How much dog vomit in a purse is too much dog vomit in a purse?

In the late 70s and early 80s my aunt Peggy would occasionally  Taxi Jim and or I up for summer visits to our grandparents in Westport. She had a sporty little red two door Toyota Corolla, at least to my eight-year-old eyes. On the drive up we could stop at the Chestertown exit of the Northway, which had one of the last open Dairy Queens in our part of the state. That’s when I I started my addiction to the magnificent Peanut Buster Parfait. Described from the bottom to top: a layer of hot fudge then peanuts, then ice cream, repeat another layer of hot fudge, peanuts and more ice cream. Now one last layer of hot fudge, THEN a big twist of ice cream, and sprinkle more peanuts and fudge on top. It’s more than I should eat now, and more than I could eat then. As a 50-year-old man I know it has 720 cal and I’m OK with having to run the extra miles to earn it. As an eight-year-old boy I just knew it was the very best thing in the world.I love them so much that my mid-twenties, Jen Goetz drove one from Buffalo to Maryland packed in dry ice for me. It’s possible that the reason I still live in Texas is because every town in the state still has a DQ. But I digress.

Peggy adopted a shelter mutt who looked so much like the movie dog Benji and that it was weird. Soon after adopting Nikki, when we stopped at the Dairy Queen she would order him his very own small bowl of ice cream. Watching him happily slorp it up was an unabashedly joyful experience, as any bad pet owner will agree.

So now to be totally honest, I have to acknowledge that I’m not sure if Nikki barfed because we stopped and he got ice cream, or if it was just straight carsickness from a young dog. I may even be conflating two separate Nikki the dog memories. What definitely happened is that Jim was exercising big-brother rights to the front passenger seat, while I sat in the backseat, and Nikki was perched between the two seats. Suddenly Nikki  just horked a jet of puke between Jim‘s legs into the foot well where Peg’s purse was laying open to catch it. I can still hear Jim’s exclamation of surprise and disgust. I don’t really remember if we just pulled over or how Peg dealt with it. It’s possible there wasn’t even a mess in the car. The perfect view from the back of the dog puking is the indelible part.

I had just finished drawing blood on a patient at the VA hospital in Houston during my student clinical rotations, and I was looking at the back part of the needle, the part that actually goes into the tubes. Those tubes have a nice rubber top that gets punctured so the blood can flow into them, but the back of the needle apparatus has a blunt tipped safety protector. Baffled as to how that dull tip pushed through the stopper so easily, I reached out my gloved finger to see what material that tip was made of. 

And that’s how I spent six months scared I had Hepatitis C, which I thankfully do not. It turns out it is made of the thinnest rubber in the world. It’s basically a tiny condom for a needle. In this case for a needle full of another person’s blood. The tip punctured my glove and my fingertip like the tiny spear that it is.  I was standing in the hallway outside a patient’s room, having done just about the stupidest thing possible. I am not going to lie to you: I did not report the needle stick to my instructor because I was too embarrassed. I did everything else: I squeezed my finger to express blood, I washed my hands in antiseptic (a billion times), and got the labs run on myself and my patient to make sure I wasn’t going to die. 

I can still think about how that millisecond of stupidity could have ruined my life. The pit in my stomach comes back writing it down.

I have a non-functioning pool in my backyard here in Texas. I keep it covered year round. Every time it rains toads appear through a wormhole to party with each other. It’s a race between how fast I can get the water pumped off versus how fast they can croak out WhatsApp messages to the orgy. If I’m too late, I’ve got a week of wearing earplugs to sleep to drown out the bass notes of Club Freaky Toad. It’s either that or repeat the night I stomped around my backyard with my headlamp catching them and throwing them like baseballs over the back fence, but I’m not sure I want to explain that behavior to my neighborhood association or to g-d. 

The spring of ‘77, the year after we moved into the house on Braintree Street, my parents had to deal with uncovering a winter prepped pool for the first time. In New York the pool cover stayed in place through Memorial Day, accumulating rain and leaves. Despite their best efforts, I can see one corner of the cover slipping into the water contaminating everything with a season’s worth of detritus and tadpoles. I’m pretty sure I can still see their faces frozen in horror as they watched the escape into the pool. 

Soon after I had my first opportunity to observe the life cycle of toads as the pool gradually passed from tadpole nursery through baby toad daycare to concert venue for opera toads. The pool deck was biblical for a while.

