Tacking out from shore into Lake Champlain against the wind in a sailboat for the first time was a challenge, no matter how many times I had calculated vectors in physics class. The diagrams didn’t include the chop of the waves, the feeling of the spray in my face, or trying to keep my balance in a small boat while my aunt and uncle did most of the work.

There’s some amazing physics going on in a sailboat: between the sail, the rudder and the keel, the forces can work such that a boat can actually go faster into the wind than it can with the wind behind it. It’s hard enough to understand when you’re looking at math and arrows; I don’t have the skills to do it with just words. Math and physics are comforts for a mind like mine when I’m experiencing something new.I don’t have any experience in sailboats other than this story, if you don’t count tours of Old Ironsides or the Halfmoon. Despite a lot of time in and on and around water, it’s all been motorized or self paddled. The wind isn’t usually such a collaborator in deciding speed and direction. 

My brother attended the Naval Academy which had its own flotilla of sailboats. They trained him to sail before he started academic classes, the same way they trained him to march and salute. As an aside, one family reunion, my uncle rented a waterskiing boat but didn’t want to drive all day. Like any good uncle, he double-checked if Jim knew how to drive a boat. Jim’s somewhat bruised ego response was to remind my uncle that he had steered naval vessels.

Uncle Bill and Peggy took me out in that ten-foot sunfish type boat a few years back.  While I viscerally recall the “excitement“ and “trepidation“ of the trip out of the bay, returning back to shore with the wind behind us was really a sublime and eye-opening experience. The boat and the wind and waves all move together  at exactly the same speed, so everything glides, still and silent. When you’re far enough out from sure there are no real landmarks that parallax so you move so much more quickly than you perceive. Something very similar happens sometimes when I am on a bike ride, and the wind is following.  I feel so powerful, skilled, and efficient. 

That’s one way I think about privilege. Everything lines up behind me, with no resistance or spray back in my face. I get to move straight towards safety, and I feel stronger than am. The route feels smooth, and I never even noticed the wind at my back.

I received the first of my pair of bowling trophies when I was just six or seven years old. Jim’s Cub Scout troop was participating in a charity bowl-a-thon. I think they got people to pledge money for every pin. That’s the first time I remember bowling. I’m old enough that they didn’t have ramps to aim or gutter-bumpers to protect my feelings. I bowled a ONE. My mom, or someone, awarded me a tiny little trophy, probably not much bigger than a plastic toy army man. In retrospect, I suspect that I was miserable and frustrated 19 of the 20 times I double-armed the ball down the lane, but I don’t really remember. That trophy, and the retelling of its story, ensured that I remember the day as a good one, however I might have felt when it happened. 

The second trophy was for a slightly better performance. I was in a Saturday morning youth bowling league at Sunset Lanes for a year or two in elementary school. I have fond memories of being driven to and from bowling by a friend’s older brother. Most of what I know about the bands Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd came from David Hughes’s eight-track player. Near the end of the season the league held a “high-low“ tournament. All the players were ranked by average and a top player and a bottom bowler were paired as teammates, and their scores were combined. Through a combination of coincidence and someone’s sense of humor, Jim and I were a team. I was barely a three digit bowler and on the day, I think I bowled 126. Jim’s average was over 150 (he had his own ball) but I don’t know how good. He also had an exceptional day. I know at one point in his “career” he pulled over a 200, but I don’t know if it was our tournament day or not. We combined victorious, and won a matching pair of winners’ trophies. It was the only non-academic first place trophy I received until a running medal in my forties. 

Despite the pride of place those trophies held on my bookshelf as a child, my first place team trophy has been lost to the intervening 40 years. I can not speak to the location of Jim’s.

