Mad-Lib:
MOVIE TITLE: Lord of the Ring’s: Return of the King
RELATIVE: Mother-in-Law
RESTAURANT: Bennigan’s
MEAL: Monte Cristo sandwich

One Saturday, Michele and I drove into San Antonio and picked my RELATIVE. We were taking my RELATIVE to see MOVIE TITLE, even though she hadn’t seen the prior movies. The theater was on Loop 410, and the nearest fast casual dining was RESTAURANT. At one point, sitting there beside my wife, eating a MEAL, I remember thinking about how surreal my life was sometimes.

Because MOVIE TITLE was such a big deal, Lilia wanted to see it. My RELATIVE had an adventurous spirit, inside a tiny, well mannered, disciplined persona. She had a wonderful escapist streak that movies and TV helped fill. Because he didn’t drive, the only time she saw something on the big screen was when one of her kids brought her. Her husband, like all husbands of a certain age, by law, was not allowed to remain awake in a movie theater.

I’m pretty sure she said she enjoyed MOVIE TITLE, but I don’t remember any details about that particular showing. Possibly because I had already seen it in the theater, and seen MOVIE TITLE a dozen times or more since. Another reason is that ever since I accidentally took my RELATIVE to see The Forty Year-old Virgin, which I instantly regretted, a few years later, I had to wipe all my memories of taking her to movies.

One night in the early eighties, dad turned the family car (I think it was our Ford Escort) down our street, just arriving back home after a weekend visit to one of the grandparents, to find the road blocked by police and fire trucks. They were fighting an ongoing house fire in our neighborhood. We were close enough to see the glow of flames down the street, but not able to tell whose house, or if it could be ours (dear reader, it was not ours). The tension and uncertainty in the car lasted just long enough, that it imprinted itself onto my brain forever. 

From that day forward, every time we went away overnight, I would crane my head to catch the very first glimpse of the house through the windshield, to reassure myself that my house hadn’t burned down. 

That particular phobia and ritual occurs to this very day. Now as I take the right turn onto my street, and my house comes into view as I come up the twisty hill, I say to myself, and sometimes out loud, “Oh good. The house didn’t burn down.”

Michelle Yuroschuck and I took a six week fencing class through a learning extension catalog in the winter of, I wanna say ‘86. It was at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institue, and it must’ve just been through their intramural fencing club. Our moms took turns driving us. We got to wear the face guards and practice the poses and lunges and parries. Honestly, I think it was mostly stretching.

The only specific and vivid memory happened during the entire course, was our “final” night when we had one actual face-to-face fencing match against another student opponent. We put on the full gear. The guy I was facing kept getting so excited that rather than the fancy lunge poke that you’re supposed to do he kept swinging his sword excitedly. He was so out of control that he whacked me on my ass –  twice! Those foils are basically quarter inch thick car antennas. I had marks on my left hip for days after. I remember how badly it hurt both times, and when it happened the second time I lost my shit and yelled at him to knock it off and calm the hell down.

Technically I won the bout.

Ralph Coon and I were in his car (his dad’s car?) during what must have been the summer of 1988. I don’t remember where we were going, but I feel like we were heading down Western Avenue, so maybe mini golf. It was daylight, and we were just two high school buddies spending time together before going off to college. Maybe it was the following summer and we were catching back up. I really wish I could remember because it impacts how embarrassing the next part is (a little). 

The radio was playing, and then “Never Gonna Give You Up” came on. We started jamming out and singing it at the top of our lungs. No irony. Just two nerdy white boys (one of whom shared Rick’s red hair) belting out, and doing the white overbite dance moves from the video. 

I remember joy and freedom and friendship. Just two dudes bopping down the road with radio blasting out. 

This might be a complete misremembering of almost the same thing happening to “Lean on Me” by Club Nouveau. 

Either way, it made me really recognize myself in the scene from Wayne’s World when Garth & Wayne sang Bohemian Rhapsody.

WARNING: This is not a good memory.

It takes place on Christmas Eve, but it’s not a jolly thing. Or even a melancholy Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” memory. It’s a terrible and grisly one:

Michele was driving us home, because it was late, and my night vision isn’t great, especially in cities. In the overbright lights from strip-mall store signs, my depth perception gets bad. We weren’t more than ten minutes from Michele’s parents’ house, not long after I-410 shot us out onto US90 to head east toward home, when Michele swerved  in an attempt to avoid the body laying in the road. The person’s body. 