The snowfield began to move. Despite our training hours in mountain safety and winter camping, half of the class had bunched together on this slope that’s beginning to slide underfoot…

The winter after I finished college, I used the money from my elementary school car accident to pay my tuition to a wilderness emergency medical technician course in upstate New Hampshire. My classmates were preparing to lead cross country bike trips, rafting expeditions, kayaking adventures up the Canadian coastline. At the time, I had an offer to work at Carlsbad Caverns. For a month my classmates and I spent our days in the classroom learning anatomy and first aid, or doing hands on practice of backcountry leadership, safety and wilderness rescue. Some afternoons we’d snowshoe out into the woods to perform search and rescue for our “injured“ classmates lying in the snow with pretend broken limbs, to bind and sled them back to safety. Is it wrong that my favorite parts of those days were the “energy cookies”, so filled with chocolate, m&m’s, nuts and fruit? Man, I love cookies. 

Near the end we hiked up a mountain, camped in handmade shelters for the night to put our winter survival skills to the test. Of all the beauty and wonder of that trip, one of the most indelible memories is Ted, the course coordinator, who seemed to us a “grizzled wilderness mountain guide“ but was in reality probably in his early 40s, trudging up the trail, like a machine. He was the living embodiment of the “I think I can” train or the  tortoise from the fable where it races the hare. He set out with a deliberate pace from the vans that never changed for the entirety of the hike to the summit, no matter how steep the slope or deep the snow. Us young pups took off into the snow and then exhausted ourselves. We’d rest and along would come Ted with his great big bushy beard and his mummy-like strides and gallumph past. We would gulp in more oxygen and take off after him, with our ears flopping behind us, once again too fast for our own good. Time and again it would happen, and each time Ted went about his business like he’d been hiking this snowy hill his whole life, which he had. It was enlightening and humiliating at the same time. Though we were too young and stupid to emulate him at the time, I can say in all truth that with every single road race I embody Ted’s philosophy, knowing that I’ll catch up to many of the younger runners who take off from the starting horn too fast.

At the summit, the group was standing on a snowfield near a cliff, taking in celebratory views of the White Mountains (both the name of the range and a literal description) when we set off the avalanche. Good news: the whole slab only moved about a foot. I’m not gonna lie though, that was a scary ass moment. After that vivid reminder of snow safety, we built our igloos before the sun set and temps plummeted into the negative numbers, and settled in for a night of breathing in our own exhaled moisture, getting dripped on by the melt/freezing ceiling, and peeing into our empty water bottles to avoid having to leave the igloo. In the morning we descended while classmates “broke their legs” periodically to further test our skills.

I just spent a couple of minutes semi-frantically rummaging through a packed closet, looking for a box of photos that I know I have somewhere behind another box behind another box. I’m not gonna find it, so I can’t post the picture of a tiny distant speck that is George Carlin performing on a stage in the West Gym of SUNY Binghamton. I’d like to show you the picture, and I’ll keep looking later, but I’ll try to describe why I want to find it in less than 1000 words.

I literally just finished watching Bill and Ted Face the Music. If you’re remotely a fan of the earlier movies then this is worth the money, unless you want to donate it to your favorite Democratic political candidate, which arguably is a better use for $20 if you have to choose between the two. Otherwise it’s exactly the sweet scoop of optimistic whipped-creamy hope that I personally think the world needs at this moment on a Friday night, trying to take a breath before the world does it’s thing again. I’m not a movie reviewer, I don’t really care if you like it. I liked it. Spoiler alert: George Carlin’s dead. Spoiler alert: they do a pretty good job homaging him a couple of times. Spoiler alert: watch all the way through the credits. (I know that’s not how spoiler alerts work).

George Carlin came to our campus to perform in 1989, which means it was either freshman or sophomore year. That practically guarantees that my seat was part of a block of tickets that probably took up a better part of a row. I believe strongly, if I don’t know for a fact, that half of the guys from my freshman floor would’ve been sitting within a few feet of me for that show. Those young men, who helped raise me in my last teenage months, were the funniest, most generous, most curious about each other guys in the world. No one who lived on Champlain 3E would nominate me as the official historian for that floor in that group. I missed a bunch. I’m not qualified to speak of all the amazing guys in all the amazing details and all the best stories that happened those years. My personal nomination would be Stuart Flamen, who is also the funniest of us. Guys would just pack into a dorm room and listen to Stu read Dave Barry columns. I had my head up my ass for a good portion of it, so Adam with his mohawk Mike O with his constant heavy metal guitar, Arnold and Michael, Mike and beautiful dear departed Rob, RA Mike P, Mark who smoked, Mark who ran, upperclassmen John and Andy, who lost the housing lottery and wound up on a freshman floor, but were subsequently worshiped as gods, Dan, and even my wonderful roommate Steven, were sometimes supporting cast in my own personal version of Say Anything. 

