance that leaves us numb to pain. 

Last week Tuesday, Jarrett came into work and said “well we’ve descended into authoritarian rule now” after the government had used gas and heavily armored police to disperse the protesting crowd in Lafayette Park. I can honestly say that I had looked at the story in the news, but it didn’t register as any bigger deal than all the other crap that the President and his allies have been doing these last three years. 

Here’s a cool thing that often happens when you remove someone’s toenail:. To numb the toe for the procedure, you give a small prick  of lidocaine to the surface of each side of the base of the toe to numb the skin, and then you plunge the needle all the way down until you feel it hit the side of the bone. Then you push the medicine out right there where the nerve is passing, so the tip of the toe (and nail) go senseless. After a minute or so, it’s so asleep that many patients want to watch while you do the bloody work of pushing back the skin, clamping onto the nail with medical pliers and tugging. They often exclaim how much they can’t feel it. Sometimes they have a look of amazed glee. What I know that they do not, is that they WILL feel it later. A lot. 

I am not unaware of the killing of Breyonna Taylor in her own home, or George Floyd, or Ahmaud Arbery, or the huge list of others. Police and state violence are not just things on the news to me. I have a young patient whose elementary school classmate was shot and killed by a “stray round” when police raided a mobile home and the bullets penetrated a neighboring trailer. I live thirty miles from an immigration detention facility. These things are known to me. I actively try to rectify these wrongs with my time, my money, and my voice. I even write my congressmen (and let me tell you writing to Ted Cruz regularly is an advanced course in squandering precious time and energy). I am not blind. Nor am I ignorant. I recognize the wound. I apply the bandage to the bleeding. 
But I am anesthetized.

I’m plunging toward the river, and all of my oxygen is knotted up under my sternum. It’s a race now between whether I asphyxiate before or after I hit the water.

In the summer of 1994, I was living and working in Hanover, New Hampshire. I was working as a contractor for a ropes course construction company  before I moved to Texas to start my teaching career. By living in Hanover, New Hampshire, I mean living in a bed of pine-needles in a park outside Hanover. One highlight of that summer was the two nights I worked at an actual camp, because I got an indoor bed to sleep in. One low light of that summer was when the guy I was working for had sufficiently low cash flow, that he paid me in one hundred sixty feet of rope. 

Coincidentally, while Bill Church and I were in New Zealand earlier that year, we met a couple of Dartmouth College students who were taking a break to do some mountaineering.  I had their contact information in my journal, and it was nice to see “familiar” faces,  so I connected up with them for a drink and a meal one afternoon.

They decided to take me out to a swimming hole on the Connecticut River for part of the afternoon. It had an amazing rope swing that hung from a grand old pine tree that angled out over the water.  The swing was pretty exhilarating in it’s own right. However the branches of the pine tree were spaced just right so that you can basically walk up this tree like a ramp out over the deep water in the river, and generations of adventurous, and inebriated, locals and Dartmouth students had been jumping off this tree into the water, and these guys invited me to join them. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m not sure now, how much of it was a testosterone challenge, and how much was just adventurous young men enjoying a summer day. 

I think most amateur rock climbers will tell you that they have a healthy fear of heights, and a healthy trust in their gear. I’m solidly in that group. I’m actually not much of a risk taker. I’m a calculated risk taker, and there’s a huge difference. Most of the time, anyway. Climbing up the tree was fine, and certainly no challenge for a guy who’d been working in trees for the past year, but the thing I didn’t find out until I was up there, is that there was a big branch you needed to clear, so not only do you have to really commit but you can’t see below you. When I was standing up there, amongst the branches, there was no ground. Just sky, and the jump.  I don’t know what fraction of my motivation was to not look like a fool in front of these guys, but that was some of it. One of them went first, and whooped and lived and yelled something. Now it was my turn…3…2…1… here I go…

Have you ever slipped and fallen down on your back and knocked the wind out of yourself? I hate that feeling. I think it’s one of the physically and emotionally worst feelings somebody can have. Despite knowing it’s not really serious, and that you will be fine in a moment, there’s just this kernel of doubt. A small part of you says “what if it lasts forever?” Now imagine having that feeling while accelerating towards the earth. 

