I wanted to see that tornado so badly. I don’t know why. It wasn’t because I saw the movie Twister, or the Wizard of Oz, or 100 shows on the Discovery channel where people chase tornadoes down. Of course that must have been part of it, but that’s not the why. I’m a nerd, and nerds just want to see cool things. But that’s not the why. I’m very confident in the not the reason, but I don’t really know the reason.

It was a summer night south of Temple, Texas, in 2001 or 2002.  Michele and I were out in my red Isuzu pick up, way too late, in the driving rain, lost, looking for a glimpse of a tornado. The TV and radio had blasted warnings and course maps, and though she was definitely not in favor of the plan, she preferred that I not go alone, and I would have gone alone. We’d only been married for a couple of years, so we were still in that stage where one would do anything to support the other, as opposed to flatly calling the other out for being an idiot or an asshole, so she was in the passenger seat outwardly showing more nervousness than I. 

Ever since the car accident that happened in a heavy rain storm in 1982, I am the world’s worst, most nervous, person to be in a car with when it rains. If I’m driving I’m gripping the steering wheel like it’s trying to escape, and if I’m a passenger I’m tense from scalp to toes stomping on the imaginary brake and snapping at the driver, no matter who he or she is. So what was I doing out here in the heaviest rain, the darkest dark, the windiest night, trying to find a storm?

One of the best novels I ever read was The Magus by John Fowles. It’s a complicated book about a selfish, adrift young man. In the book there’s an allegorical tale about an old farmer who spends his nights standing on the shore of the lake screaming out to God and communing with the Biblical pillar of fire. He’s tapped into some force, some great knowledge in a fantastical supernatural phenomenon that gives him focus and meaning in an overwhelming world.

If you grew up in the North, you think hurricanes or tornadoes are romantic mystical occurrences, like seeing a UFO or Bigfoot. They’re not real. They’re fantastic and cool. I think people who grow up in the South probably feel the same way about blizzards. If you grew up in the North you know that two feet of snow is a pain in the ass that you have to shovel that spends the rest of the winter turning brown and making the roads ugly and treacherous. Michele grew up in Texas, and she grew up knowing that bad weather it’s just bad weather; stay inside and wait for it to pass. But I didn’t know that yet.

 I think that I was driving around Bell County from hilltop to hilltop hoping to glimpse my view of the great, mystical, meaningful pillar of storm out there. I had a budding career in medicine, a wife who loved me, and a whole world open in front of me. In some ways at that age, knowing you can be anything, do anything, is a form of not knowing what to be, what to do, where to go. It’s an incredibly privileged version of that problem, certainly. I think from here now that I can see that fear of all that choice and potential to fail is why I would be so stupid as to drive into high winds and wiper swamping rain drops. 

Unlike the character in the Magus, despite the yelling for the storm to show itself, I never got a glimpse of a great pillar twisting from earth to sky. I couldn’t see beyond the windshield wipers in the darkness, because stories aren’t reality. Tornadoes are a giant impersonal weather phenomenon, and if you’re lucky, you fail to get close. 

I found my meaning and direction from the scared woman in the passenger seat.

The folks I worked with at Genesee Valley Outdoor Learning Center had an incredible array of skills and certifications. Two completed wilderness emergency medicine and rescue class with me just before hiring on. One had guided cross country bicycling trips. Another taught kids to hand build and paddle kayaks in the Pacific Ocean. Several were white water rafting guides. We took advantage of each other’s skills as much as possible to pad our resumes. Sally was a lifeguarding instructor, so just about everyone took the opportunity to pick up a lifeguard certification.

It was probably late April when we started training, and the first big pool session we had was indoors, and it was fine. I’ve always been a reasonably confident swimmer, except for my fear of sharks in the deep end of my pool. The only difficult thing about the first session was treading water for two minutes using just your legs. It shouldn’t be super hard, but I got the second worst calf cramp of my life during the test. I finished that two minutes with just my lips above water.

We’d had to borrow a pool from a nearby school for that session, and nearby is a relative term. The long distance swim part of the lifeguard test requires a 300 yard open swim. We did that at the outdoor learning center itself. Genesee Valley didn’t have a pool, but it had no shortage of ponds. The average water temperature in May in Maryland is 56°. At that temperature it takes about an hour to get hypothermia depending on how active you are. Let me tell you when you’re in 56° water you stay pretty fucking active. I have camped on snowy mountains, spent the night in my hand built igloo, and seen spilled water freeze before it hit the ground. None of that made me as cold as swimming across that pond. My sole mission that day was to jump off the dock, catch my breath, convince my testicles to descend, swim to the other end of the pond, turn around and swim back to the dock like I was being chased by Jaws.

