Summer of 1991 I lived on my brother’s couch in Hawaii. He was stationed there with the Marines, and I leeched off of him for an amazing tropical summer. One week I flew to Maui for an incredible solo bike tour on the cheap. Each day was its own magnificent adventure, but right now I want to share snapshots from the nights.

Night 1: Because the sunrise atop Haleakala is sublime as the road to its peak is steep, I rent a car, with a trunk big enough to fit a fully assembled bicycle inside. The backseat is big enough to sleep in, so I spend my first night in the parking lot of the Food Land grocery store in Pukalani. About 3 am, a police officer knocks on the window to tell me to move along. It’s time to head up to the park anyway, so I drive off to catch the sunrise before hiking into the crater for a few hours before returning my luxury bedroom to Hertz.

Night 2: Somewhere at the south end of the growing condo stretches of Wailea, I find a completed construction slab, which is a nice place to eat, but too hard and visible for sleeping. Further out in the waist high grass, I find a six foot wide trampled circle, which is perfect for sleeping. I stretch out as the stars ignite above me. About 3 am, a group of wild pigs snorts and tussles out there in the grass, complaining that I am in their bed. I eat my breakfast on the condo-crete floor before heading further south to a lava field where the word “road” gets a serious redefinition.

Night 3: After an exhausting day of black lava rock, carrying my bike, and the glorious sensation of fresh pineapple stinging my dehydration cracked lips, I use my cell phone to check in with Jim, and watch the sun set just outside Maui Wine. When it gets dark enough, I cross the road, toss my bike over the wire fence, and curl up in a drainage ditch by the roadside. About 3 am, a group of cows comes by to investigate this strange object by the tree. Their wet noses are the scariest thing that will happen to me the entire trip. 

Night 4: After the Most GLORIOUS downhill ride of my life, where I spend all the potential energy I had stored up the previous day, I coast all the way through Kahului without seeming to peddle and keep going to Iao Needle State Park. By sneaking off the trail at closing time, I have the entire place to myself. I find a huge bush to hide myself and my bicycle under as the sky slowly fades through purple to black. About 3 am, every mosquito on Maui comes to investigate the rumor that a single warm human has stayed after sunset. 

Later that morning, I become some airline passenger’s smelly tale titled “The world’s worst seatmate.”

I am thinking about geometry class. Geometry was the most comfortable part of tenth grade. It was about rules and building up order from a handful of self-evident truths. Even more than most math, geometry and I got each other. The curvy lines in my brain straightened out every day for forty-five minutes, while my talents of logic and focus were rewarded. I’m pretty sure that’s the year I got a 100 percent on the Math Regents exam. Although it might have been the 99, and I pined over the single lost point for a summer in the way only a kid without a girlfriend could. 

In general, I liked taking math tests. Clearly that’s because math was something I was good at from the beginning, which meant I was successful at them, and praised for. The feedback loop is potent. It took another five years until I met a math subject that pushed me into the choice of work harder or fail/quit. I can admit to some regret at not working harder. My math books are the last vestige of those college books you hold onto in case you want to crack them open again someday. I think I’m still fantasizing about math in the way only a man who’s lost a love could. 

I’m pretty sure we used those light blue square composition “notebooks“ that only had a dozen or so pages, when we took our Geometry Regents. I can’t remember if we used them for other tests, but I can feel the sensation of flipping from one page to another with a pencil in my hand to start another geometry proof. I can see a circle and a tangent line on a page. My drawn circles never approached the beauty of the one on the paper, or the one my mind tried to make my hand produce. I could copy Euclid’s logic, but not his drawings, no matter how much I practiced. We could get these little quarter-sheet booklets of old regent’s exams for extra training, I think. They could fit in a pocket. Maybe they had a green cover. Did we have to buy those, or were they provided by our chalky little math teacher?

Later on in math, you learn that modern mathematicians “discovered” that every one of Euclid’s self-evident rules could be broken. Every “proof”, everything I learned, only remains true under a very limited set of circumstances.

Happy Birthday to my dear and lovely sister-in-law!

