I’m tired today, and don’t have a lot of energy for memory-mining. As I was flopping around for something to write about, the phrase “phone it in” came to mind. 

• My parents, despite moving to Texas almost a decade ago, decided to keep the home phone number I grew up with, so people could still find them. It’s now connected to a retired iPhone, and gets mostly spam calls. But if you still remember my phone number from high-school, you can call my parents.
• I had a pager at some point. I don’t know why. It would have been 1994-95, at most. I was a boarding school teacher. I can’t imagine why I had a pager, but I did. 
• My first cell phone was a TeleTac 200 or 250. Looking at the pictures, I can’t tell. I got my phone in ‘95 and the 250 was new that year. I might have got the coolest gadget I could as my first phone, but I don’t know. It was a thick grey brick. It was for “emergencies” in my car, when I drove to and from Houston from my teaching job. Did it have a memory speed-dial? If so, Michele’s phone number must have been in there at some point. Remember monitoring your minutes? At one point 200 minutes seemed like a lot, and then it didn’t. Now I don’t think I could talk on a phone for 3-½ hours a month to win a bet. 
• I think my next phone was a Nokia 3310. It had a plug-in external earpiece and microphone. It was the only “cool” phone I bought until I joined the iPhone cult as soon as the iPhone 3g launched in 2008. Between those were a series of uninspired phones that kept changing when we moved for jobs between 2003 &  2005. Remember when moving cities would change who your cell phone carrier would be?

Michele and I were married in mid-August 1999, and honeymooned in the Pacific Northwest. My mentor Rosemary Sebastian, whom, to my great shame, I have lost touch with, pointed us towards a charming set of cabins about an hour up the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. To her great credit, Rosemary made sure that we were very, very aware that the gorgeous river-view came at a cost, but not a financial one. The cost was auditory: the amazing rustic, A-frame, split-log cabin was sandwiched between the water and the train tracks, less than one-hundred feet away. Their website now boldly announces “Whistle free as of March 2016”, but it sure wasn’t when we were there. Instead of mints on the pillows, they had earplugs. If you’ve seen the movie “My Cousin Vinnie”, then you’ve seen our honeymoon video. Having said that, we were warned, before, during and after we booked the place. I have always thought of it as one of a series of marvellous metaphors for marriage. You tell yourself what you’re getting, and you think you understand, but you don’t.

Our days in Stevenson, Washington (the north side of Columbia River is WA, the south is OR), coincided with the county fair. On a lovely cool night, we wandered the fairgrounds, and watched the crowds. My favorite part of any fair is always the 4-H barns, and the kids of Skamia County didn’t disappoint. I saw the biggest, fluffiest bunnies in my life! What really popped the top off the cute-o-meter that night was standing there with my wife watching two baby goats butt heads. They couldn’t have been much bigger than my cat, with round nubbins on their crowns. They stood, braced forehead to forehead, with their little legs trembling, whether out of fatigue or youth, I could never decide. If that’s not also a metaphor for my life with Michele, I don’t know what is. 

Michele has a fascination with boats and water that either makes no sense or perfect sense for a woman raised in landlocked San Antonio. On our travels, we have never met a body of water she didn’t want to kayak, canoe, row, be towed or peddle-boat upon, Since she took swimming lessons two years ago, we can now add, snorkel, swim, float, and, I assume someday, scuba. Our honeymoon cabin had a two-person kayak whose siren-song led us out on the water on a lovely evening. We paddled a while towards the setting sun. How well do you know Western State geography? Which way do the rivers flow? Ding-Ding-Ding! West, towards the sunset. When we turned around we discovered that the “first half” of the trip gave way to the “hard nine-tenths” of the trip back. We ground our way, inch by inch, back up the shoreline as the last of the day-glow turned into the first of the “Jaws in the deep end of the pool” darkness. We finished, sweaty, and frustrated, and taking it out on eachother. This story has no marriage metaphor at all. I swear.

