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.

The end of the movie True Grit involves a spirited and dedicated horse called “Little Blackie” running itself to collapse and death against the moonlit sky to save the life of the protagonist, who named it. My first car was a blue two door Pontiac 2000. I never named it, but that car carried me to the homecoming dance, college, from Maine to Georgia, and to the Pacific Ocean. Eventually it took me to Texas where it died in a Walmart. The beginning and end of the story involve little old ladies.

I didn’t want a car. I wasn’t keen on driving; still am not; and only registered for my drivers license test when my dad got frustrated with me eleven months after I’d turned sixteen. This particular car came to me through my Uncle Mike, the nexus of most crazy stories.  He was listening to a coworker gripe about a problem that had landed in his lap. This guy’s elderly aunt had a car with some random electrical problems. After it stalled out and stranded her in a number of intersections, she declared it possessed and swore never to drive it again. Her nephew, not being crazy, took it to a couple repair shops without satisfaction. He told Mike he was willing to dump the whole thing for his sunk costs of $400. Uncle Mike called my mom and asked if I was looking for a car. She said “No I wasn’t”, but the deal seemed compelling enough that my parents decided it was worth looking into. Now the real glory of this tale is that our friend, Mr. Tom Oliver, who lived directly across the street from us, was the senior mechanic manager at a GM dealership.  He blessed the car, told us he could fix the problem, and I had a vehicle that didn’t need pedaling. 

I’d like to stop a moment and once again acknowledge the ridiculous chain of good fortune that this series of events documents. Even at seventeen I understood that this is not the experience most people have in life. Thirty-plus more years has only caused me to be more grateful that the world seems to go out of it’s way to make things easy for me. I understand that optimism is easy when the world keeps walking by to refill your three-quarter-full glass. I pay it forward to the best of my ability.

My expenses were gas, my parking place at the high-school, and maybe part of the insurance. I left the car at home freshman year at Binghamton, on my parents’ insistence, saving me from being the kid in the freshman hall who had the car. That meant poor Dan Rafael had to drive us everywhere. My Pontiac could carry an impressive amount of camping and rock-climbing gear, and one spring break, took three guys, three bikes, and almost a quarter mile of climbing rope to West Virginia to escape a late spring storm. I neglected to tell my parents about the sudden change of plan, and came close getting grounded for the first time in my life as a twenty-one year old. It did ninety mph after I jumped out of a plane. Following college graduation, Jenn Goetz and I loaded it up with six weeks of supplies and road tripped across the country and back. It got the dirt of at least ten national parks in it’s tires, suffering only one flat, outside of Corvallis, Oregon. 

As its last great journey, my mother and I drove it down to Texas, so I could start my life as a teacher. We stopped in New Orleans, got hustled for money, and spent a considerable fraction of the car’s purchase price on breakfast at Brennan’s. Mom and I told stories, and bonded our way across the Southeast before I started life as a responsible adult. I remember crossing the state line into Texas and instantly understanding the lyrics to “Deep in the heart of Texas”. 

The Pontiac 2000 died on Garth Road in Baytown, Texas not long after. I had only been teaching for two or three months when an unobservant older lady pulled out of the Walmart parking lot into oncoming traffic. There was no time to react.  Every person was unhurt. She didn’t have insurance. The car was sufficiently messed up and I wanted to spend some of my newfound teacher money. I donated the Pontiac 2000 to charity, because it wasn’t’ even worth enough cash to trade in. I got a red Isuzu pickup. I put  a cap on the back, and I could stretch out and sleep in it when I went camping. Eventually I named it Chucky.

For my 26th birthday, while I was working at Chinquapin School in Baytown, Dave and Sandy Bartholome (and maybe some other faculty) took me out to see the Mission Impossible movie. By the last week of May, we must have been done, or close to, with the school year. I can’t remember if we went because it was a big, generic summer blockbuster, or specifically because I am a huge Tom Cruise fan. Because I am a huge Tom Cruise fan. I just looked at IMDB, and I’ve more than 75% of the 45 movies to his credit. I own more than I can comfortably confess at this time. 

