If you’ve ever had a cast removed, or seen one removed I suppose, you’ll recognize that evil looking hand saw they use to cut it off. It doesn’t actually spin around in a circle like something Dr. Frankenstein used to take the top of heads off. Instead it just vibrates back-and-forth, and that’s enough to cut into a cast, especially an old timey plaster cast. I know that now, but there was no convincing nine-year-old me of that. I was already worked up by the look of the thing and the motor sound before the doctor even touched the cast, but by the time he got to my ankle bone it definitely felt like he was trying to cut my foot off. I howled and bucked, and I don’t remember if somebody had to hold me down, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

The main thing I take away from that is how much expectation shapes an experience. I was convinced having my cast removed was gonna hurt and I did. This happens to kids all the time. They are convinced a shot will hurt or touching their armpits or belly will tickle, so it does. Sometimes a shot hurts for a good 10 minutes BEFORE they get it. When that happens, there’s not much anyone can do to talk a kid out of that anticipatory pain. Occasionally I can distract them by getting them laughing for a couple minutes, but many of those kids return right back to worrying or crying as soon as they’re out of the moment. Afterwards, the arm or leg they got the shot in doesn’t function properly, just because they’ve convinced themselves. 

Of course sometimes things do just plain hurt. For most of my career, when I took a cast off I demonstrated that the saw doesn’t hurt by pushing up against my hand while it’s running, showing the kid it doesn’t cut me. One day the screw on the blade was a little loose, and the edge of the saw was a little bent. I held the saw up against the heel of my hand and it drew blood. Since hand and finger cuts are one of my weird phobias, I’m pretty proud about how calmly I turned away, put a Band-Aid on my hand up and went back to convince that kid that it wasn’t going to be a problem. I don’t remember if he howled and bucked. 

My first date with Michele was also my first date with Scott Phillips, which should have been awkward for all of us. In their defense, this problem was entirely of my making. I had gone to church that morning intending to ask Scott to come see musician Ellis Paul with me at the Mucky Duck, the following weekend, and followed through on that plan. It’s just that Michele had approached to talk with me after Mass that morning, and she was just so much prettier than he was, so I kind of just blurted out an invitation to them both. They both said “yes.” 

We’ll get back to the date in a minute (because I’m pretty sure you have questions), but I’d like to point out how insane “Michele had approached to talk with me” is. I suspect that phrase documents the single most extroverted thing she’s ever done, and that includes wearing knee-high, red Wonder Woman boots as a guest speaker at her old Christian school’s graduation ceremony. We’d met briefly two years earlier, but not made any meaningful connection. She remembered I was a teacher (whoops – I had just quit days earlier), and I calculated that she should be due to graduate med school soon (nope – she’d had to take a winding academic road). That those two conversational lead balloons didn’t derail us is a sign that something was meant to be. We’d both had a rocky, life changing couple of years aiming us towards each other, but those confessions would unroll over time as we grew comfortable as summer went on. 

I finagled it so Michele and I got dinner before the show, and met Scott at the pub for the music. At dinner, Michele talked about how, having no idea what to wear for a “folk music show” she’d asked for advice from the doctor she was training with. The only context he had was Grateful Dead shows, so she settled for black jeans and top. In retrospect, this charming story is the first indication that my wife would turn out to be a fanatical member of the “Over Thinkers and Preparers Association of America”. She excused herself to the bathroom for so long that I assumed she was either snorting coke or playing head-games with me, but it turns out she was just attempting to do all of her diabetes related math and medication on the down-low. That her “secret” didn’t make it through our first date is a symbol of how radically transparent and trusting we would end up being with each other. 

Scott was a slightly better known quantity. We’d shared the same friend circle for years, but not much one on one time. I suspected he’d be a willing companion, since his future wife was away for the summer, and we could nerd out talking about computers and music while we figured out what else we had in common. Despite the occasional teasing that he chaperoned our first date, I don’t think I’ve ever outright asked him about that evening. It’s one more piece of evidence that Scott is one of the world’s best people. I sometimes think of that night as being like the scene from Disney’s Lady and the Tramp: Michele and I fall in love while a marvelous singer croons about how lovely the night is. That would make Scott the spaghetti. 