Jim and Denise met In a bar or a beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as per the law of beautiful people, but he introduced me to her after he’d moved to Washington. She’d drive up for weekends from her Air Force posting in Norfolk Virginia, between her ICU nursing shifts. I don’t think I can describe what a perfect couple they were (and still are). I don’t just mean in the wonderful, permanent, eternal loving partnership meaning of perfect. That was inspiring then and still. I mean in the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie so beautiful the rest of us needn’t bother, meaning of perfect. She, like Jim, was fit and active and gorgeous, confident and successful. It was intimidating as hell. She still has the best abs in the family. 

One night Jenn Goetz and I went out to dinner with Jim and Denise to one of their favorites: the wonderful Fascia Luna pizzeria. Denise drove. As Jen and I unfolded from the back of Denise’s red BMW convertible, we watched tiny Denise in her high heels cross the street beside starched, rail-straight Jim, and we looked at each other. One of us mumbled to the other, “Here we go. Barbie, Ken and their mutant siblings.” The wine at the restaurant was not ruined by my sour grapes. 

One of my favorite sounds in the world is of Denise laughing. Specifically, it’s of Denise laughing at my dad. If you don’t already know this, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that my family is the kind of family that plays Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, or other party games when we get together for holidays. Any game like Balderdash or Scattergories, or even a tight game of Boggle, brings out the snake-oil salesman in almost every member of my family. 

My father is a wonderful mix of good and bad at this. He’s quite skilled at coming up with things that might be plausible, but he has no poker face. He inevitably breaks up midway through, and for some reason that just lights a fuse for Denise’s laughter. I have watched my father descend into giggles as he attempts to convince a room full of people that Legos are a type of vegetable or that a hippopotamus could win a gymnastics competition. You have not lived until you have watched Denise cackle-gasp at some piece of bullshit my father can not sell without cracking.

Commonly at the clinic, a boy, seven to ten years old, will head down the hall into the bathroom, do his business for 10-20 seconds, open the door and head back down to mom, who will ask, “Did you wash your hands?” The answer is usually “Yes” despite the fact that everyone involved knows that there is no way on earth that kid’s stone-dry hands got washed in the amount of time he was in the bathroom.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when my mother left me in charge of my own hygiene. It was about the age of those pee-handed boys, and like them, I was not worthy of her trust. I’m sure for a while I was, and followed the rules like a good boy being given responsibility, but that’s not what I remember. What I remember is a period of time, probably when I was nine or ten, when I would go through an increasingly elaborate facade of taking a bath, all to avoid taking a bath. LIke all kids, I was convinced that my ruse was working, and I am guessing that I fooled no-one. Obviously the stakes were low enough that allowing me to “have my way” was fine. 

The wild thing is that by the end, I would get undressed and sit at the far edge of the tub while the shower ran.  I would estimate the five or so minutes it would take by pantomiming the actions, then rub a trace amount of water onto my skin and towel after turning the water off, so all the evidence would align if checked. I have no recollection if I made sure to wet the soap as well, which might have been a failure point in the scheme. 

A “famous” medical study from 2001 showed that at least some of my idiocy is chromosomal. It showed that male medical personnel washed their hands less often than women did. I sure hope that pattern has changed since publication, especially now, but I doubt it. A study published in May showed that men were much less likely to wear a mask, because they perceived mask-wearing as “shameful, uncool, and a sign of weakness.” You just know that some of those dudes are pretending to bathe by standing outside a running shower reading their phones every night.

I’ve got a quilt made of t-shirts from runs I’ve competed in. Each square of fabric, each logo, represents weeks or months of training. Time, sweat, money, all culminate in a parking lot some Saturday morning, and then a shirt-scrap of memory. Some retain meaning better than others.  The Gruene 10k is a run through a nice riverside community not far from where I live. In the early fall they host a popular race that is now too crowded, but I used to love it. 

The most distinguishing feature of the Gruene (pronounced “green” around here) 10k (pronounced “ten-kay”) is the one big hill. Now, to non-Texans, I have no way of defending it as either “big” or “hill”. It’s a pretty steep grade though, and most people couldn’t ride a bike up it. Around here that’s a mountain.