Our SUV was big enough that I honestly don’t know if we issed it completely or not. Michele pulled over to the shoulder as quickly as possible, but we passed two cars already stopped.  Exiting the car I noticed how dark it was for the first time. There were no lights on the stretch of road other than the distant houses and bodegas below the embankment of the road. Walking (running?) back along the shoulder, we passed an intact car that had pulled over, and a minivan with a sickeningly shaped hood dent. That driver was sitting in their car, “in shock” as they say on TV.. 

Another few yards down the road, a body was stretched out in the near lane, but it might as well have been a mile away. The only light on the road was headlights from oncoming traffic, barreling down at the same sixty-plus miles an hour we had been doing minutes before. I stood watch as cars swerved at the last minute as the shadow appeared in those headlights, until one didn’t. The corpse (definitely now) ragdolled a few more feet in the direction of my home. The only light I had was my phone I and another man spent a few desperate minutes moving towards the next rounds of oncoming cars, waving wildly in the hopes of slowing them down. I was scared someone would swerve too wildly and hit another car, but just as worried they would head onto the shoulder, where we were.  

Finally, someone came to a stop in the road, blinkers on, which dammed the flow of potential carnage in the near lane. For all that, it meant that people were now changing lanes to swerve around an unexplained stoppage, which still left a dangerous few minutes until the first police car arrived with flashing lights. As more police and emergency personnel came to the scene the aura of chaotic danger receded into merely numb horror at what we had witnessed. 

An officer took our statements and information, and gave us a business card. We sat for a while and Michele started to drive for home. Not long after, another officer called my iPhone to ask why we’d left. There had been confusion about if we’d been given permission or told to stay. I can honestly say I have no idea. I offered to return, but as the first car on the scene had actually witnessed the accident, we were superfluous, I guess. 

I watched the news for the next week, and finally saw a small article in the paper that said a man had been crossing from his neighborhood to the local store for snacks or beer or smokes and been hit. It was apparently a well known danger of that stretch of road.

There are lights on the part of the highway now, but still no pedestrian under/overpass for a mile in either direction. I clench up every time we drive home from my in-laws house, even though it was a decade ago.

I HAD a Rubik’s cube back in the eighties; it was required by law. I could solve one side and get the corners on all the sides, but that’s where I fizzled out. I even bought a book, but either it didn’t make sense, or it was too much work, and I never progressed. One time, I blindly followed the steps to get the cube solved, then I left it alone on a shelf. 

I can solve one now. A couple years ago, my cousin Nate asked me if I could solve one. We were chatting during a videogame night, and they were coming back in vogue. He’d figured it was the kind of thing I’d have learned to do. I had to admit my shortcoming, but was immediately spurred to resume the challenge. I bought one, but somehow got sent two, so I have one for home and one for work. I did what anyone does to learn a new skill these days: I googled a tutorial. I don’t find the videos helpful because the perspective is wrong. If I can’t see the cube in my hands, I can’t understand the instructions. There’s a pretty standard set of moves that you can learn to solve one in between 2-3 minutes. I won’t claim to understand what I’m doing spatially; it’s just pattern recognition and repetition, like memorizing state capitals or digits of pi. When I get a step wrong I have to start over at the very beginning, as opposed to really undoing my error. Still, it’s a comforting, tactile ritual that takes me out of my head into a very specific brain-space, much like a rosary, strangely enough. 

To get faster than two-minutes you have to move to a better understanding of how moving the piece you’re looking at affects all the other pieces with each turn and/or memorize a lot more potential move patterns. Each time I’ve considered doing that, I realize that I’m just not motivated to improve beyond my existing level. If YOU are interested, here’s a video of your competition.

Fried chicken does not remind me of my mother. My family has lots of cooking traditions, but frying chicken is not one of them. Shake ‘n’ Bake doesn’t count. Therefore my boyhood experiences with fried chicken involved the occasional KFC. 

Some comfort foods come to us later in life. The first time I had homemade fried chicken, it was cooked for me by a wonderful elderly lady who was hosting me at her house in Glen Rose, Texas. I lived with her and her husband for several months during PA school. Their home was within literal walking distance of the hospital, which made nights, weekends and emergency calls much better for me. Her husband was in poor health, and I think having young, healthy, medically knowledgeable guests made her feel safer. 

Not long after I arrived, she served me a meal that I still savor. She fried some chicken strips in a cast iron pan on her stove top, which is kind of like saying Michelangelo painted a ceiling one time. I don’t know how to describe it except in antonym: once I cooked a steak by stabbing a bunch of holes in it with a fork, and sticking it under the broiler for ten minutes. It was like eating part of a scuba suit. So whatever the opposite of that is, is what eating her chicken was. It tasted like fifty plus years of experience and love improving a technique learned at the elbow of someone named “meemaw.”