This is not a persuasion piece. I’m not advocating that you should like Tom Cruise. In fact this is more of a Scared Straight kind of thing. I’m telling you it’s too late for me, and you should probably never start. You don’t want to feel incomplete with Tom. You don’t want to feel the need.

Hello everyone, my name is Kevin, and I’m addicted to Tom Cruise.  Feel free to stop reading now, but if you don’t, if you keep reading “remember…you wanted this.” 

“Tom Cruise, really?”,  you might ask. This week’s theme answer is “I don’t exactly know.” My best guess at my fascination with the man is that he’s trying so hard to be (portray) the exact opposite of who I aim to be. Tom apparently comes from the “paralyzed mannequin with internal screams” school of acting. I’ve never seen anyone else act effectively with all of their emotional blast shields cranked up to maximum, and except for the eye holes. It’s possible he’s a robot, and just on this side of the uncanny valley. I am for all intents and purposes, an open book. I have almost no inexpressible thoughts or emotions. I may attempt to delay demonstrating what I think or feel if I think there is a better time to share them, but I have very little skill in covering my feelings, nor do I wish to. My ability to modulate the volume of my voice is virtually non-existent. I am blunt almost to the point of insult, but not in a “let me tell you what’s wrong with you and/or America” kind of way.

I know almost nothing about Tom Cruise’s personal life. Although I’ve never heard of anyone commenting: “Boy that Tom Cruise seems like a healthy, adjusted, normal man.” His characters all seem so brittle, and just barely hanging on. Even the ones that think they have their shit together. My empathy with the rest of humanity is based upon the belief that everyone is as flawed and broken as I am. I appreciate people who acknowledge that, who attempt to grow and improve, and who extend that recognition to others. I don’t demand it of other people, or even expect it. I have found that many people aren’t safe enough to acknowledge their fragility, let alone demonstrate it. I think they’ve been damaged too much already to expose themselves. 

Tom Cruise’s acting fascinates me because he is so bad at hiding that. Not that he’s a bad actor (I’m not objective), but that his characters are almost always men who are so desperate to hide themselves within a facade that they wind up doing just the opposite. Decades ago, I read an article in Discover Magazine about the designers of the underground cave-vault that was intended to store nuclear fuel rods. Those rods will be deadly to life for tens of thousands of years, and no “Do not enter” sign will last long enough. The problem is that anything big enough, bold enough, scary enough to say “Don’t come near me” is also exactly the kind of thing that gets the attention of anything curious enough to be warned away. The very warning light draws the eye too closely. Almost every “great” character Tom has portrayed was a broken person, who desperately needed the therapy Tom himself is famous for denigrating: Maverick lost his dad, Mitch McDeere (The Firm ‘93) had a neglectful parent and secret shameful brother. Chief Anderton (Minority Report ‘02) had a murdered child. He’s been a bad father, a coward and a drunk fighting aliens, indians, samurai and more aliens. In each of those he plays a man to whom the end of the world is often the only thing big enough to face the past he’s hiding from. He twice failed to portray the humanity of literal monsters: in Interview with a Vampire (‘94) and The Mummy (‘17). I don’t know if all of these characters had huge emotional holes written into them to explain Tom’s own wounded acting style, or Tom was perfect for these men as written. 

My Tom memories go back well before Top Gun (‘86). I’m sure I saw Risky Business (‘83) on HBO, probably while I was babysitting Sarah and Nathan. I hope they were already asleep. Tom had a supporting part in The Outsiders (also ‘83) which was based upon the book of the same name, which every kid in Colonie read as a pre-teen. My youngest memory of Tom, though it’s possible, but not likely that I saw the movie later and recognized him, is from Taps (‘81). In Taps, in which the students at a military academy high-school, Tom plays a loose cannon with his own code, who can’t work with leaders, but who’s value outweighs his obvious flaws. He found his stride early, didn’t he? The film’s better actors carry the story and emotion of the movie.  He’s the Colonel Kurtz of this particular high-school apocalypse, and his mental breakdown literally triggers the movie’s last act. It’s beautiful man, beautiful.