For quite a few years they set the race up so the hill came at the end of the course. I respect the diabolical bastard who made that choice. The knowledge of the big challenge waiting for you at your most fatigued is brutal. It impacts how hard you push yourself during the entire race; to keep a reserve for the end. After about the first ten percent of finishers, most people walked at least part of it, then had to decide how motivated they were to run the last hundred yards to the finish. The race planners switched the course so the hill came at the midpoint of the race loop not long ago.  This layout also has a certain vicious “I can’t believe I paid you bastards money to do this to me” charm.  Now if I’m a serious racer, I have to decide how much I am willing to push up the hill, and how crappy that  will feel for the second half of my race. Novice runners had to decide if they really wanted to continue out and back to finish the whole 6 miles, or maybe they could just stop now, and get a beer. It’s right there. It’s mean, and I love it. As much as I like running, it is a masochist’s sport, and I have a soft spot for races that acknowledge that. 

Before the race, I could always tell the “serious and experienced” runners: they were the ones that warmed up on the hill. I was part of that crew. I liked to have an idea what heart rate I wanted to be at when I approached the bottom, and what pace I could sustain all the way to the top. During the years I raced it, when I hit that hill, it was like the rest of the runners started sliding backwards around me, as their bodies started screaming at them to slow down. I am not a “fast” runner, but I know how to hold a pace. Consistency is a form of speed. It is even more evident when you hit the hills.

One time I served a dinner of take out barbecue brisket to my friends. As I was cleaning up my dinner mess I licked the delicious meat off of one of the serving forks on the counter. Unfortunately, it was the fork I had used to serve wet food into my cat’s dish. 

It’s a really vivid memory. 

It was tonight.

About an hour southeast of Dallas there’s a little town called Athens, Texas. When Michele finished residency, their hospital hired her to set up a pediatrics clinic, and me to work in the urgent care of their ER. We lived there a little less than two years. It was in many ways a “starter relationship“ with a town and a career, where the first hard lessons are learned. 

Athens had a few hints of being a progressive town in some ways. It had a huge private-grant park in the middle of town, with an olympic pool and sports fields. It had the first real disc-golf course I’d ever seen. The course threaded through the pines, like a huge hedge maze. There were moments I felt as likely to see Narnia as Texas. Athens was a tiny town: It still has a population of just over 10,000 people, and an outlook on the world that is almost exactly the caricature of a small Texas town. Not long after we got there a group of doctors invited Michele and I out to dinner at the country club, and the only Hispanic woman there besides my wife was the woman clearing the table. Not long before we moved, there had been a horrendously newsworthy racial killing in a county south of ours.

The jobs both had a touch of the unearthly and surreal. Michele‘s hiring had apparently been more about keeping a rival hospital system from getting a toehold in the town, and she was never really supported by the institution that set up her clinic. She struggled to balance her hospital and clinic duties with the scant resources doled out to her from the “big city” of Tyler, where her administration was based. During my time in the Urgent Care I picked up one literally certifiable super-fan, who wrote me a multi-page manifesto accusing me of being in league with the alien influences I was submitting him to in his medicines, which was weird enough that my boss forwarded the letter to the local police department. My tenure in Athens also contains the low point of my medical career. I failed to recognize the abnormal vital signs of a young mother who had the flu. She died of pneumonia a few days later. If my math is right her newborn son will be graduating high school soon.

We struggled to make success of our choice to move to Athens.  We briefly considered taking jobs with the competing hospital system which offered more support and structure.  Ultimately we decided that moving closer to San Antonio and Michele‘s family was a better choice. 

Athens had been my swing and a miss at an ill-defined target. It was far enough north and east in Texas that it caught just the last tip of the great forest that made my beloved Atlantic Coast. The pine trees dropped beautiful brown needles in the winter. The leaves changed to familiar oranges and reds,  albeit in November or December, before they dropped. The hills on a certain Appalachian curvature. It was the first taste of a cure after a decade of homesickness. 

But it was never going to fit. When we left Athens, almost everyone of our friends said “oh it’s about time. I wondered what you guys were doing up there.” Not unlike what your friends say to you after you break up with a girlfriend that everyone knew wasn’t right for you, but didn’t want to be the one to say it. I at least failed to see the forest for the trees.