For those culminating months of learning before I graduated, my job was to eat and sleep medicine at this small hospital. I literally knew every doctor and surgeon in the town, and I had the opportunity to participate in every interesting thing that happened there. It was exhausting in the best way, but it was exhausting. That mid-century house, with the nice lady in the housecoat, was the place for a few hours to sleep, and shower, and recharge. Her chicken, and oh my g-d her okra(!), were a refuel to both spirit and body.

Nineteen years ago, I was already seeing patients when news of the plane crash (or crashes) reached the Lane Murray Prison Unit, where I worked. Did someone roll a TV cart out so I could watch, or was that what happened on every show and movie about the day? I can honestly say I no longer remember what images I saw “live” and what I’ve seen since, over and over, year after year. The memories are TV memories. I remember that despite the fact that we were literally behind concrete and barbed wire, the sense of fear and vulnerability pervaded the place quickly. Like many places all over the country, a rumor started quickly that we too could be a potential target, just miles from a large military base. The minds of most people quickly turned to justifying our fears with a facade of reason. I remember going about my day seeing patients “as usual”, out of either numbness or recognition that there was nothing else I could do. Today, the internet was filled with middle-aged white men reminiscing about how calm and reasonable they were that day; that makes me suspect my own recollection. 

I know I was not a victim, despite how “9/11 changed everything.” No one I know well died or was hurt. Unlike my relatives, I was not grounded in a city unable to be with my family. I did not leave Manhattan Island on foot towards my home. Though I was shaken and scared, and uncertain about the future, I will not lay claim to having suffered. Not when people died, or were hurt in explosions and crashes. Not when people were sickened or injured while rescuing, investigating, cleaning, or repairing or rebuilding those places. Not when people got beaten, or shot, or threatened, or called names, for looking “like terrorists”. Not when military men and women, the enemies they fought, and the people upon whose homelands they warred, were thrown into a chaotic blender or harm. 

I hope that nothing changed for me on 9/11. I trust I was just determined to find my own place of compassion for other people’s pain before that day as after, but I suspect I was not.  If not, then I pray that I redouble the effort to become so, and try to live up to my own standard daily. 

On this 9/11, my coworkers and I spent three hours discussing COVID. We’re trying to help children and the adults that care for them cope with a paired problem: the risks of COVID and the fear of COVID. I’m grappling with how often people confuse danger with fear, and how little it matters that I perceive those as different. Many do not, or can not. In my own moments of fatigue and self-pity, I feel “victimized” by their confusion, and my inability to reduce their sense of that danger, fear, or confusion. 

I want to analogize 9/11 to COVID, but I won’t. Doing so warps the personal trauma of so many people. I see similarities in how people are reacting though.

Every word I typed after that sentence failed…

She was my height. That meant looking in her eyes before I kissed her felt natural, as we stood in my driveway. 

We had spent the afternoon at my house. We went for a swim. Part of the time we talked in my bedroom, my hormones pounding. Now, in the dusty gravel we waited for her mom to come and take her away, standing side by side. Soon, only a letter would close the distance. I don’t remember who leaned in first, closed the last few inches. I remember the taste of braces.

My first kiss. It would be over a year before I looked into another pair of eyes.

On the drive back from Thatcher Park we would head down route 85 through Slingerlands. There was a little shop named Toll Gate Ice Cream, that sold ice-cream and those stick candies of all flavors. I remember that place fondly for a couple reasons.  The obvious one is that sometimes we would stop and get ice cream. It had excellent handmade ice-cream  that you could point to sitting in the 5 gallon buckets, long before we’d ever heard of Ben & Jerry’s or Marble Slab. I liked their black raspberry.

What my dad and my brother and I really loved about the place was a story of our own invention about the surrounding buildings. I’ll give credit to my dad for it, although it could’ve been any of us. Tucked way back on the lot behind the ice-cream place, there was another building, almost hiding from the street. This was a little town, but the building back there always seemed like way more cars parked outside this little ice cream place than made sense. To “explain” why the crowd was there my dad hatched the theory that it must be a secret meeting place for Russian spies. None of us ever believed that; it was just a cool story that made us smile. But from that day forward, while we were getting into the car to leave Thatcher Park and head home, or sometimes even when we were making plans on a Saturday morning to go to Thatcher Park for part of the day, my dad could suggest in a cheesy Russian accent “we can drive by the secret base and look for Russians.“ 

Even if we didn’t stop for ice cream that day, it would be a cool moment that would break up the “long” half our drive out to the park or back. Google Maps says Toll Gate Ice Cream is closed, and the street view shows it overgrowing with ivy.