Can you remember what a Defender joystick feels like in the palm of your hand? Or  the inertia of the control-wheel for a game of Tempest? I think I could identify the exact sound of the extra five tokens you get from putting a five dollar bill into Aladdin‘s Castle vending machine. The tokens were bronze colored, but I can’t recall if they were perfectly round or, as I think, slightly octagonal to distinguish them from quarters in the machine.

So many memories of arcades are blends instead of discreet, because for lots of boys my age, we went as often as we could get away with it. I’m not sure what are from my own senses versus TV or movies, and now nostalgic recreations of arcades on TV and movies. I know that “my arcade“, the aforementioned Aladdin‘s Castle, was a dark windowless shop in the Colonie Center mall. It was dark or black and low lit, mostly from the cabinets in an unimaginatively laid out square lining three walls. The banks of games in the middle maximized the floor space for efficient money removal. Even though eventually it would be eclipsed by the much grander arcade at the new Crossgates Mall, I honestly can’t remember anything except that it was bigger. By the time Crossgates was a destination, I had “outgrown” the arcade as the cool place to be in the mall.

When I look online at the dates of the “golden age” games I played, it’s clear that most of my arcade game memories are from before I finished junior high. That means that the formative friends of my youth: James, Danny, Ralph, and Adam post-date these memories. Only Rick Miller might have been an arcade buddy. He did live near the mall, and we might have been able to walk there, though I can’t remember if my parents would have let me bike to his house at that age?

The arcade cabinet was probably the first place I was able to project my mind into where I could shape the reality, where my choices mattered. Even books, TV, and movies, no matter how much they engage the imagination, could give me such a sense of agency the way five minutes of Star Castle did. I also think there might have been something perfect about the size of a classic arcade cabinet to me. The box was big but not intimidating to a 10 or 11-year-old boy. Standing there in front of it, it seemed like the right button combination could open it up to an entire universe inside, like a Narnian wardrobe. 

(It’s a complete coincidence that the lead character in the movie Tron is named Kevin Flynn.)

I still play. I have an Xbox, and a Switch that keep me connected with friends and family during our weekly games of Minecraft or Rocket League. There are brilliant games, like Red Dead Redemption or Inside that are as artfully beautiful as great movies. The Dark Souls games push the limits of my physical abilities as much as any workout ever has. There are games, like Animal Crossing, that are just plain relaxing after a tough day. Games like Fortnight or Minecraft keep me engaged with the worlds of the kids I care for at work. I’m actually surprised at how many parents say they don’t play or understand the games their kids play. It’s odd to realize that most people in my generation let go of video games the way they gave up baseball or football; as activities for young people. I expect that I will be hitting the A button or the right trigger on a controller at a time when I can no longer remember how to take care of my own bodily functions.

The human immune system has a default programming of “tightly wound”. If it doesn’t recognize something, it tries to kill it. It doesn’t bother asking detailed questions, and it only bothers to get to know it at all, so it can identify and kill it even quicker the next time. It’s an elegant system, mostly. Someday, our bodies will immediately recognize COVID as it enters our nose or eye, and destroy the virus before it gets past the front line, because we’ve been exposed to it either through illness or vaccine. Sometimes this system of defense doesn’t work. It’s either too lazy, and it fails to protect us, or it’s too aggressive and attacks things it shouldn’t, like our own thyroid or joints. 

Sometimes, our body throws a big panic-attack about benign things like cat hair, oak pollen, or egg whites. It dials “911” when my next-door neighbor mows the yard, and every immune cell in my body races towards my eyes and nose, like cops that have just heard an “officer down” squawk over the radio. When I was growing up in New York, my mom always referred to this as getting my “Summer Cold”, as the flowers bloomed and the grass grew. It was a minor annoyance. 

When I moved to Texas, I was beset by allergies to everything, from the moment I arrived. I took a job on a lovely green, grassy campus, and lived in a house dwarfed by the wonderful oak tree that shaded it. Every verdant plant I could see or smell shot tiny sneeze-producing spores at my face year round. One particular morning in my first fall, I was teaching pre-algebra to the eighth-graders (Chinquapin ‘99), when my face began to leak. I started a sentence and sneezed, and continued teaching and sniffled, and continued to talk and snarfled, and tried to keep going and snorted, and wiped my nose where I could and snotted, and turned to write on the board and SMEARED A STREAK OF BOOGERY SLIME BEHIND THE CHALKED EQUATION LIKE SOME SORT OF OOZE MONSTER. 