As people finished that swim, we didn’t even bother toweling off. In finishing order we just ran up the hill to the cabin and piled into the single shower. It took so long to warm up that we packed our chattering teeth and shivering flesh into that thing like people trying to set a Guinness record for numbers in a phone booth. There is a picture somewhere of close to a dozen people in one shower sharing the hot water and whatever body heat we had left. I think most of us are smiling in that picture. 

Later that summer, we finished a day with a bunch of teenage boys by letting them take the zip line down the hill and into the pond. One kid released significantly farther out then was ideal and from the shore we watched as his combat boots and camo pants started to suck him down. It took longer than I’d like to acknowledge to realize that he was drowning. I had to swim out 50 yards to rescue him, and he was in full on flail panic when I got to him. I really wish I had brought a life jacket. But I was able to roll him over onto his back and frog-kick us toward shore to my partner, who had taken the critical extra three seconds to bring a floatation device. 

That is, by the way, the only life I know I can take credit for saving  in my career.

Have you ever seen me dance?

By and large, this is a rhetorical question. Most people have not seen me dance. There’s a reason for that. Here are some exceptions to the general rule that most people have not seen me dance:

1. If you ever attended an end of season soccer banquet at the Polish American community center in the 80s, you may have seen me dancing with a tie around my forehead bandana-style.

2. If you were at the Canfield Casino in Saratoga Springs New York for the Senior Prom of Colonie Central High School 32 years ago, you would have seen me dancing to the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing, surrounded by girls in humongous ball gowns that were the style that year.

3. We were at my wedding? 

4. Did you by some chance take ballroom dancing class at Rice University in 1998? If so you may have seen me trying to learn to swing-dance with my wife, and  I’m sorry.

Of course I dance to one or two songs at most weddings I attended in my 20s and 30s, because those are the rules, but by then I was doing it in begrudgingly, as per the Gen X white guy rulebook. 

The only time you might have really seen me let go and  dance was in the rec-room of Champlain Hall at Binghamton University. It was with a boy. I am, and have always been, very comfortably heterosexual. This story is not about how I “experimented in college “ or “almost experimented in college“, unless you count “how I experimented with dancing in college”? It is about a man crush, because beautiful is beautiful. The real glory here is I literally can’t remember his name anymore. Hopefully one of the folks from Binghamton will chime in and remember it. It’s whoever was supposed to win the Champlain dorm presidency our freshman year, if Dan Rafeal hadn’t stuffed the ballot box, so our hall mate Adam Rasmussen won. He (not Adam or Dan) was tall and poised and well dressed and cool. I was not (am not). He was intimidating in the way that all people are intimidating when you’re not particularly confident in yourself. I think it was evident to me even then, and obvious now, that he was as uncomfortable in his outward facing character as I was in my own, and most of us were most of our young lives. I didn’t know him well. I did hang out with him one or two nights at dorm parties, but don’t remember anything about him. The solid memory I have is in that rec room.

 A bunch of us were dancing to whatever 80s music was playing, and then the beginning beat of Blue Monday by New Order began. I’m sure I knew this song at that point, because I was alive, but I entered college firmly in the REM,10,000 Maniacs, Suzanne Vega camp. I did not know dance music (despite what Michelle Yaroschuck and Patty Edwards tried to teach me in high school study hall). But this guy lit up like he was on fire and started moving with a passion and grace I had never seen before. It was electric. And joyful. He was free. And it made me want to be free. 

So this is something I’ve tried to explain more than a few times unsuccessfully. I’ll try again. You know how when I dance, and I’m off the beat, it looks terrible and foolish and like my body is moving wrong compared to everyone in the room? In the middle of the song, he got off the beat. Instead of looking like he was wrong and the record was right, it felt the other way: like he was on the proper beat, and the rest of the room, including the record, had gotten lost. Have you ever realized that when a conductor stands in front of a symphony, they are the person who controls what the dozens of musicians and hundreds or thousands of audience experience, with just the motion of their arms? When I think about that moment, that song, I feel like he was conducting the room and music, leading and making the beat with his body. In the Matrix, each time Neo starts to realize his potential a bit more, they bring up the special effects to show how uncanny it is, and the everyone else in the scene stares and realizes they’re seeing the impossible. That’s what it was like.  It was probably just me, but it was sublime. I wanted to be free like him. I danced to that song with all the passion and skill a 4th grade band throws at the Star Wars theme.  

But I danced.

I broke my leg in third grade.

The Roessleville elementary school gymnasium floor was a giant poured rubber slab, instead of wood or some other laminate. I’m sure this was some fancy space-age idea when it was built in the 70s, but it was effectively a big solidified slab of Jello, that would rip the skin from your knees if you fell. It was  the world’s slipperiest surface when wet and world’s stickiest floor the rest of the time. During an indoor PE class kickball game I kicked the ball for a whopper and had almost rounded the bases completely when someone accused me of missing a base. I reversed direction, ran back to the missing base with all my speed, planted my leg on the white square painted into the rubber floor, pivoted and pushed off to continue back around in the hopes of completing my home run. That jump plant twist push is, it turns out, the perfect way to give yourself a spiral tibial fracture. There was an audible crack. I collapsed in a heap, and in a rare show of fortitude and focus, began to army crawl my way to the next base, only to be hit in the butt by a thrown red-rubber kickball soon after. I remember making a very disturbing groan while crawling and I remember being incredibly mad at whoever had thrown the kickball and gotten me out.

