As the 1980’s began, Roessleville Elementary school hired a longterm substitute music teacher. She was young and pretty, and she wrote out the words to pop songs that we would learn to sing in class. I sat in the second row, on the right, so my good ear was towards the rest of the class. She would smile at me when I sang loudly.

That is why my wife is staring at me as we drive down the road, her mouth agape: After forty years, I have just accompanied Bette Midler, line for line, through every verse and note of “The Rose.”

The first time I saw a bald eagle, it was perched high in a tree, overlooking the Jefferson Memorial, the cherry trees, and a gargantuan bronze sculpture of a figure erupting from the earth; forced to liberate itself, since Jefferson had neglected to do so.

Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld fantasy novels, once witnessed the spectacle of an American tourist lugging a huge piece of tartan checkered luggage through the airport. As it seemed to have a life of its own, he was inspired to provide one of the characters with a sentient magical trunk known as “The Luggage“. Across a half dozen novels, the Luggage accompanied it’s protagonist across the world, and heaven and hell. It carried infinite amounts of stuff, occasionally attacked and ate enemies, and fell in love with another piece of luggage.

For my 18th birthday my Aunt Peg took me to the American Tourister shop in the Colonie Center, to buy my going away to college Luggage. She gave me some guidance but left the choice largely up to me, which is how I wound up leaving the store with a three-piece set of space gray nylon bags with bright yellow piping and zippers. From this distance I can now see that my luggage was designed to look like Buck Rogers took them on his honeymoon.

There was a hanging clothes bag, a small medium duffel, and a huge duffel bag that is the closest thing I had to the luggage. Along the sides of the big bag were three huge pouch pockets large enough to pack my clock radio when I went to and from school. The big bag carried an entire dresser’s worth of clothing, and took up half of my trunk of my car all by itself.

It flew halfway around the world with me to New Zealand, and it waited faithfully in a locker at the Auckland Airport for eight weeks while I backpacked the length of the country. It suffered its first wound when the point of my ice axe punched through its hide en route back to America. After that, it’s zipper ripped from being overstuffed in my move to Texas. Its duct taped patch job made it seem more and more like the Giving Tree, until like the clueless young man of the book, I asked it for too much. 

I don’t remember if it was made explicit or not when Peg bought me the luggage, but I knew I was being given tools I was encouraged and expected to use for adventures. Go places, do things! I’ve tried to honor those gifts my family has given, and continues to give me. 

P.S. I  still have the little bag. It’s retired, living in my attic, swaddling the climbing gear I haven’t used in twenty years. 

There is a reason that my phone rings to Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo of Eruption when my brother Jim calls. Memories of Van Halen are inseparable from memories of brotherhood. Jim had a Van Halen poster on the bulletin board next to his bed, right next to a poster of a slam dunking Julius “Dr. J” Erving. The Van Halen logo was one of the last things I saw every night, and one of the first things each morning when I opened my eyes. Early memories of Van Halen involve a portable eight track tape player with Jim at Grafton Park beach. 

Van Halen was cool because Jim thought they were cool and Jim had unquestionably good taste. The only reason I can draw the Van Halen logo is because I thought doing so would impress my big brother. I wouldn’t be surprised if  “And the Cradle Will Rock” wasn’t the first track touched by the needle on teenage Jim’s new stereo. Thankfully there are no pictures of elementary school Kevin air guitaring to their music. 

Eddie Van Halen, was, possibly along with soccer player Pele, probably the first person that young Kevin could name as a virtuoso. I couldn’t have told you what made him the best guitarist, but I would have told you he was. I had no clue what obsessive practice would have gone into that excellence. I don’t have the gene that pushes me to explore improvement at any cost. My character is tuned to look down deep into the dark tunnel of greatness, and go get a snack. I admire the Eddie’s, the Pele’s, the Jim’s, the Dr. J’s of the world immensely. 

Like every other teenage boy I knew, I watched the little kid version of Eddie and band mates embody Hot for Teacher on MTV. By the time Van Halen put out 5150, named after Eddie’s desire to make music more to his own vision, I was listening to music more to my own taste, and I lost track of his work. 

As I stepped out of the dark theater into the waning sun-light over Hannover, New Hampshire’s town square, I had Tom Hanks on my mind, and a need to get back to my campsite in time to cook some food before full darkness. In contrast with the just watched Forrest Gump stumbling into the center stage of American history, I was squatting in a nature preserve south of town, isolated and lonely, living in the wings of my own life.