The acceleration due to the gravity of the earth is 32 feet (or 9.81meters) per second, per second. In the first second you go from a speed of zero, to a speed of 32 feet/sec, so on average you are doing 16 feet per second for the first second, and so you fall 16 feet. That gets you past the first branch, and now you can look down to see the water coming up at you (in your reference frame. To a neutral observer, you are falling toward the stationary river, and the River observes that the tree has just shot at it with a large peachy, screaming pine-cone). The water is coming at you fast. In the 2nd second you’ll fall about 48 feet (we’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader), and I really don’t think this tree was 60 feet above the water, so the whole experience lasted less than two seconds, if you don’t count the infinity I spent coming up from the water, or the 26 years that loop has played in my psyche.

A stranger stands over me. I’m somewhere around 10 years old. “Well, I can’t fix his hearing. If you want, though, I can pin his ears back.” This is the first time I have ever thought “Fuck you” to an adult.

I was born deaf in my right ear. I have a medical degree now, and I still just think of it as “nerve-deafness” which is what my mother, or my doctor explained it as, when I was a kid. My real doctor. Not that dick who took the opportunity to stigmatize my prominent, sticky-outy ears. My sticky-outy ears are why someone in my family referred to me as looking like a sugarbowl (old-timey ones have a handle on both sides), and why “big ears” was probably the most common insult hurled at me growing up – aren’t kids great. I can’t say I liked being made fun of any more than any other kid would, but let’s be honest, “big-ears” is pretty weak sauce as insults go, so I have no complaints. I’ve always thought I have a striking resemblance to Charlie Brown, so I’ve got that going for me. I got one ear stuck on a fence once, but that’s about the worst. Still, fuck you, doc.

Now my non-stereo existence is far more significant. It’s the reason I couldn’t get an appointment a military academy, and follow in my brother’s footsteps. I think we can all agree that’s both a metaphorical and literal bullet dodged there. It’s the reason some of you know which side of me to stand/sit/walk on, if you expect me to understand a thing you say. One girlfriend thought I was a real gentleman because I always put myself on the street side of any sidewalk whenever we walked anywhere. She assumed it was me trying to “protect her” from traffic, until much later when she understood it was because I can’t hear anything.  If you’ve ever seen me spin around in slow circles, like a lighthouse, when you call my name across the cafeteria, mall, grocery store, or open campus, now you know why. 

To this day my wife, STILL has a tendency to respond “in here” when I call her name, not quite remembering how she’s torturing me. It’s really fun when I misplace my phone, try to figure out which room’s smoke alarm is low. Oh, it also saves a ton of money on stereo speakers and headphones, but it makes movies and video games annoying when they pipe the sound into different speakers for effect. You have no idea how many dramatic moments I only hear half of.

My cousin Sarah (24?) is sitting across the small table from my nephew Jordan (11?), with the last cards finally out of her hand, the rest on the table before them. The stress in her eyes, visible all day, is now receding quickly, because they have won, against much a more experienced pair. This tournament has been going on all week, and she and her young partner (the youngest in the game), underdogs all week, are the champions of the Schmid Family Reunion Pitch Tournament. Cheering ensues. 

I’m from a family that plays cards. My grandmother, Maude Schmid, was a card-sharp (not shark – look it up). She played bridge and pinochle, rummy and a hundred other old-lady games. She had three daughters, and each of them had two kids. Three sets of pairs, which is probably a high-scoring hand in some game my grandma played with a neighbor, but who knows? We all learned, young. We had round, plastic pringles-can lids fastened together so we could hold card hands bigger than our kid-hands. There’s not a blood relative of mine who cannot shuffle, or who isn’t planning to teach their kid to shuffle if they’re too young.