You know how everyone supposedly has an anxiety dream about getting up in front of a room and realizing they’re not wearing pants? This was worse. I would have happily dropped my pants then and there if it could have made me wake up underneath the pollen tree, instead of having to turn around to meet the eyes of the harshest, most jaded, cynical mean girls (and boys) that school had. I’d only been teaching a few weeks! 

(A brief aside. Here now, comes an interesting test of a person’s innate narcissism. Often, we remember our “worst moments” and no-one else who was there has any recollection at all, indicating that we are our own worst narrators, and blow things out of proportion. Through Facebook, I am still in touch with several members of that class, including Eddie DelaTorre. If the ridiculous good luck I cling to holds, none of them noticed or remember. If they do, then it really was as bad as I recall it being).

That day, that moment, I decided that I would have to quit my job and leave Texas, or go see a doctor for medical help, because if I may paraphrase,  I vowed, as G-d as my witness, I would never smear snot on a chalkboard again. I was able to see a local allergist fairly quickly, who promptly put me on a powerful new antihistamine, which worked wonderfully, but did enough damage to my liver that my primary care doctor lectured me sternly on the dangers of being a binge-drinking alcoholic. We stopped that medicine, so I could continue binge-drinking alcohol (I’m kidding), and started allergy shots, in which a small amount of everything that makes my itch was injected into me weekly in an attempt to make me give up and move back to New York. My main side effects of regular allergy shots were pain and a face that frequently looked red and stupid and embarrassed. The injections were fine, but the nurse who gave them to me was pretty and young, and I was socially inept and tried to ask her out. I got shots for an awkward three years after that.

I’ve always thought of my experience with allergies, medicines, and shots to be quite symbolic of a more general human experience. So many of us are bothered, or legitimately debilitated, by “little things” that cause us to wildly overreact compared to the actual threat. The intellectual knowledge that peanut dust isn’t anthrax does nothing to reduce the emergency need for benadryl or an epinephrine shot. If you don’t have access to them, you’re wrecked. I had to go to the doctor’s office every Friday for half a year, then gradually stretch the visit interval out. I had the time, money and schedule freedom, as a teacher, to compliantly complete the plan. And to remind you, that plan was to regularly expose myself to small, safe amounts of something my body was erroneously convinced was potentially deadly. So many people I know aren’t as lucky, even if what they’re facing isn’t actually dangerous, just vexing. Their finances, schedules, commitments to care for others, and lack of access to resources keep them from receiving the help they need to thrive and survive. I’m obviously talking about more than allergies now.

I came to with the touch of light rain on my face and the sound of dad’s voice, calling my name. The view was straight up into the cloudy sky. I was strapped in a gurney wearing a collar, and was quickly loaded into an ambulance, and I don’t recall if my dad was with me for the ride, since he was also strapped to a gurney, hurt slightly worse than me. 

I spent most of the  80’s playing with Village Youth Soccer Club, and that weekend day in 1982 started off with the same plan, despite the weather. I dressed in my red and gold uniform and filled my Pizza Hut™ jug with ice and water, and watched the rain stop and start, wondering if a canceling call would come. It did not, so dad loaded me into our brown Ford Escort™ wagon for the drive out to Guilderland or Niskayuna for the game. When the rain intensified, or the thunder rolled in, the decision was made to cancel the day’s game. That’s the last thing I remember until the rain on my face and the sound of dad’s voice.

I can identify the intersection where it happened, now, because my family would mention it when we’d drive by later, and during occasional commutes to the area. I believe we were stopped at a red light at the bottom of a slight hill.  The young woman’s car hydroplaned through the intersection when she hit the slick watery pool and slammed into us. This is all per reports by people whose memories weren’t swatted away when their forehead cracked a pane of auto-glass. 