Disclaimer: There are some amazing medical writers (I grew up reading the Vital Signs medical column in Discover Magazine), and I really admire their work. During my medical career, I have had countless moments where wonderful, funny, poignant, meaningful or just plain horrible things happened with patients. They are important memories, and some could make good stories, but patient privacy is an incredibly  meaningful moral and legal concept. Since I post these stories to Facebook, and I have a few local friends who were also patients or patient-parents, I want to be crystal clear that I will NEVER write, nor do I tell people, what we talk about in the privacy of an exam room. The story below took place decades ago, and I have removed as much information as I could. If, despite these steps, my sharing a story about a patient makes you personally uncomfortable, please let me know. The trust that every single patient I have ever cared for has extended to me is honestly the most valuable gift I’ve received. 

We are trained that as part of the medical note the chief complaint is supposed to be “a succinct statement of the problem ‘in the patient’s own words’“. One of the saddest chief complaints I’ve ever written down in a medical record is “I just want my dog to come back“.

I had an urgent care job that was frequently as much psychiatric care as it was for physical problems. Like much minor or urgent care work, my job was to deal with problems that at least one medical professional had already judged as “not serious“ or “not worth a doctor’s time.” The man I was seeing whose words I am quoting had several issues with anger and substances. He had a hard life, with few bright spots. His truest companion was his dog. His favorite thing to do was to sit on his porch with his dog, drink a beer, and smoke a cigar. One very bad day, he had fought with his wife, and in anger, he kicked his dog. The dog ran away in fear, and disappeared for a few days. The next time he saw the dog, it had been taken in by a neighbor across the street. He felt terrible. Guilt, anger, shame, I would imagine. He told me that now he had to sit on his front porch, drink his beer, smoke a cigar and look at the dog that wouldn’t come near him again. He knew he needed help, but didn’t know what kind of help he needed or could get when we met each other.

We talked for a while, and discussed medication and therapy options. He was lukewarm about both. He knew what he wanted, but had no real sense of how to do the work it would take to get it. It was professionally frustrating for the young me, and so profoundly sad. The last thing I remember him saying to me was “I’m not apologizing to that dog. I’ve got my pride.”

The waiting room and office that I remember best is from my dentist. Dr. McMahon‘s office was a converted 50s era house on Western Avenue in Albany. It was a corner lot, with a couple of concrete steps up to the front door, which entered into the waiting room. It had thick 60s shag carpeting and shiny green Naugahyde sofas as soon as you walked in. I would sit at the coffee table and look at the Highlights magazines that other kids had completed. During the short wait I couldn’t help but listen to the cheesy cheesy 50s pop-chorus music coming over the speaker. That music, I must confess, has done more to shape my musical tastes than I am comfortable admitting. I love a cheesy light listening harmony vocals deep down in a way that I’ve only ever seen in the Brendon Fraser character in the movie Blast from the Past. How do you wind up having nostalgia for something you disdain as a child. From what was clearly the house’s original parlor/living room you could go to the repurposed kitchen/reception area or off to the right was the main dental exam room, which must have been a lovely master bedroom, with it’s windows on two walls. It’s spacious floorspace had room for the x-ray arm and the torture chair with a little tiny spit sink. I sat in that chair every six months from before I could remember until I finished college.

There was a smaller darker (it probably only had one window) secondary dental chair room down the hall, but I was only in it once. He pulled two of my teeth in. I didn’t like that room.

I went to the eye doctor a lot, but the only thing I have to say about Dr. Kassoff was that he always seemed to be running an hour or more late. I hated that. One time it was closer to two hours and my mom actually gave him and the office staff a telling off. That didn’t change anything. I think the biggest difference between Dr. McMahon‘s office and Dr. Kassoff’s was that there was something about the dentist office that acknowledged you were a person while you were there. Part of it was that it was a house, I suspect. That was lacking in Dr. Kassoff’s office. It felt like I, and the other patients, were unimportant ghosts while we were there. There’s a scene early in the movie Beetlejuice when Alec Baldwin and Gina Davis are checking into the netherworld and they’re just sitting in a DMV like waiting room to be processed. That’s the way the eye doctors office felt.

I had a doctor’s appointment today, which got me thinking about waiting rooms and offices I have known as a patient. I don’t remember my pediatrician’s office much, because I only went once a year, if that often. It’s possible I only went when I had shots. In my professional experience most kids complete the bulk of their visits to my office when they reach age 4. I just realized that means most of them won’t remember me. That’s a bittersweet thing.