I would be teaching high school in Texas in the fall, but that summer I was doing contract work repairing and inspecting ropes courses throughout New England. Three years earlier, I’d worn my interviewing clothes as I walked through the doors of the beautiful Georgian-style brick buildings of Dartmouth to interview as a Ph.D student in Physics, and chatted with a professor about black hole physics. All that netted me was a passing knowledge of the good vegetarian restaurants in town, and a renewed love for Dr. Suess, who’d gotten his start as a cartoonist for the campus newspaper. Maybe some of Suess’s irreverence for institutional learning had rubbed off on me as well, but Dartmouth wasn’t going to let me in either way. 

Now my worldly possessions fit into my two-door Pontiac, and the only bed I slept in that summer was while inspecting the course at a summer camp, which was a two day gig. That luxurious night was still a few weeks away when I walked to my car, and drove away, after using the payphone in the town square. My nearest friends were a three hour drive away, and I don’t remember who I called. 

Driving out of town felt like setting out from port into the ocean, like I was starting my thousand mile journey to Texas, and not just a few miles away. I was living one strange day at a time that summer, never knowing how I would feel when I woke up. The dry pine needles on the ground made for a noisy but acceptable carpet for my Megamid open tent, and a pouch of Lipton Noodles cooks on a camp stove just fine. 

If I’ve done my math correctly, the only time I ever watched my grandfather climb a tree, he was over sixty years old. He and my grandma, cousins Billy and Brad Band, and I were on a walk in the hills surrounding their house in Westport. It must have been summer, and the trees would have been blocking the light and cooling the path as we wandered up the trail, such as it was. We came to a section of smaller trees, with trunks just a few inches across. Young trees, growing fast and thin, racing each other towards the light. He wanted to show us something he’d learned to do as a boy, and pass it down the generations. He walked from tree to tree, touching trunks, evaluating them with the experience of an Eagle Scout with a degree in Forestry. When he found one that suited, Gramp shimmied up, more like climbing a rope than a tree, using what few branches there were for extra grip. He climbed up two-three-maybe four times his height, as the tree trunk flexed. All eyes were on him, which means I can only speculate upon the look on my grandmother’s face. Would it have been the same look of joy and amazement that I felt? Would her eyes have been full of worry, her body as strained as the tree, watching her husband of forty years, with his polio-weakened leg, acting like a fool boy? At some point, his six-feet, one-hundred-seventy-five pounds exceeded the forces keeping the tree upright and the canopy began to lean towards the earth. He added to it’s tilt, by leaning his spidery frame out, away from the trunk. As it bowed more and more toward the ground, he descended back to terra firma, letting his feet hit the ground. He smiled as he let go of the trunk, sending it catapulting back towards equilibrium and verticality. “Who’s next?” 

We all were.

If you haven’t seen it, this guy isn’t doing it right 🙂

CW: death.

The boy was sixteen, and his body had been sitting in the little glass trauma room for six hours. He’d been at a big family reunion at a nearby lake-recreation area. By nearby, I mean a 45 minute ambulance ride to the rural emergency room where I was training. The exhausted EMTs had done their duty and performed CPR the entire way back, but over the radio during the trip they’d been telling us they already knew it was too late. It was too late by the time they got there, because the lake was also a 45 minute ride before the ambulance got to him in the first place. Someone in the family had brought a four wheel ATV and the kid finished up lunch and drove it off away up a nearby hill. His whole family saw him hit the rock that flipped the ATV backwards on top of him. It was too late by the time the adults got to him. 

When he got to us at our little hospital, our job was to clean him up for the family. I helped take out the breathing tube and IV. My doc had a son just a couple years older than this boy. After his parents had said their goodbyes they agreed to donate his tissue and organs. Unfortunately the extended ambulance time without a pulse made his heart and organs non-viable. Later someone came for the tendons in his knees. The technician who came down from the city for his corneas let me assist. He delicately removed the tissue from the surface of that boy’s eyes with a scalpel and used tweezers to place the cloudy circles into the little cups I held as steady as I could.

I’m not sure what amazes me more: that through all the sadness, it felt so cool to help, or that cool as it was, I felt so sad.  It’s been almost 20 years so there’s no way I can claim to remember many details about this kid with clarity. I remember the fracture in the back of his skull, and I remember his eyes.

The Ground Round restaurant was a fast-casual dining eatery long before I ever heard of Chili’s or Applebee’s.  It was a very popular place for big groups. It had baskets of peanuts in the shell and, for some reason, old timey black-and-white cartoons projected onto screens. It was tolerant of high school kids, and a popular hangout after games and dances. I don’t remember what night of the week they had $.10 wings, or if it was a seasonal promotion, but one night myself and Rick Miller and some others (were you there Dan Montuori? Were you there Jim Papa? Were you there Sean Barnhart? Were you there Ralph Coon?) attempted to complete the calorie 10k, having read that a single chicken wing was about 100 calories. That would be 100 wings, and only ten dollars. It was an epic struggle, that I, for one failed. I think one of us ate over 70, but I don’t remember who it was. Like the wings themselves, the memory is powerful and bold, and makes my eyes water a little bit. 