Because it was 1982, there was not a mandatory seatbelt law. Because I was not wearing a seatbelt, my reflex was to throw my right arm up to shield my face. Because the right arm of a twelve year old boy is exponentially weaker than a spinning car, my wrist broke but kept me from eating a windshield. 

I got another trip to the ER, setting one of my few superstitious patterns, which was breaking a bone at age nine, twelve, fifteen (we’ll get there). “Luckily” I broke that curse when I took the golf-ball to my mouth at age sixteen (see Jim Papa – you actually broke the curse – I am deeply sorry it traumatized you). I got a cast, a couple of stitches, and a summer banishment from the swimming pool. 

The tight confines of the small, economic Ford Escort™ meant my dad’s kneecap broke when it dislodged the center console.  During his hospital stay and surgery, my aunt and uncle, Peggy and Mike Coryea, took me fishing. Mike shared the picture recently, but I can’t find it. It’s of a mopey kid in a canoe with sutures above his left eye. I won’t speak for my dad, but thinking about this now makes me think that he and I “learned” different lessons from that accident. As an adult, it must have been one more thing he couldn’t protect me from, deepening the anxiety that parenting brings. One price of protecting your child is their increasing sense of invulnerability. 

As a kid, this would be just another mishap, some worse than others, from which I would recover with a few scars, and a good story. I have a little PTSD when I’m in a car in heavy rain, but otherwise unscathed. We got a small insurance settlement to compensate for the medical bills. As a minor, “my” settlement went into a trust that I couldn’t touch until I was eighteen. Ten years after the paramedics loaded me into an ambulance, it paid for my Wilderness EMT course, the beginning of my medical career.

Somewhere in western North Carolina, there is a facility for mentally handicapped people where I spent a day volunteering. Somewhere near there is a park or nature preserve where we went afterwards. Somewhere in there is a creek where our Outward Bound group did our “solo”. Somewhere along that creek is where I turned downed branches and leaves into a shelter for those three-days and two-nights. Somewhere up the creek from that shelter is an overhanging rock I shaded under for the hot part of the day.

I sat and wrote sappy poems in my journal, and sappy letters to a girlfriend.I ate all the figs that first night, and didn’t have anything sweet to eat for the next 36 hours. I spent a considerable amount of time wishing I’d had more figs. I spent a morning watching flying insects couple in mid-air and flutter down to the surface of a rock to make more flying insects. I refrained from doing David Attenborough-like voice over, because we weren’t supposed to talk. Despite that,  I made up a song and sang it to the setting sun. 

I crept along the rocky bank of the creek looking at every detail. I found a section of blue granite with lovely white crystal streaks. I collected a golf-ball sized piece that hung from my keychain for twenty years. I used to lick that rock occasionally because it tasted like the water from that stream.

Sometimes people, mostly on TV, say “Go to your happy place” or “Find your quiet place”. That’s mine. I couldn’t find that place again, even with google maps, but I would recognize it in a second.

I had a “girlfriend” briefly in first grade, whatever that meant. I think she gave me her animal shaped eraser as a symbol of our deepening relationship. I liked her enough that I lied to the teacher about how bad my vision (or hearing) was, so I could move up to the front row of the class, next to L. Her house was so far away it was on a different bus route, which to a six year old might as well be a different country. How were two six-year olds supposed to get some quality time together?

Well, my brother was in cub scouts, and for at least one scout season (I don’t know the terms; even at that age I found the uniforms and ritual a little off-putting) I would take a different bus to the den mother’s (I know that’s correct) house after school and hang out there with her son J, while Jim and his hive made lanyards, or whatever. I didn’t pay attention unless it was wooden race-car week. 

My “girlfriend” lived on the same bus route as J and his mom. One week, while we were an item, we hatched a plan to be together after school. The route went down Dott Ave, until a cross-street, stopped to let kids off, then turned back up Arcadia past her house/stop, and then moved on to other neighborhoods. She and I sat together on the bus: I had the window, she had the isle. Maybe she was granting me the gift of the window view for this strange new adventure, but probably so she was on the side of my good ear. 