At the far end of the stem of the inverted “T-shape” that was my high school, under the West Cafeteria, was a double-sized classroom full of drafting tables, where I took Mechanical Drawing, with the best group of friends and classmates Colonie Central High had to offer. I took four years of drawing and drafting in high-school, which even included a fancy new Computer Aided Design module as a senior in 1988, which was pretty high-tech at the time. 

Mr. Vanamerongen (who always told people to call him “Mr. Van” for the obvious reason) was the high-priest of the room, and his students were devoted to him. He was kind and quiet, and firm and fatherly in the way the best career teachers are. He was one of those men who understood that the course material might fade, but the skills he taught us, on the page and off, could be permanent. He usually had a coffee mug in one hand as he’d pass  through the room looking over our shoulders, quietly correcting our mistakes. 

I can close my eyes and look around the room and see where everyone in the class sat. It can’t really be that everyone sat in the same spot for three or four years, but I can’t picture Rick or Ralph, Russ or Margaret, Dan or James, Mike or Joe at any other desk than “their own” in my memory. I wish I could remember who else was in the room.

As I think on it, the most palpable thing in that room was the quiet. Not silence, not the absence of noise or action. Quiet. There must have been days at a time when a dozen or so teenagers could spend forty-five minutes in focused effort, heads near a large page of paper, pencil in one hand, three-sided ruler in another. From here I see the haven that it was during the noisy hormone driven day. 

My mother credits MechDrawing (MechDraw? – we had some “cool” abbreviation) as the only reason my handwriting is even remotely legible, and she’s probably correct. Learning to patiently trace letters and numbers, even with a stencil took all the concentration I could muster. We learned to make blueprints for machines, parts, even houses by the end. We broke increasingly complex objects down into component parts and views, learning how different something could appear from the front, top, or sides. I struggled for the entire time to capture the strange way even the simplest curves warp in your eyes and on the page as you change the location of your eyes to pin them down.

I saw a dude in his thirties today at Einstein Brothers Bagels (I wore a mask) whose faded 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics T-shirt had so many holes in the back and shoulders it looks like it had survived a shotgun blast. The fabric was worn so thin that it wouldn’t have qualified as clothing if it had been on a woman. The collar ring had frayed clear through in places. I couldn’t resist complimenting him and it. He told me his mom had even had to sew up some of the bigger holes to keep it wearable. 

Do you have an item like that? Do you have a favorite shirt? Or an oldest shirt? Or something that’s both? It doesn’t have to be a shirt. A ratty old pair of jeans that “still fits” despite the fact that you’re not remotely the same size?

For decades, I owned my dad’s freshman football practice “jersey“ from Siena College. It was a double layer cotton T-shirt:  blue with yellow letters/yellow with blue letters. They  could flip inside out to identify practice squads. My dad was a freshman in when John F. Kennedy was elected. I don’t remember dad wearing  it much. It must have lived in his drawer until Jim was big enough to wear it. When Jim went off to college, I inherited it. I probably used it more as a sleeping shirt. I have no idea how it ever fit my dad, because it was always too small for me.  But every once in a while I would wear it to work out in my 20s until it became so threadbare that each time I put it on I could feel a seam in the collar or armpit start the fray. After that it just lived in the bottom of my drawer, as a totem I would look at or touch from time to time. About 10 years ago I contacted somebody on Etsy to make “duplicate“ shirts and gave one each to Jim and Dad and myself. I gave the original to  my nephew Jordan. I don’t think I properly explained that I had freighted him with such a historic memento. If he still has it, I doubt he knows where it is.

I know that items like this are just shirts, or jeans. However, we live in an age when I myself have thrown away a microwave oven because replacing it will cost me $80 and repairing it will cost me twice that. I think the things we chose to mend tell us something about ourselves, and others. It’s not just frugality or laziness. Those very closures are actually windows into something important. Like a visible scar on skin, I know there must be a story behind a stitched piece of cloth. I am drawn to those stories.