Happy Birthday Michele.

My grandfather used to tell a story of his boyhood about a time he accidentally burned a brushpe that contained poison ivy. The smoke and oil got all over his and his allergic reaction was so bad that even his eyes swelled shut. He was so inflamed head to toe that anything touching his skin made him miserable. He spent several days sitting bare naked on a wooden rocking chair while he recovered.

My mom has a similar story about rolling down a hill through a patch of poison ivy and getting a rash up in her little girl lady bits. My cousin Nate basically looks at a poison ivy plant and has to go to an emergency room for a steroid shot. I’ve seen his skin blister up so fast he looks like he’s catching a zombie plague. Considering my family history, it’s surprising that I’m one of the 25% of the people in the world that’s not particularly reactive to poison ivy.  As a kid and a teenager it took me years to figure this out. I’d walk through the same creek sides or woods my brother or friends did without suffering the itchy consequences. 

It’s not a super power obviously, but it’s one more nice little gift the universe gave me to make my life that much more Kevin proof. The only time it really came in handy was when I was working at the outdoor learning center, and we played a big game of hide and seek with some scouts. I literally laid down in a 20 foot patch of poison ivy. When one of the kids found me, I was able to monologue at  him like a supervillain. I pointed out all the plants around me, and told him to look at the leaves,  and told him that I was immune. He thought I was bluffing, and I dared him to find out the hard way. He walked away, and I “survived“ another few minutes before somebody else caught me.

Unfortunately, like most people, I took this gift for granted, and science tells us that over time, with enough exposure, everyone becomes sensitive to the chemicals in poison ivy. Somewhere in my late 20s or early 30s, probably because I’m the kind of idiot who occasionally laid down in fields of poison ivy, I got sensitive to it as well. Now I’m a Muggle like the rest of you. 

Grandma and I are at the end of a long table full of relatives at a chain restaurant outside Beltway 8 in Houston. 

Gram is nervous because she doesn’t think she’s ever had Mexican food before, and she “doesn’t want anything spicy“. All the words on the restaurant menu look funny. I’m trying to talk her into a plate of chicken fajitas, but she doesn’t understand that it’s just grilled chicken. This woman who once served me soup that contained both leftover liver and peanuts is being a little bit whiny about her menu choices. It’s the first time in my life I’ve been on the teaching and comforting side of the relationship with Maude Schmid. 

This is 1995-96, so Gram’s about the age that my mom is now. I’m 25 and I’ve never met most of these people, or met them so long ago that they are strangers to me. But apparently I’ve had a second cousin living within 30 miles of me for a year and a half, and Gram and Gramp don’t go anywhere without deepening connections with relatives. She spent most of the day in the warp and weft of stories about somebody’s daughter-in-law‘s sister’s cousin’s dog’s illness without batting an eye, but this laminated menu is so strange for her it might as well be a copy of the Quran. 

Meanwhile 25-year-old me is at the age or five years younger is a child and five years older is middle-aged, and there’s no one at this table who’s within a decade of my age. I’ve spent the day nodding and smiling, foolishly trying to protect myself from, rather than marinating in, the sticky web of connection and love my family spins. Those few moments explaining Mexican food to a literal Connecticut Yankee come with a sense of power and competence that I will cling to as my first comfortable role of the day.

We’ve reached the boundary between comfort zone and comfort food. 

A crowded table that could, at any moment, come under assault from a mariachi band or horde of waiters singing “Happy Birthday” is not the place to bridge the 50 year gap between the two of us. Especially since one certain trait we share is poor hearing. That will come another night of their stay, in my apartment in the trees. At my small table next to the windows, looking out onto the porch with her husband’s telescope pointing at the sky, we’ll talk quietly. We’ll talk about teaching and distance from family and Westport, and about nothing at all, because it’s not the words that matter when you are looking in her eyes.

When I stepped outside this evening it was still warm and bright in Texas. That surprised me since I had spent the past hour with my thoughts in the cool crisp weather of the state of Nostalgia. 