In my experience modern six year olds don’t demonstrate good communication or planning skills, and I don’t suppose that’s a recent phenomenon. I thought I would get off at the turn as usual, drop off my stuff at J’s and walk down the street to her house. She must have thought the plan was for me to get off the bus with her at her house, because when we reached “my” stop, I stood up, and she just sat there, looking up at me, her knees blocking my progress out. I can’t recall if I said anything, or just gawked at her dumbfounded, but it wasn’t long before the driver closed the door and restarted the bus.

I don’t remember anything but the emotion of abject terror as the bus started moving; maybe some vague sense of betrayal. What I definitely remember is jog-weeping down the street towards J’s, the white nylon straps of my backpack cutting into my shoulders after getting off the bus at “her” stop up the next street. 

I am pretty sure that was the end of our relationship. I know we’re not still together.

(Names have been redacted to protect the innocent)

I was a physics major in college. That meant I treasured the rare slots in my schedule to take humanities electives. I only double-dipped one professor. Well two. One was a literature professor, Constance Coiner. I had to drop her British Lit class during Quantum Mechanics, but made a point  to register for the next class she was teaching. That’s how I wound up taking Multicultural American Women Writers. If that sounds like a joke, bite me. It was an amazing opportunity, and I treasure the authors I read in that class. I got so mad at the book Storming Heaven, that she gave me an F on the paper, and asked if I was OK.  Professor Coiner died when TWA Flight 800 blew up in 1996. She was taking her daughter to see Paris. 

William Haver taught history. I loved his medieval Japanese history class so much I literally begged him to allow me to use my last elective hours to take his senior seminar on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That was the entire class. We spent sixteen weeks talking about one morning. Of course that’s not true. We talked about everything that led up to and from that singular event.

He let me and Bill Church in, even though we weren’t history students, because we offered to explain the science on the bomb. We brought radioactive material ang geiger counters to one class. Clearly he let us in because we were passionate enough to plead, when we could have taken basket weaving for the credit. I worked harder in that class than I did in any other class my senior year, because I cared more about being in that seat than I did any other room senior year. We read the poetry of Japanese men with radiation burns on their body, trying to come to grips with the devastation of their homes. He introduced us to the guilt of the survivors who remained haunted by the deaths of their families, because there were no bodies to mourn over and bury. I think of that daily now, as so many people in America, including my wife, could not attend funerals of their friends and family, for fear of perpetuating COVID by gathering together to perform the rituals.

During a class when I was disputing another student’s opinion about an Italian Communist whose name I don’t remember, Prof. Haver interrupted to debate me. The ninety seconds I spent with my ideas under his scrutiny that night changed the course of my career. I reached out to thank him a few years ago, and that he remembered who I was after twenty years is one of the sweet joys of my life.

One day in the elementary school Cafetorium, I got really engrossed with the way a packet of ketchup flexed when I twisted it. The little spiral-pinch was fascinating. I kept twisting it to watch it get narrower and narrower. After a certain number of twists, the pressure build up caused a seam to burst and shoot a stream of ketchup most of the length of the table. I never saw the lunch lady coming. Noone believed that it was an accident. 

In junior high or so, Jeff Tomaso and his dad took me to a minor league baseball game.  I can’t remember if they were the A’s or Yankees at that point; they switched names more often than Diddy. I got a slice of pizza and then covered it with the white powdery substance in the shaker. Jeff’s dad wanted to know why I was putting coffee creamer all over my pizza. I told him I really liked it that way, instead of admitting that I had mistaken it for grated parmesan cheese. 

Jen & Bryce Bixby, and Michele and I went to Chicago to spend a weekend with Marsha and Brian. It had been years since we got to see each other, and part of the ceremony of the weekend get together was each couple cooking a meal. Marsha and Brian were out briefly for a social function while Michele and I made Chicken Mole. Mole is a mixture of Mexican spices that is hard to explain, but wonderful. Marsha and Brian keep kosher, and during the preparation, we accidentally unkoshered their kitchen. They were incredibly gracious when they discovered it upon arriving home, but I felt so sick and ashamed that I basically didn’t talk to Marsha for almost five years. When she found out that was the reason we had lost touch, she tried to climb through the phone to kill me.  