I sat in the nurse’s office dreading my dad’s impending arrival while waiting to get picked up to go to the ER. I honestly don’t know why I thought my mom and dad would be angry with me for breaking my leg. I know I was more focused about disappointing him than the pain.  He was, of course, wonderful and caring. 

I broke my leg in February in upstate New York, which is a bad time of year to live in sweatpants with the seams ripped down one leg so they can go over the cast. It’s an even worse time not to be able to put socks and shoes on over bare toes. My aunt Peggy Coryea custom made me a knitted booty that looked like a sneaker, and then made another even more custom knit sneaker that matched the color and pattern of my actual green suede sneakers, so I could look like I had a match set! 

Two or three days after the ER I had to go to the orthopedic doctor for my permanent cast. His office was an old Victorian house in downtown Albany and it had a long sidewalk. I had only used crutches for a couple days, most of which had been getting from bathroom to couch. I remember looking through the car window at the icy patches and snow drifts with fear. I don’t remember if we talked about it, but dad picked me up and carried me across the ice and snow to the front door. That moment in his arms is the embodiment of feeling safe and protected from the world.

From the time I was in elementary school until Jim went off to college, a regular Saturday afternoon activity would be my dad,  my brother and me loading various athletic equipment into dad’s car and heading to the nearby State University of New York at Albany campus. The earliest memories are of baseball mitts and batting practice and learning to catch fly balls, but both boys transitioned out of baseball for our own reasons fairly quickly. 

There was the occasional frisbee, lacrosse sticks briefly. The giant acres-square empty field is the best place in the world to throw an Arrobie you got for a birthday if anyone remembers what those aerodynamic super frisbee rings were, but the vast majority of my memories involve a soccer ball.

I can’t think of any particularly interesting physical descriptions of what a 12-year-old , a 15-year-old and a 40-year-old look like when they’re kicking a ball around. It was nice. Sometimes we’d go so early in spring that we’d have to retrieve a poor pass from a bit of snowdrift. Other images are sun drenched, and we’d bring along a Pizza Hut thermos full of ice water. I can see now that my dad played a hero’s game of voluntary goalkeeper and coach, and I can’t fathom the well of patience he demonstrated over the years. I will need to ask him about the experience of being on the athletic decline while your sons are on the ascendancy. Not having children on my own, I’ll defer to the reader, many of whom can speak to this from experience.

There are two indelibly vivid details of trips to SUNY that I want to mention. The first is the fascination with the difference between the speed of sound and the speed of light that came to my brain watching my brother as he kicked shots with the soccer ball against the giant backboard on the edge of the practice field over and over.  From the other side of the huge practice area, seeing the ball rebound off the giant green wooden wall and then hearing that particular hollow thump arrive so late to my ears, as the ball coursed it’s way back to his feet, set my mind abuzz with wonder and questions that I would only understand years later.

The most visceral memory comes as a direct result of our frequent post-session stops at the Dairy Queen just off campus. We would order Mr. Misty‘s, which were a frozen slushy fruit drink. Invariably I would suck mine down with such ferocity that I would give myself a ”brain freeze“, that stabbing pain behind your eyes and sinuses that results from drinking cold things too quickly. It would happen to all of us so often and we never didn’t do it. I know now that laughing-at and being laughed-at-by the others was part of the love and bonding that underlay those afternoons.

Today I watched my brother Jim’s change of command ceremony, where he turned over the command of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island to his successor, Brigadier General Julie Nethercot. There is no way I can adequately describe my pride in him, and my respect for the dedication and professionalism they try to live daily.

So I will tell you a story about the time he tried to waterski behind my bike: 

Picture an eight year old toe-headed bowl-cut with big ears and horn-rimmed glasses. Imagine his rail-skinny older brother wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey (that’s right Jim, I was there; I remember before you loved the Giants). Among their assets they possess one two wheel pedal-bike, with blue flames on the white seat, one yellow plastic skateboard, and one length of clothesline. Equipment – check. The older boy explains to the younger that he is going to tie the rope to the back of the bike seat (probably avoiding the four foot long mounted neon safety flag), and hold on to the other end while he rides the skateboard. Little bro’s job will be to pedal his skinny legs off, generating the speed to allow big bro to do tricks and look cool doing it while we cruise up and down the street in front of our house. 