Seeing a hologram of George Carlin in a movie threw me back in time to seeing the real George on stage surrounded by many if not most of the young men of that hall.  I can remember sharing meals, days, nights, classes, church masses, high holiday fasts, alcohol, and most importantly laughter. I choked up when I saw George on the screen, and I’m choking up composing this. I am a part of a generation of men that does not tell other men that they love them, and that is one of the only ways in which I am deprived, but gentlemen if you lived with me on a long hallway in Vestal New, York at the end of the 80s, or in a house at the beginning of the 90s know that I love you as honestly and fully as I know how. I loved you then, and I hope I showed it in every way I could.

I never had a “cool” cartoon or movie character lunchbox. I was a brown-bagger for most of elementary school, but for a while I had a Tupperware one with its own strappy-foldy handle. I thought it was neat, but really it yelled “give me a wedgie please.” I was a pretty consistent PBJ kid, but had to buy milk. The lunch-lady window (or was it a cart?) was in the corner, to the right of the stage in the cafetorium. 
When I first started school, I kept my seven cents for a milk in a blue-colored leather coin wallet. One of those Boy Scout craft-project ones with the plastic ribbon through the holes. I liked chocolate. I recall quite a stir when the price went to ten cents. By the time a milk cost fifteen cents, I was old enough to want two of them. The real glory of double-milk money was that I could afford to skip the milk completely and afford the twenty-five cent coconut-covered, red twinkie called a Zinger.

I prefer to think of myself as a rational man. I want to think of myself as a person who does not bear a grudge. When someone errs I can learn to understand it, and forgive it. I believe most mistakes to be earnest misunderstandings or brief moments of carelessness, not malice. Oh, this is true most of the time, unless of course you activate my biggest irrational phobia.

Unless one tired night I get ready for bed and fold down the covers to find a pair of scissors glinting its open blades at me, metallically, hungrily. Then, oh wife, you are doomed to years, nay decades, of being reminded of the one time you absentmindedly did that thing. It’s not fair, I know.

To be clear, I did not lie down in bed and accidentally castrate myself, like I imagined. I did not jump into bed and have the scissor points bounce up in the air and puncture my femoral artery, or my kidney. The edge of the scissors did not slip between two fingers and slice at the web spaces, as the tape-loop of my mind constantly plays. You do not think knives and scissors are secretly plotting against you. That is me. This is my dread, not yours. You were merely a fatigued medical resident who opened a package and got distracted; at least you made the bed.

You are not the clumsy handyman who stabs himself with the tiny screwdriver every time you pry out the button battery. It was not you who once trapped your face under the sharp pokey part of a chain link fence. Edward Scissorhands is not your body-horror, but mine. You’re the one who could watch all the way through Dead Again. I am the one who mentally grasps the blade of every knife each time I make a salad, in a loop in some doubly embarrassing space between phobia and fetish. 

It is I who grasps the blade, over and over, and you are the one who gets cut. When my brain loops and snarls, the knife that slices the kink is held facing away, pointing at the closest person to me. 

Forgive me, my love. Forgive me, please, but, also, remember that I am insane, and dearly need you to stop leaving knives in the sink.

For those who don’t know, the Chinqaupin School, where I taught from ‘94-’98 was a boarding school, and almost all of the faculty lived on campus. Most of us lived in a row of houses/duplexes on the east side of campus. The teachers were also my neighbors, and many of them had dogs. Three stand out in my memory:

Quincy was the Wade family’s basset hound. Whether pulling the children behind him with his leash or waddling freely from yard to yard, that dog had confidence and attitude. He lounged like a lion, and could stare at you with the nonchalance of a mobster in a police interrogation. The confidence of an animal who routinely stepped on its own ears was an indictment of my need to seek approval from others. That dog did not give a fuck. He rarely worked up enough energy to make noise, but when he did, his nose would point at the sky and he could channel the moving tectonic plates through his throat. The school was located not far from an oil refinery; I suspect their emergency siren was envious. 

Janet Johnson arrived in ‘95 with a Dalmatian named Casey. Casey was more a bag of energy and neuroticism than a dog, but I’m told that’s true of the breed. Watching it sprint after a ball or frisbee at the end of the day was freedom itself. Janet would let it out, and it would suddenly just APPEAR across campus at a dead run, heading for some friendly student. If you’ve successfully imagined the sloth of Quincy, this dog was the complete inverse. If it did not actually have special dietary needs and prescription dog-shampoo, it’s the kind of dog that could have. 