My wife prefers to cook from scratch, even when she’s coming at something totally new. She thinks it makes dining more meaningful. When we were first dating, she wanted to introduce me to one of  her favorite home cooked meals. As a busy medical student, thinking it would save time as well as enhance the flavor, she added the chopped jalapeno peppers into the soaking dried beans – for 24 hours. Neither one of us remembers much else about that meal, besides searing pain. Twice.

On a trip back to Houston, we met up with old friends Beth & Scott Phillips at a Red Robin, and had a wonderful chance to reconnect, before heading home. Michele and I both had the Blue Cheese Buffalo Burger. Later that night, we knelt side by side together in the bathroom, taking turns throwing up and praying to die. Blue cheese is dead to me now.

The first song I ever learned was probably “Frere Jacque” or “The Itsy-bitsy spider”.

The first time I heard a song and felt like it was just for me was “The Rainbow Connection”. 

The first time I heard AC/DC’s Back in Black I was ten. My cousin Mike got in trouble for singing the word “bitch” out loud in front of my Aunt Mary during “What Do You Do For Money”. 

Linda Ronstadt was belting out “Hurt So Bad” from a car stereo the first time I was moved by someone’s voice. I was sitting in the lap of a friend’s teenage sister in an overcrowded car and she was singing along.

 There are memories that only songs can reach. Some events are welded so deeply to a song that it’s easier to sing them.

It’s dark in my room on Saturday night, in the fall of tenth grade year. The wood paneling of my ceiling glows in the light of the digits on my clock as it plays Madonna’s aching voice. “Crazy for You” is a cloud of sound that I float upon, allowing me to turn onto my side and look through the window to the outside world, feeling excluded. Through her words I am able to name my sadness for the first time. Not just aloneness, but loneliness. I have good friends, best friends, with whom I can share pleasures and interests, but no-one yet I feel safe to confide in. I’ve never wanted to be unguarded before. I want love for the first time. Not just a girl’s attention or a kiss or a brush of a boob, or whatever coup I am supposed to count as a teenage boy. I’m not even in love with any one girl. I’m in love with every girl; any girl (editor’s note – of conventional teenage beauty standards). I’ve got a crush on being in love. The singer’s vulnerability shames me. It’s a start. It is the first trade between a boy’s life and a man’s.

I’ve heard “On Eagles Wings” countless times in church. The song is one of the most frequently sung songs at mass my entire life. It’s simple to play and sing, and sing along with. It’s quiet and meditative and until today it’s meaning is limited to knowing that as soon as it ends, communion is over and donuts or bagels are just on the other side of parish announcements. At this moment, it’s being played at Nana’s funeral mass, which is my first funeral mass, and for the first time in my life I need to be borne up by G-d. I’ve made it to seventeen without a meaningful loss, but today I feel the weight of loss, after years of shelter. My own hollowness is enough to tighten my throat, but my family’s grief presses against me in strange ways. The song’s words aren’t quite as trite and cliche, and I can’t push the tears back into my eyes. It might be the first time I pray.

My wife is in residency, and she’s struggling. Her program is jerking her around, and changes the rules of success every time she gets close. The music of Colin Hay, from the eighties band Men at Work has reentered our orbit through an appearance on Scrubs, a show about the struggles of medical residents, laser guided at my wife. On bad days she drives out of the city and listens to music to decompress the screaming she can’t do at work. Today she invites me along. She needs me to hear the song “Waiting For My Real Life to Begin”. It starts with “any minute now…” and he sings her thoughts “soon…soon…oh so very soon” as she cries, aching to be free of these hoops, so she can become the only thing she’s ever wanted to be. Colin accuses me of saying “be still my love” and “be here now” and she is smiling as she cries, because Colin hears her and I do not. He raises up her unimaginable pain in his song, as I beg her to let it go. He has known her all her life; I have only three years as her husband. I don’t understand, but I am at her side as she realizes that she is not alone. That is enough.