My childhood closet was six foot long slanted space created by two sliding doors meeting the angle of the low ceiling. It was probably only 5 feet high at most but for some reason the darkness emanated from that closet like a pit of hell. Like all children I was afraid that something would jump out of the closet at me. Well into late elementary school, I was nervous every time I reached  in to grab something off a hanger, fearful something would reach from the deeper darkness beyond the halloween costumes and grab me back. 

In college, I was taking a  friend to task one day about how defensive and withholding he seemed to be with his girlfriend, and he rebuffed me saying  some version of “I have a vault. It’s where I keep my scary self. I’m not letting her in there.”  I’m pretty sure he described it as a basement that he wasn’t going to let her down into, but I heard it as a deep dark closet in my head. 

The back bedroom closet of the duplex in Athens in ‘04  was one long wall covered in louver doors. I would love to paint my wife as a stereotype, and a good fraction of that closet was filled with her stuff, but I hadn’t done much purging myself.  Our frequent moves for work made for a lot of piles, and those doors hid a lot of sins. One evening while we were watching TV in the living room, we heard an incredibly loud cascading ruckus, such as Santa Claus would make if he fell down a chimney out of  the fireplace and overturned the bookshelves.  With our adrenaline spiking, we ran into the bedroom, to see who was breaking in, to find that the central support point of the hanging closet bars had torn free of the wall, and our clothes being actively vomited out into the bedroom. We watched, stunned, as the last of the shirt-a-lanches came to rest on top of our bed.

I’ve always thought that most people who are afraid to show others their “dark secrets” are more afraid of seeing themselves. They seem to push things down deep and fear what will happen if they “let it out“. In my experience when people keep things bottled up and cluttered up and secret, eventually the central pillar rips free and it spills out all over their lives.

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This post was vaguely inspired by the “A Problem Squared” podcast. It features a mathematician and a comedian giving advice/answering questions. Episode 2 has them experimenting on “the most efficient way” to store shirts.

I was four years old when my Oma, my mother’s grandmother died, and my family considered me too young to go to the funeral. They left me for the day in the care of my grandmother’s next-door neighbors, the Hoskins. Their youngest was two years older than me, but the rest of the kids and the family ranged up to teenagers. A group of us went on a “hike“ up nearby Poke-o-Moonshine Mountain in the Adirondacks. The hike is basically a long gradual ramp that ends in a cliff face drop-off with an impressive view out of the folded land to the east. I have only snippets of memory of the path, sunlight through trees, the tall legs of the giant people in the group, and being carried at times by some of the girls. It is a thing I know I did from family stories, and a few sparks in my neurons. I think I fell asleep on the ride home, if not the hike back to the car. 

My senior year in college saw a return to Poke-o-Moonshine; this time to try the vertical face. Mark Mancao and Tim (I’m so embarrassed that his name is escaping me), and Bill Church and I drove up from Binghamton. Bill and I attempted a supposedly easy route up the sheer cliff, doomed by immediate failure on my part. Bill danced his way up to the first perch 100-plus feet off the ground and set the first anchor with the intention of belaying me to him, but I literally could not get past the first 15 feet of the climb, which was the most complicated section of the cliff.  I struggled and scrambled and kicked and cursed. I tried every way I could imagine, or Bill could yell out, to overcome that challenge, but ultimately let myself down. This led to me literally having to let him down. Unfortunately, he was so high on the wall that we had to tie two ropes together, and he had to leave an expensive piece of climbing equipment jammed in a crack to descend safely.  The phrase “leave someone hanging” takes on an entirely new meaning while watching your partner problem-solve their way down off a rock face while you watch helplessly. We hiked back to find Mark and Tim enjoyed a restful morning in the woods.  

We stopped at my grandparents house, and they fed us the kind of delicious grandma cooked meal you dream about when after months of noodles. On the drive home the guys lovingly teased me at my ability to juggle two completely different conversations with each grandparent at the same time.