My mind was trapped in a loop:

 I’m staring at the patterned stamped-tin ceiling of the Red Lion Pub. When the meal is done my parents and I go upstairs into the Red Lion Inn proper, and we look at a diorama of the town of Stockbridge which contains a model of the Red Lion Inn itself. If I look closely enough will I see a little version of me looking at a model me, thinking about whether or not there is a tiny stamped ceiling downstairs?

Will he have spent the morning at the Norman Rockwell Museum looking at portraits and scenes frosted with so much small town sweetness they could be packaged and sold as a kind of fudge in Ye Olde Shoppe. 

This town has frozen itself in a nostalgic dream of itself that makes me look out for Rod Serling to monologue. It has painted itself onto the surface of a mobius strip of the way things were, but weren’t really,except in Mayberry or Pleasantville or Utopia or Eden or Madame Tussauds. People come to Stockbridge to look into a pair of fun house mirrors of time where reflections extend to infinity, going further back and further back. “I’m in now, drinking a pumpkin spice latte, looking at a Post-War then, that looked back fondly on a Depression Era then, that hugged the one-horse open sleigh days to its chest. 

It’s actually a lovely town. It’s possible I am confusing it with the place from Midsommar.

When I was in college at Binghamton, I participated in several rallies and sit-ins. Some were globally meaningful, as during the run-up to the first Gulf War in 1990. Some were less so, to combat the cost of parking stickers on campus, although the parking issue actually had real-life toll on the cost of college for commuters, and a couple hundred upset students might actually have had an impact. I don’t remember how that ended. I do know we didn’t prevent American troops from fighting Iraqis. 

An early protest took place in the lobby of the administration building, which meant a lot of kids making noise in the lobby of an administration building, where we bothered no-one. All the offices were on the third floor or higher, an elevator or fire-stairwell away. I suppose a few meetings were canceled, but I think people might have even come and gone while we sat in. Ultimately, it was the college equivalent of a parent putting a toddler in the playpen to cry themselves to sleep. Noisy, but contained, and honestly, not that hard to ignore. 

A few months or a year later, people were protesting something else. I want to say it was more significant, I think there was a tuition-hike issue, but I honestly don’t recall. Either I was more invested, or this one was better run, because as detached as I was from the organizing, I remember a strategy meeting of some sort beforehand. Some out of town folks from another school had come to join us, and these women had a much more aggressive and to me radical, attitude. I think they were even wearing boots (gasp). This protest would ignore the symbolic admin building and be at an actual functioning and important part of campus – the recruiting office. At the appointed time, we marched in and chanted “hey-hey, ho-ho” for several hours, and made a ruckus that made phone calls to and from prospective applicants and parents difficult, and maybe postponed some campus tours. My description is not meant to be dismissive, merely self-deprecating. I was a hobbyist, complaining about something that inconvenienced me, at most. Others there likely had more skin in the game. As we filed out, at some appointed time or achieved goal, I wasn’t far behind the women from out of town. I saw one of them pull the fire alarm, and I was mortified at her behavior. So thuggish, so rule-breaky. I felt so bad that we’d (she’d) done something illegal. It obviously impacted me enough to remember, unlike the issue we were protesting, which I can not recall. 

I’d like to go back in time and slap young, prudish me across the face. I’d like him to know how much he would learn to respect and admire people who pull down statues and stop traffic, instead of being led politely away. I’m going to run out of rational words in a minute and just start typing curse words and bleeps. I’m not going to convince anyone of anything on a Facebook post. This is a memory recollection project for me, and I’m remembering that not long after this protest, or maybe not long before it, a black student who graduated from Binghamton was found dead, hanging from a tree in the woods not far from the mall near my house. I didn’t know him, didn’t know he was from nearby. But I admired him. I have literally no more information about his life or health beyond what I just wrote. It was quickly ruled a suicide. 

What I remember is how angry hearing that ruling made me. It was the first smoldering feeling that the woman who pulled that alarm did so because she could smell the smoke from the fires that I did not want to see. 