The Roessleville Elementary School library is a mixture of muted blue and gray metal shelves and similar colored carpet in my memory. I’ve already talked about how bad I am with colors, so one of you corrects me to neon purple and black in actuality, I acknowledge my error.  My relationship to the physical recall of the space comes mostly from formative early years, so while I’m sure the shelves werre actually no more than five or 6 feet high they seemed to reach the sky. Beyond those meager details, I cannot trust that this particular library hasn’t been blended in with almost every other library I’ve ever visited into one amalgamation.

The distinct memory I have is of the one (or two?) times a year that the library would host the Scholastic Book Fair. For a few days, every flat surface in their would be covered with books we could handle and browse to get our little brains excited about buying books for home. I think we could go before school, or at lunch, and we definitely went as a class. We had a magazine sized catalog to pick from, in addition to all the copies we had greased with our PBJ stained hands.  I distinctly remember the tiny print and check boxes on the order form. 

I rummaged through my memory for “the first book I ever bought“. When I Google search the likely candidate, it’s publication date was 1980. I probably got books from the book fair earlier than that with mom’s help, in fact writing this brings a Clifford the Big Red Dog book to mind. But the book I can see in my mind, titled The Watchers of Space,  is perhaps the first, or certainly a first, book I got without adult input. I had it on my shelf at home for years, along with my collected Hardy Boys books. It was a science fiction book, in which a boy and girl on an interstellar space ship receive help from the constellations Orion the Hunter and Cygnus the Swan to reach their new home, overcoming the obstacles of a generically evil space squid monster. I can see the drawn cover with the ship and it’s big habitat ring, and the hunter’s bow and graceful swan. A field of stars. One of the watchers dies, aiding the kids; I think that was the first time I cried alone reading a book.

The publish date of the book is predated by both the Battlestar Galactica original and Buck Rogers television series. I saw Star Wars in theaters in ‘77. I’m almost certain I bought the book because I’d already seen those. It’s likely I judged the book by it’s cover.   I’m going to guess that this book was the first sci-fi “novel” (it was probably the same size as a goose bumps or babysitters club book) that I remember reading.  It’s safe to say it was a formative moment for me as a sci-fi reader.

I think a first house is like a first love. You’re probably more in love with the idea of it than the reality, you probably don’t know what you really want, and you probably don’t have the skill to treat it right. Possibly I’ve revealed too much.

When Michele and I moved from Athens, TX to Seguin in 2005, we got to shop for our first house. Or we had to shop for our first house. I’m still a little iffy on home ownership. It depends upon the day whether I like owning a house. Some days I would trade the whole thing for a tent or comfortable back seat, rather than mow my lawn or crawl under my sink to fix a leaky faucet again. These days, though, while many of my patients are huddling in their apartments waiting for COVID to pass over, I recognize how lucky I am.

We were moving from just far enough away that we really only had one trip to see as many houses as we could and to make a choice.  At the time, we were living in a 2 bedroom duplex in Athens. We were never sure if we’d stay in such a tiny East Texas town, and we had serious school debt, so we lived cheap and temporary, and near work, to save expenses. Up to and including Athens, our criteria had been “Is it safe and clean (y/n)”? We’d never really been confronted with meaningful aesthetic choices before, which meant I barely had the language to express my preferences, let alone understand Michele’s, when she could voice them. 