Jeff took over the Physics teaching duties when I stopped teaching in ‘97, and he moved into the downstairs level of the duplex. Jarrett and LaShelle had my old place on the top level, and I had the shiny new trailer. We all shared the washer/dryer around back of their place. Not long after arriving Jeff took in a stray or rescue demon. It was an act of compassion and charity that I admire, but did not appreciate. Sloop was part rottweiler and part Minotaur. Because it had developed a habit of destroying items of clothing, and possibly furniture, when left alone in that small apartment, Jeff left it harnessed up to a tree in the yard. The length was sufficient to let it roam, but that meant it was just capable of blocking the pathway to the laundry room. I developed a knack for distracting Sloop with a thrown ball or apple and rushing by before it recovered. The first real bonding experience I had with Jarrett was discussing the shared experience of coming out of the laundry room at night having forgotten Sloop’s existence, only to have a snarling monster in my face as I came around the corner. The underwear in the basket may have been clean, but…

Jarrett reminds me that the Bartholomes had a dog, but I don’t remember that one very well. Possibly because it was a normal dog, not a budding reality-TV star like the others.

In this fallen world there are few perfect things. Baseball pitchers and fans speak of the perfect game. Musicians are impressed by perfect pitch. Princess Buttercup had perfect breasts (according to Westley in the Princess Bride). I for one believe the most perfect thing in the world is a raspberry.

There are other nice things, great things: A peach, a sunrise. New shoes before school. A grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Love. All are fine, in their proper time.

Perfect however, is not subjective, not open for debate. Perfect is:

Perfect it’s a pint of bright red, newly rinsed berries in a bowl on the kitchen island. It is the way time and peace flow and crystallize as the berries disappear into my mouth and gently stain my fingers as my mom and I talk about nothing. I ask her “Why do people take drugs when raspberries make you feel this good?”

Perfect is the fluffy peek of meringue on top of a huge slice of fresh raspberry cream pie. The recipe is my grandmother’s. The pie is love and tradition and comfort and support and laughter and memory baked into physical form. It feeds my mouth and heart, and disappears to crumbs and memory and longing, the way all perfect things fill you and leave you empty with their transience. 

Perfect is the berry that grows from the gangly bush on the bank of the river I am kayaking. Hanging high over the curve of the water, almost literally tantalizing, but reachable by the mouth of a person in a low boat willing to paddle against a current. It explodes juicily in my mouth, and my friends and I continue downstream under the shade of the trees, looking for more berries, or more moments like this one.

I received an award for diving while I was in college. It was titled “Highest and Farthest”; I believe I was being mocked.

We had a PE requirement when I was at college at SUNY-Binghamton. I don’t know why, or if they still do at Binghamton University. I’m guessing we had to have a yearly credit for Physical Education, because I remember three classes, and I got credit for playing JV soccer my first year.

I had the one vanilla credit under my belt for continuing a sport I’d been playing for a decade, and since I continued to play intramural football and joined the Outdoors club to hike and rock climb, I had no shortage of ways to stay active. I decided to sample the entire menu when it came to the other classes. I took the aforementioned “Springboard Diving”, one semester of Taekwondo (it might have been Karate), and the most fun was “Running to Awareness”.

In my diving class we learned how to dive off a springboard. The concentration was on combining poise and power on the board, control in the air and ending with a smooth entry into the water. I think we can all agree that the only noun in the previous sentence that I embody might be “power”. What I do best  is energy and enthusiasm, and so while my pike-position was never graceful, my altitude was apparently quite impressive. I am more of a ballistic diver than a precision one. On one particularly memorable day I was attempting a one and a half somersault flip; while I got nowhere near one and a half flips I got very very close to the far edge of the diving pool. At the end of the semester I received the paper certificate from my teacher memorializing the event.

One of the faculty or staff was a black belt in karate, and effectively combined a PE credit with marketing for the dojo of his sensei. I know there’s a difference between Karate and Taekwondo, but I don’t know which one we took.  In yet another class precision body control was the key to proper kata technique performance and so, once again, I was not good (see above). I was, and still am pretty flexible compared to most men, so at least I have that going for me. I got my yellow belt as part of my final exam. Because that class was held in a dance studio on campus, the men and women taking ballet or modern dance in the classes before and after ours were far more impressive than any of us.

By far the most enjoyable of the PE classes I took was “Running to Awareness“, taught by the head track coach on campus. He was a really laid-back hippie type, who combined meditation techniques and running. Twice a week we would get together and run around or off campus.  While there was some physical training, it really was like going for a half-hour jog  with The Dude, from Big Lebowski. It was so much fun, that one of the women (a friend of Jenny Grella Winters) in the class drew a custom T-shirt for it, and we all bought copies.  It is one of the tragic losses of my life but I do not know where that shirt went. That class is also where I met Christie Nolan Papa, who would become the wife of Jim Papa .

One last memory PE memory, but not from one of my classes: my diving instructor also taught a yoga class. Jennifer Goetz-Bixby and Bill Church took the class in the same semester. Jen took it very seriously, and it launched her yoga hobby, which she very well may still be continuing. Bill Church was famous for taking a nap on his yoga mat most classes. I believe they both earned a PE credit.