At every family gathering big enough to get three other people around a table, my grandmother would start a game, or be a willing fourth, or coach, or substitute, depending upon how many others were playing. In our family, THE GAME, is known as Pitch. Played in two teams of two, three, or four, I’ve been friend or foe with every aunt, uncle, parent, sibling, cousin, niece, nephew, and their children or their partners. I know how likely they are to play aggressive or hold back, how likely they are to bluff, and how happy they’ll get when their gambit works out, or when they block the success of their favored enemy at the table. I know which family members will bid to take the lead with one crappy Queen in their hand, and which ones will sit quietly on Ace, King, Jack.

I learned about people’s tolerance for risk, reward, and failure. I learned to focus at the card table. How to see who followed suit, and how many cards of the favored suit have been played each round, so I could track whether my teammates or opponents were more likely to take control of the game. I learned statistics at the table: depending upon how many players (6 cards per) there are 24, 36, or 48 cards in play, that means Aces, Jacks, 10s and 2’s are more or less likely to be hiding in someone’s hand, to  be hunted. I learned to keep long and short term objectives in balance between taking a trick, taking a round, and winning the game. I learned to win gracefully, occasionally, and how to lose gracefully, a lot.  I learned all of these things in spoken and unspoken ways from my grandma, my partners, and my opponents. My family.

After my grandmother died, my grandfather made sure the entire family got together every other summer, to connect and watch families and kids grow. For the first few, we drew pairs, and played all week, culminating in a final. It was intense. Too intense for some of us, and getting in all the permutations of games cut into the swimming and the catching up. Now the tournament has been retired, but the casual late-night games continue, with people rotating in and out. Laughing, loving, remembering…

I’ve just run several hundred yards up to a group of men on a putting green, who are about to have their day take a very strange turn. I take my hands away from my face and blood comes shooting out of my mouth as I ask for help. It’s safe to say this is not how they expected their golf-day to start.

It’s either Friday or Monday of Memorial Day 1986, and I, along with Jim Papa, Dan Montouri, and I think it was Ralph Coon, but it might have been Rick Miller, have spent the beautiful school-vacation morning playing  golf. One of us had the brilliant idea that if we play real fast, we can get in the second nine, so we’re basically golf-jogging. I’ve hit my ball, and am running further up the hole when Jim’s ball comes into view from my left side. The ball is head high. Specifically, my head. With the reflexes I have displayed my entire life, I slowly gawk and turn directly towards it, as it hits me between my nose and lip, bursts a whole in my upper lip, and shoots my left incisor tooth out of my mouth and into the grass. 

I’m sure I made a sound that is both sad and hilarious, but I have no idea. The boys come up rapidly, and I have no recollection of how they reacted, other than they found my tooth as I ran back towards the club-house.  One yelled to me to drop my golf-bag, which I’m still mindlessly lugging over my shoulder. 

Now, back to the poor guys who’ve just been Gene Simmons upon. The closest one, who’s been watching me shamble up like something from a zombie movie turned so pale, it’s like he’d just completed in the hundred yard bleed-a-thon, and not me. Actually those guys were great, and in rapid succession I have a towel, ice and a phone. My poor dad will, once again, get a phone call telling him that his youngest son should be taken to the emergency room for a ridiculous accident, but there’s a tale for another day. 

We went to the dentist first, actually. My boyhood dentist, with his naugahyde sofas and the world’s cheesiest waiting room music, is open, and willing to see me NOW. Dad, me, and the tooth (in a cup of ice) all go see Dr. McMahon, and he sticks the tooth back in my gum-hole, glues or screws some metal into my front teeth, and basically says “let’s see what happens.” 