For example, I am colorblind. Not physically. I can see all the colors. I just can’t imagine them. If you want me to imagine what a space will look like if it’s painted red, you need to paint it red, then ask me to tell you how I feel. That’s the only way. Seriously. We’ve tried for twenty years, and that’s it. I can picture the quantum state of an atom in my head, but not a red wall. I’m a real catch. Twenty years on, Michele just comes home with sample squares of a few things she’d like an entire room of, and if I like the 2 inch card, she can move ahead. During our first house shopping day, every time she said “we can repaint it (fill in blank) I crashed like an overheated Xbox, and she had to give me cookie. Old houses were out. Our realtor took us to new houses, and we realized that unpainted white walls say  “Buck Rogers” to me and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to her. Also, neither one of us actually knew what 2000 square feet was. Too big, too little, just right. Rinse and repeat.  

Our poor realtor showed us big doctor houses and little fixer-uppers. He kept telling us what school district things were in, and it took me four years to figure out he was speaking in code for “where the white kids go”. At one point Michele and I found a place we kind of liked, and stood there talking about knocking out a wall.  Our realtor stepped in, the life coach we needed at that moment, and told us that as young professionals we did NOT want to come home from a new job a to a construction site when we got home. I will alway love R.H. Garcia for that bit of crisis counseling. He knew us better than we knew ourselves. That’s a professional’s job, but still. God bless him. 

Ultimately, he took us to his neighborhood, at the end of the day, and showed us a house we fell in love with immediately. Why? Because we were tired, and the low sun cast beautiful light into an empty space. Because we wanted a house, and wanted to eat. Mostly it was a big blank canvas Michele and I could both project our own image onto. We’d already closed on the loan by the time we realized we’d neglected to share those images with each other.  

It was actually the very first house he’d try to show us that day, and I made him turn around from the driveway because it didn’t have trees. We planted trees and lived there for seven years. 

Pro-tip: if you let the grass in your yard get knee high, your next door neighbor will mow it for you to keep his kids from getting bitten by snakes.

I’m going to be blunt: I don’t know why I love running. It’s an oddity in my personality, like a weird crystal embedded in an otherwise uniform piece of rock. I’m generally a mild-to-moderate effort kind of guy. In almost everything.

When I started to get in shape in ‘09, I really wanted to be able to go for a run again. I don’t know why running was a goal, though. I was never a runner in high school or college.I remember once teasing a friend who ran cross-country that track was for people who couldn’t run and do something that took real skill at the same time.  In fact, in high school preseason soccer conditioning, I hated the timed one or two mile tests we did with a passion. For a little while at Chinquapin, while in my mid-20s I ran semi-regularly, but even then it didn’t have any particular hold on me. It was mostly to stay in shape and keep up with the high-school kids I coached. The only really positive running experiences I can point to were the Thanksgiving turkey trot races I did annually for a few years with Dad and Jim. 

Family is a part of the makeup of that strange crystal. My family has always been pretty active and fit. Doing adventurous things and playing sports, or taking long walks, or working hard in the yard is just something we always did, together. When I got out of shape, there was no active shaming at all, but my family still did talk about their adventures and exploits: mom was doing cross-state bike rides and dad’s never met a strength workout he wouldn’t try. Jim’s job. Actually the reason I decided to get into shape was a one-two punch of feeling terrible trying to keep up with family. The first was getting super short of breath swimming with Tyler and Jordan before they moved to Germany. The second was when I went home to Albany for Matt and Sarah’s wedding, which was between Dad’s 64th birthday and my 39th. Dad showed me a series of exercises he was doing to keep in shape. It. Kicked. My. Ass. 

I had a mid-life crisis on the plane ride home, and went zero to sixty to get in shape. My  new iPhone 3G let me download LoseIt, and I became such a calorie cutter that one day a coworker in the hospital pulled me aside and said “eat a damn donut. I’m sick of your sulking.”  As I moved from measuring time on the elliptical in hours instead of minutes, I kept the fantasy of getting off that hampster wheel and going for a run as a beacon in the distance. When I had lost a certain amount of weight, I could go for my first run. I wanted to be sure that I wouldn’t hurt myself by starting too early. I also wanted to force myself to keep at it until I had “earned it”. I don’t really know what that means. I’m struggling to figure it out on the fly, right here, right now. 