I’ll end with a link to a song I listen to over and over when I’m this mad. It helps me not scream. The link is to the YouTube video, which is horribly produced, because they’re an indie band. I’ve literally never seen it until now. The music though, fills me with hope: https://youtu.be/YT7z2WpFIng

The biggest ocean waves I’ve ever seen with my own eyes were off the California coast. I think it was Point Reyes, but it might have been some other gorgeous windswept piece of northern California. I was on vacation there with Michele, Jarrett, and Melina ten years ago, and we were driving from San Francisco north, to the Redwoods. We stopped at Point Reyes for the view, and for a half hour we just ate a snack and watched huge waves break offshore and send spray and rumbles of sound up the grassy cliffs towards us. The “dangerous waves” signs posted were the least necessary objects I’ve ever encountered in my life. You couldn’t have dragged me any closer to the ocean with a tractor. 

Despite the fact that the North Shore of Oahu has some of the biggest, most famous surfing waves in the world, they gain their epic size in winter storms, and I was there in summer. The biggest waves I’ve ever willing been in, and tossed around by, were when Jim tried to teach me to surf while he lived in Hawaii. The four-foot surf on the military base beaches barely constituted “waves” by Hawaii standard, but it was where Jim was learning, and he tried to teach me. I couldn’t even paddle the board out over the incoming crests without getting thrown back and tumbling over again and again. We tried for the better part of an hour, until my shoulders were burning from fatigue. Jim went out to catch a couple of actual waves, while I built a sand-castle, or something equally pitiful. I felt weak and wounded, and my spirit was temporarily as bruised as my body. 

One weekend night later that summer, I had gone out to a local bar with Jim and friends, and while the night cranked up for most, my mood didn’t match it. I took the walk a couple of blocks to the beach (there was always a beach a couple blocks away – unless you were already on a beach) to be alone to indulge my mood. It takes a special cocktail of narcissism, homesickness, and twenty-year-old male hormones to be sad on a moonlit beach in Hawaii, but I achieved it. I’d also had a couple of actual cocktails. I don’t think there was a good reason to feel sad that day. It was Hawaii, for free, living with my brother, my idol. I was just sad for a bit. When I got to the beach, I walked along the water’s edge until the lamps and signs from the road dimmed. I sat down in knee deep water, womb warm. The waves came up to my shoulders and for a while I just waited, feeling the water pull sand from beneath my heels and buttocks, wondering how floating away would feel. The waves rocked me back and forth in that lulling rhythm that soothes a baby, and it did the same for me. I looked out at the deep dark ocean in front of me embodying how small my problems felt, thankfully not how small I felt, while the white noise of the beach floated me above my self-pity. The moonlight was bright, like it is tonight, and lit me up a little. I don’t remember how long I was there. It was more than a millisecond, and less than a thousand years.

They’ve moved my high school soccer field from right up next to Sand Creek Road, to the other side of the school completely; closer to the football field. That probably happened twenty-years ago, for all I know, and it was a good idea, since occasionally a wild soccer ball would end up flying into rush-hour traffic. 

One early-September day, before I was old enough to participate in the pre-season soccer two-a-day practice/try-outs, I did spend the day “watching” my brother and his teammates. I’m guessing this happened somewhere between 6th-7th grade. I got bored kicking the ball around by myself, and wandered over to the little store across Sand Creek Road, which at the time might have been a snack-shop, but it had a couple of arcade cabinets as well. Google Maps shows that it is now the site of FlightsofFantasy Books and Games. I’m thrilled to know that nerdy pre-teen Kevin would still find that locale a comforting space. 

I don’t know exactly what I thought would happen if I blew all my lunch money on Frogger and Galaga, but by late morning I was broke. When the soccer players walked up to Wendy’s for lunch, I just grabbed a handful of crackers and told everyone I wasn’t hungry. I can’t recall if it was Jim or one of his friends that figured out I was staring at their food the way my cat watches me now, but someone gave me money for food. I remember a Frosty, but I hope I ate something besides that.