Now, finally, we can go to the ER to sew up my face. I have a star-shaped scar in the philtrum-groove beneath my nose, and the numbing shots the doc put in are still the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. While he’s sewing me face up, the doc accuses me of ditching school, which is infuriating because 1) I couldn’t move to object  2) I was the world’s biggest goody-two-shoes nerd in the world in high-school, and funny in retrospect because 3) in PA school three of us DID ditch a class for most of a semester for our weekly afternoon golf-game.  

Eventually my lip will swell up to probably an inch thick, and when I get back to school, one of my best friends will tell people behind my back “I didn’t think he could get funnier looking, but I was wrong.”

This is my first memory. A memory that I know is mine alone. A memory that there is no picture of, that my mother might have imparted unto me when looking through snapshots later in life.  The most vivid thing about it is a taste. It’s the taste of the leather drawstring from the hood of a corduroy coat. I think it’s from between three and four years old. It’s near the end of the evening and I’m standing on the top of the front step of the duplex we lived in, looking towards the woods. My older brother Jim is in the woods or down the street beyond the wooded lot.  He gets to go play, and from the age of the memory I’m too young to do that. It’s a wistful memory. The bitter tang of the leather in my mouth is in harmony with the feeling of unfairness that he’s out there, and I’m stuck on this bare concrete step. 

It’s not surprising that the memory is tied to a taste. Scientists know that smells and tastes are among the strongest of our memory triggers, being older, more primal senses, and wired deep into our brains. In literature, there’s a famous, often referenced passage by Marcel Proust, who’s main character is driven into a virtually unreadable, hundreds of pages long reverie of his childhood, when he nibbles a bite of a lemon cookie from his sickbed. By the by, I have read that book because I have a rule that whenever I come across a reference to a piece of classic literature in three different novels, I have to assume the universe is telling me to go read the original. That rule has largely been a nice life guideline, but sometimes, ouch!

There’s not a lot more to share in this one. It’s a pretty raw memory. I can’t ascribe a whole lot more intellectual depth to a fragment I had as a preschooler, without turning into a liar.

October 3, 1995

OJ Simpson has just been acquitted, and the students at my school are cheering. I am their teacher. I am agog. I can’t believe these kids can be this wrong, this stupid. I think they’re so naive, and have so much to learn about the world.

I moved to Texas in the summer of 1994 to teach science and soccer at The Chinquapin School (now Chinquapin Preparatory School). It’s a private school for underprivileged kids in Houston, with a 100% college admissions rate. The boys live on campus during the week, to better focus on their work, and keep them out of trouble. The girls, even more underprivileged, have to ride the bus for an hour each way, because many of them have responsibilities at home. In this tiny rural oasis outside the city limits, these brown and black kids (with a sprinkling of white kids in each grade), are “safe”. I, and the other teachers (all white, except for one alumnus) are here to teach these kids the ways of the world, of our world; the college world. The privileged world. 

They’re celebrating this verdict, and I don’t get it. More than that: I don’t like it. I disapprove of it. 

That’s it. That’s the memory: A young, smarty-pants white guy shaking his head at a bunch of brown and black skinned kids celebrating that someone with their skin color didn’t get punished by cops with my skin color.

This memory fills me with regret and shame. 

I can remember how worldly and wise I felt at 25. I’d seen most of America, and even left it’s shores behind, and had the stamp on my passport to prove it. I’d seen the world, and could speak to some of its citizens in their own language, though not to the parents of many of my students in their own language.

Of course some of their celebration was mere adolescent joy at seeing authority not in total control. Of course, if I had asked, the vast majority of the kids wouldn’t have been able to give me a reasonable explanation as to the nuances of the verdict, and certainly not to the standard that would earn them a high at the school they were attending. But there’s part of the problem. I would be the one deciding the grade. I would get to decide if they’d succeed or fail. I had the power. The one thing in that memory that brings me an iota of comfort is that I didn’t exert power over their feelings. I just stood there flummoxed. That’s a start. 