I talked my wife into getting me a Nike-Fuel run band, which predates the Fitbits we all have now.  For Christmas I got myself a nice new pair of LiveStrong warm-up pants. They were so the in thing back then. I’m not a clothes shopper, but I think I put more care into picking out those pants than my wife put into her wedding dress. I don’t remember if it was Christmas morning or if I forced myself to wait until New Year’s day to go for my first run. It was one of those rare sub-freezing spells in Texas, and those pants are still one of the best Christmas presents I have ever given myself. Lance Armstrong’s an ass, but he made good pants for a while. I bundled up in a hat and gloves and headed out from my front door for all of a half a mile. Everyone who’s ever started a couch to 5k knows exactly how horrible I felt. Moving frigid air through my lungs didn’t make my body feel any better. Those were incredibly meaningful steps for me. That morning I reaped a reward after 6 months of work sticking to a plan. I began something I still can’t define.

Have you ever had a meal taste so good that you’re not sure if it’s the food or something else?  For example, there’s a pizza place south of San Antonio that Michele and I occasionally go to after we’ve done a long bike ride in the area. We’ve never recommended it to anyone, because we  honestly don’t know if it’s great pizza, or just salty food that replenishes us after two or three hours on the bike. In my friend group we have a term “gas station nachos“. We use it to differentiate between food that is objectively high-quality from food that you as an individual enjoy. The term comes from the place that Melina and her dad went to as an outing and bonding experience while she was a kid, and pilgrimage she still makes when she goes home to visit. Another example would be the Dinty Moore stew my wife likes and the canned corn-beef hash I like. Objectively, they are both one small step from dog-food. Subjectively, they are comfort food of the highest caliber. 

For a while, my grandparents had an extremely rustic cabin on a lake in the Adirondacks outside of Newcomb, NY, a place so rural that even today it barely shows up on Google Maps. When I was a kid, it was even moreso. I think when my aunt and uncle bought it from my grandparents in the nineties, they might have installed running water and a flush toilet. But I’m not certain.  When I was ten or so, my grandparents organized a family expedition that took all three daughters and the four grandson’s (this predates Nate and Sarah) out to Goodnow for most of a week. The outhouse was a treacherous root and rock path away from the cabin, but I don’t remember any other extreme discomforts that an elementary age kid would have to suffer. Maybe bugs, if we went during the wrong part of the summer. I recall that my grandmother was an accomplished camp-cook, and the taste of fresh pan-fried perch and trout are among the fondest memories I have from that era, but I can’t claim to recall what we ate that trip. I can say with certainty that my aunts are still the kind of women, along with mom, who do not skimp on the provisions when providing for the clan. I can’t imagine how many marshmallows got roasted.

The camping itself is a blurry prologue to my most vivid memory from that trip, which is the meal we had when we got back “home” to Westport. Westport is a place from another era, literally. It was “a fashionable resort town” in the mid-1800s, and “began its decline” in the 1930s when airplanes let people from New York or Boston get their beach time in Bermuda or Hawaii, rather than horse or train to a mountain lake. Their loss, in my opinion, but Westport only nominally exists today, and my aunt and uncle are among the last of the die-hard residents. In the eighties, it still had a vibrant community of locals and tourists, and even one last fancy hotel with white linen dining. Classy enough that there was no hamburger or kid friendly menu. For some reason that’s where we went for dinner the day we got done camping. That night at the Westport Inn, I had stuffed filet of sole, for the first time, and it changed my life. I honestly don’t know why. It’s fish, spices, and some crab-meat, or something. It shouldn’t be the most vivid thing from a week with the family I love. It’s probably a stand-in for something much more profound and important, but that my ten-year old brain couldn’t process. Or maybe it was all the butter and lemon. I don’t know. For years afterwards, whenever I saw sole on the menu I would order it, only to be disappointed time after time, because it wasn’t the meal I had that night. That white fish became my white whale. I’m not even sure I could tell you what it tasted like, but the memory I have of eating it is pure bliss.