Honestly, the thing that strikes me most about that story is that as kids we could down a fast-food meal and then go back and play sports for another couple of hours without heartburn or throwing up. That simple act of kindness was a formative moment in my life, though.

In an episode of Friends,Ross flirts with a pizza delivery woman, at one cringingly painful point telling her that they have to add the smell to methane.  Well, let me tell you “the rest of the story”. Not of the Friends episode. You can go watch that yourself if you want. Let’s talk about the gas! Ready?

About an hour east of Athens, TX is the town of New London, TX. It was originally London, but there’s already another London, TX that registered with the Post Office first, so they had to change to New London. It’s a little north of Old London on Google Maps, if that helps. My parents were visiting Michele and I in Athens, somewhere been ‘03-05, and it should be some indication of how little there was to do in Athens that we found ourselves an hour east of it during their visit. That’s a bit unfair. Actually one of my favorite things about my folks is their unquenchable love of exploring a place they inhabit. My parents can probably draw complete road maps of several counties in eastern New York and western Vermont and Massachusetts. Six months after they moved to Texas, they had already been to more of central Texas than I had with a twenty year head start. 

For whatever reason, driving between hither and yon, we found ourselves in New London, getting out of the car to stretch our legs. We walked past the front of the London Museum and Cafe. Always willing to check out an out of the way piece of history on a lark, we strolled into the best little museum I’ve ever visited. It details the history of the New London School Explosion, which killed or injured virtually every child and staff member of the small town, when the sub-basement space filled up with the natural gas from local oil wells and exploded. 

The story is horrendous and tragic, and the tiny museum tackled the challenge of balancing the scope of the tragedy with the humanity of the townspeople upon whom it was visited. I remember it having display cases about the everyday lives and activities of this little town. I can still see the woolen football uniform and padded leather helmet, and imagine the farm boy who wore it proudly, and wonder if he survived. Of course it’s possible that the “everyday lives” as presented were an idyll, forever framed through the distorting lens of the instant the town changed. That’s inevitable, I suppose. In a few steps, I was looking at photos of a pulverized building, the heavy farm and oil drilling equipment used for search and rescue, and the hospital beds for the survivors. Next came the newspaper stories, obituaries, and timelines of legal cases, investigations, testimony and legal changes, including “adding the smell.” It’s also got a condolence letter from Adolph Hitler. 
I would love to hear about any cool, little, out of the way museums and historic places you’ve discovered, especially since one-third of them may close in the wake of COVID.

I am a Vanilla Man. I like my stories like I like my milkshakes: Bland and sugary, almost cloyingly sweet, that lingers on the tongue. I’m not a connoisseur; I espouse simple ingredients of decent quality, preferably handmade, but not always by me. 

My mother taught my brother and I how to make vanilla syrup by bringing water, sugar and extract to a boil. We always kept it in a mason jar in the cupboard by the stove. Stewart’s vanilla ice-cream, and Stewart’s milk. The prototypes were made in a blender, but we had a Hamilton Beach machine after not too long. The process was so easy even I could make a shake and clean up without having to bother anyone. 

I don’t need whip cream or cherries or a fancy glass. Too runny and it sprays all over during the preparation. Too thick and it is impossible to drink. If it requires a spoon, it’s a sundae, dammit. Besides, a shake that thick and cold would risk a brain-freeze headache if sucked up too fast. The perfect thickness was the Friendly’s Fribble, the platonic ideal I attempted but always landed short of. Ultimately it took more ice-cream than I could afford, and a stronger motor to mix properly. 

I could make a shake after a soccer game, to refill myself with lost energy and descend from the heightened and bruising world of competition. Making enough to share with others took no extra work. 

One nice thing about a good store-made milkshake, and I don’t mean whatever it is that McDonad’s peddles, is the extra amount in the stainless steel cup. You could tell how much bonus shake you got by the height of the condensation line forming on the outside. It gave me choice-paralysis, between starting with the glass or the cup-full. 

Either way, what began with such bounty ended with the sound of the straw bottom-slurping an announcement that this one was over, whether you were ready or not.