Three years ago, my parents dropped me off at the Albany airport after a week-long family reunion in the Adirondacks. I was flying back alone, since my wife had left earlier in the week to keep the clinic open during the “back to school” season. I had a wonderful time with my family, but had spent a week without the Internet, so I was very excited to catch up on a dungeons and dragons podcast (I know!).  As soon as I cleared security, I put my noise canceling headphones in, while I waited for the boarding announcements for my flight. I’m the kind of person who arrives at the airport very early for flights.  While I was wandering the gate area, I noticed that another early-bird was flying with a cello, and his ticket was out, while he napped.  It said boarding group H — same as mine. I took a nice comfortable seat in view of the gate since I knew it would be a while. 

The podcast got dramatic as I watched Gate Lady get on her microphone.  People formed lines and boarded in my eyes, while the heroes fought their enemy in my ears. Gate Lady kept going to her microphone, but never called for Group H, and I watched the cello, and it’s owner lay there, on the ground by the wall. After a while, after the passenger stream turned into a trickle. Gate Lady turned around and closed the big door and opened her phone and clearly started surfing Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or something. I said to myself “it’s weird that she’s taking a break before this plane is totally boarded.” Then it hit me that it was time to turn off my podcast and get off my ass.

When I spoke to Gate Lady I said, “I noticed you closed the door.  Does that mean that the plane is done boarding?”  

She looked at me with an exasperated look and said “Yes.” 

I said “I’m supposed to be on that plane, but you never called my boarding group.”

She said “Are you Mr. Glynn?”

My heart started to pound even faster than it already was as I disappointedly said “yes.” She said “I’ve been calling your name for the last 15 minutes.”

 I replied “But I had my headphones on.” (I wonder what would have happened if I’d said “I was listening to a D&D podcast)

She started to tense up like the next thing she expected me to get hostile, so I said “Oh this is definitely my fault. There’s no doubt about that. Can you help me fix my mistake, or do I go somewhere else?”

Her next words were like angelic singing: she said “Let me see what I can do”, as she walked away with my ticket. While I stood at the desk, waiting for her to return from the help the idiots department, a sleepy, frantic young man carrying a cello came up to me and said “Oh my god did the plane leave? I fell asleep!“ 

I said “Yeah man, we’re both screwed.”

A number of minutes later she came back. “Mr. Glynn, I’ve got you on a flight to Chicago with a connection to Austin [my destination]. It’s the next gate over and it was delayed, so it’s boarding right now” 

After an effusive thank you, I asked “How fast am I gonna have to sprint through O’Hare to make my flight?”

“It’s a 90 minute layover. “(This will become important in a moment).

Interesting aside, this was the day I learned that musicians flying with cellos need to buy two seats, because you would never put your musical instrument in Luggage, and it doesn’t fit anywhere else on the plane. Anyway, the cello guy and I both got on the flight from Albany to Chicago, I never saw him again.

When we landed in Chicago, and I knew I had about 90 minutes, which was enough time to get some food, I decided to walk between the two terminals rather than take the mini train, so I could get my step count up. At O’Hare, the terminal connections are underground tunnels. The entire missed flight debacle happened so fast I never had a chance to call Michele before I got on a plane. I finally got a chance to call my wife and tell her my ridiculous story. As I was spinning the tale I reached the end of the walkway and decided to skip the escalator and further stretch my legs by taking the stairs. I hung up with Michele. When I got to the top of the stairs I saw a sign that said “Now Exiting Terminal.” I took two steps past the sign as the words sunk in, and I whipped around to notice the TSA agent next to the sign hold up his hand.. 

“Did I just leave the airport?” 

“Yes.”

“So I have to go through security again?”

“Yes, and it’s very busy today.” 

“Thank you” I said, as I took off at a sprint.

To once again demonstrate how ridiculously good my luck is, I got through security at one of the world’s busiest airports and made my connection. The flight from Chicago had a tail wind and I wound up getting home less than 45 minutes after my itinerary, despite my double fuck-up.  Since my bag had boarded the original plane in Albany, it was already waiting for me at the baggage claim. I walked in, grabbed it, and walked out before anyone else on the Chicago flight had seen their first piece of luggage.