I think it’s safe to say, from 25 years out, that the students of Chinquapin taught me much more than I taught them. A few of them learned Newton’s Laws, and a handful learned how to write a simple computer program. I know, because I’m still friendly with many of them on FB, that I made a positive contribution to some of their lives. But the raw truth is that those kids were witnesses to, and midwives of the death throes of my extended adolescence.  If the kids responded to me, it was because they saw the thing we had most in common was that I was a child, like them. 

I don’t have a summary. I can’t explain how angry I still am that those men and women, and their families, still have to fight for their dignity every day, in ways I’ll never experience. I’m not seeking validation or reassurance from any one of those students. You’ve already given me the honor of getting to know you as young people, and allowing me to continue to witness your lives in any small way you choose. 

I’ll just add this to the end. It’s a video from Houston today, and it’s emblematic of  the spirit of the kids I taught. Be safe. https://twitter.com/Mike_Hixenbaugh/status/1267901154601701376

(Content Warning: unreliable narrator)

I am certain that I saw Jaws in a movie theater, with my older brother, and my father. Except I’m not really certain, but I just looked it up and Jaws came out in 1975, and I would have only been five years old, and my brother eight, and my dad is among the best, most careful little c conservative men on the planet. So I couldn’t have. But I know I did. I remember freaking the fuck out at a certain point in the movie (we’ll get there), and I remember ducking my head behind the back of the chair in front of me. I remember the tilted floor of the theater. 

I know the movie was a huge event; the first summer blockbuster. Dad was a teacher, and definitely could have had off, and wanted to see it, and taken his kids along. It was just PG at the time (that’s all they had between G and R), and honestly, how the hell were people supposed to know just how freaking scary that movie was going to be. There had never been a movie like it. So maybe he took us. It doesn’t matter. In my mind, I was there. 

Probably my solid memories of the film are from some rewatch on HBO later into my pre-teen/teen years. I definitely saw Jaw 2 on HBO, and I have definite very strong opinions. One actress spends the second half of the movie screaming. Just screaming. Not complaining and saying “game over man” or anything like Bill Paxton does in Aliens. Just shrieking in a ear-puncturing register. Forever. I distinctly remember changing allegiance to the shark as that movie went on. But HBO movies are for a different day. 

Relatively early in the movie, the Chief takes the Scientist out at night to look for a missing fishing boat. Scientist gets geared up and goes underwater. His big hand-lantern’s light beam illuminates the wreck, and he approaches a great gaping wound in the wooden hull. He sees a reflection of his light amidst the dark of the crack, and approaches, removes a tool from his belt and starts working a white tooth loose). As he’s intent on his labors, as we’re focused tight BAM! the waterlogged, severed head of the fisherman jumps into the frame of his light and scares the bejeezus out of us all! I can still see that face in the darkness. That face is why they invented PG-13. 

We had a pool when I was growing up. Half of it was a nice little-kid friendly three-feet, but then it sloped off to the deep end, all of eight feet. Deep enough to dive, and a nice challenge for fetching things from its bottom during the warm summer days. But oh at night. When the low sun cast shadows, or worse, when the moon was the only light after a hot summer soccer game the deep end of that pool had its own soundtrack. A low thrum of menace. Duhhh-dun… Duh—dunnn…. It was almost bad enough to turn around, go inside, and take an actual shower. I was in high-school dammit.  I knew it was irrational. 

The thing about fear, it’s pre-rational. The ancient, animalian fear part of our brain mocks our fancy new frontal lobes.  So I’d hesitate there, at the far end of the pool, with my toes curled over the cool metal edge, gazing out toward the safe light of the kitchen; not down into the abyss. The longer I hesitated, the darker it would get, the faster the bassoons and basses would play in my head and my heart. Duh-dun, duh-dun, duh-dun, dh-dn…. Eventually I’d dive in with my best, shallow racing dive and swim like hell for the safety of the shallow end, stand up in the belly deep water, and whip around to check behind me, gasping for breath. Survived another day.