We were standing in the court house, dressed for a wedding. I offered to marry her right then and there, but Michele turned me down. It was an understandable ”no” on her part, and I think the lady on the other side of the bullet-proof glass agreed with her decision, too.

Early summer in the year of our wedding, my friend Bill Church got married in the New Hampshire mountains, and Michele and I flew up from Texas to attend. Driving the rental car up from the airport to the venue the night we arrived, I forgot how to drive on curvy New England roads and failed to yield properly, avoiding an accident only because the other driver avoided me. I was blissfully unaware until the woo-woo lights came on behind me. When the officer asked the usual “Do you know why I pulled you over?” I answered “I honestly have no idea.” To my horror, she then told me what I’d done, asked me if I had been drinking (nope), and asked for my license and registration (rental car). When she came back a minute later she increased my horror further with the words “Did you know your license is expired?” Noooooooo, I screamed with my brain. “No ma’am” I said quietly with my face-mouth. It had expired on my birthday. Five years from my birthdate (May) of the year I got my Texas license, not five years from the date (August) I got my license. 

Driving without a license turned my traffic ticket into a misdemeanor crime, with mandatory appearance before a judge. I was told that failure to appear would lead to all sorts of horrible things, but really all I could hear was the pounding of my heartbeat by that point. I explained exactly how far away I would be, so the very nice officer set my date so I could go the Monday after the wedding before we flew back to Texas, leaving us with “you better let her drive the rest of the weekend.” 

Despite the shaky start, the weekend was wonderful. Bill took the wedding party rock climbing, and the best man, Jon Aurnou, gave a speech that included flip-charts. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. The wedding wasn’t far from where I’d done my winter wilderness medicine course, and I took Michele to buy her first pile jacket. Well, technically she took me, since I wasn’t allowed to drive.

Since the only decent clothes we’d brought with us were for the wedding, we were by far the most overdressed people in the courtroom the next day. I stuttered my apologies to the judge, and he ordered me to pay a fine, and send a copy of my renewed license to the court within 90 days. I stuttered my thanks, and we headed down the 4th floor hallway of the Pawnee City Hall. We had to pass the marriage license department on the way to the cashier, so I really did ask her if she wanted to get married. She thought about it for a few seconds, before turning me down, making me wait another ten long weeks. 

In the heyday of my high school soccer career, when I might have defined myself primarily as a “soccer player”, my soccer bag would have contained the following items. 

A pair of Adidas Samba indoor soccer shoes with their translucent tan, ornately patterned soles. Most likely I wore those to the game as my travel shoe, even if the event was outdoors on grass. They were my one admittedly conscious fashion choice. Other kids might wear Adidas slippers, but I didn’t care for the look. Adidas molded cleats. Their rolo candy shaped nubs gave good all around grip. I’d buy them half-size smaller than my shoe size every year, put them on and submerge my feet in water, to stretch. The tight fit was supposed to give me better ball feel and control. I probably should have just practiced more to achieve that. A pair of Puma brand screw-in cleats. They came with a hex wrench to install or replace the longer harder studs. They were for wet grass and soft turf, but imagining spiking someone made me feel tough. They were rarely used, but often fondled as part of the fall pre-game preparation. Shin guards with their pull-up stirrup ankle support, and plastic tongue depressor inserts, in case someone scraped me with their Puma screw-in cleats. Finally, a roll of cloth tape to hold up my socks. I’d pull the tough uniform cotton sock up over my knee and wrap a ring of tape around, just below the knee. A fold down of the sock to get a nice, crisp cuff. 

The small duffle itself was red canvas with white nylon strap handles. It contained the tools for each weather contingency and field condition, but it was more than a toolbag.

In retrospect, the bag embodied it’s own model world. It functioned as a Tardis or Wardrobe to Narnia, containing a space much larger than it’s mere dimension.  As I prepped the bag the night prior or opened it immediately before a game, it was a stadium in which I could travel in time, playing the game in miniature. Checking each item, another time each match, I enacted a ritual that cleaved a soccer game into what I could control, and what I could not. I could control only my feet and legs, and nothing beyond that. My teammates, my opponents, the weather might be modeled or influenced, but I could not command them. They were all beyond me. They were outside the bag.