You’re already ahead of me aren’t you. You already have a pretty good idea of how well this went, so I’ll just go ahead and confirm your instinct. Within an almost immeasurably short time, Jim has lost his balance and is no longer on the board. But here’s the part you may not have pictured. Jim, as you know, is incredibly stubborn, and not one to give up on an idea quickly, so he held onto that rope like he was hanging above a scorpion pit. Kevin as you know, is not a possessor of the quickest of reaction times, and when older brother says “pedal fast”, little brother does not ask “for how long” or “under what type of  conditions would you empower me to exercise individual judgement and cease thigh-pumping”? So picture a stick-figure wearing a mop, being dragged across the gravel and blacktop while  the summer-clothed version of the kid from “A Christmas Story” is gawking backwards and still trying churn butter, all the while thinking “boy, this is not going well at all.”

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you dragged a pre-teen boy over a cheese grater? It’s not fun to watch. Apparently it’s not fun to experience either. This moment, ladies and gentlemen, is the very moment Major General James F. Glynn, USMC first developed his “command voice”. That masculine, gravelly, sound that “has a tone, cadence, and snap that demand willing, correct, and immediate response.” 

Jim yelled “Kev, stop!”

He’s fine. Why just last summer I saw him standing up on a tow-tube behind a boat and doing back flips and look cool doing it while we cruised up and down the river in front of our vacation house. I was not allowed to drive the boat.

I was born with a lazy eye. Technically the medical term is amblyopia, and let’s be honest that term at least has less judgement to it. What’s the use in insulting my left eye? For those of you who are paying close attention, yes I’m hearing impaired on one side of my head, and visually Impaired on the other. In case you’re interested there are two reasonably important things that happen when you have a lazy eye. They’re in a bit of a chicken or the egg relationship. The muscles in my left eye never bothered being good at focusing on the same position as my right eye, so I get double vision. My brain learned to ignore the information it gets from my eye, since it’s confusing and unhelpful. Which, full circle, means that the muscles in that eye don’t get good feedback and look wherever they want, making the information worse and more ignored. Lather, rinse, repeat, as needed. 

Here’s a list of interesting and entertaining vignettes:

There’s an amazing picture of me cousins and brother and I visiting Santa. I’m probably 3. My cousin is on Santa’s Lap, and I’m at his knee, and it looks like I’m giving Santa this “What you talkin’ ‘bout Willis?” side-eye. It’s actually just late in the day, and my eye is just bonkers.

Doctors often patch the “strong eye” to see if they can get your brain to learn to use the “lazy” one. Considering that the next step is eye muscle surgery, a patch is “better.” It doesn’t work, but it beats getting stabbed in the eye. So the picture of my 5th birthday is me on a swing, dressed up as a cowboy, wearing an eyepatch. Amy Vore Moorehead is in that picture. 

Depth perception is dependent upon stereo-vision. Having two eyes that compare notes on where they think something is lets your brain determine whether something is coming at you, and how fast. Imagine how that works for me. Now imagine little league me. There is no story I can write that will be better than the one you just did, so we’ll move on. When I was younger, I was a surprisingly good Ultimate Frisbee player, and volleyball player. Until dusk. Everyone’s depth perception gets worse in dim light. Mine gets egregious. The number of times I’ve been hit in the face by a dimly lit frisbee or volleyball is unpleasantly high. I look great with a bloody nose thanks for asking.

My left eye (the lazy one) actually has better visual acuity, because it’s done so much less work over the years. However it sees things all scrambled. For most of my life, when I took vision tests, I could read farther down the eye chart with my left eye, but I couldn’t read the letters in order, so I would just tell the doc, “there’s an E, a T, an O in there somewhere.” Brains are amazing at learning to adjust. This was all a fun game/personal party trick until I renewed my driver’s license last fall, and had to take an eye-test. I put my face on the giant eye-test binoculars and the nice lady told me to read the entire 4th line. I read all five letters no problem. 

Silence. 

She repeated “the entire 4th line.”

I said “O, F, P, Z, D.” 

Shorter silence before “all the letters.” 

Me: Give me more letters, but that’s all I have. (Getting worried).

She long pauses, like she’s trying to decide if I’m fucking with her for fun, or something. 

I take my head out of the binocular-scope, and look at her like I’m not fucking with her for fun. She stands up and twists a knob on the blind-o-meter. Try again. 

I look back inside, and suddenly there’s an entire grid of letters on the left side, top to bottom, on what had been a blank white space. I read them, no problem, and look at her. She flips a dial, and the letters I originally read appear on the right side. I read those, again, no problemo. She turns the dial again, and it’s back to blank on the left, letters on the right. “Nope, they’re gone again,” I said. My brain, given the choice, had decided to completely disregard the information coming from  left eye, on a driver’s license test! She told me I’d passed, and called the next person. I was freaked out about how many people I was  going to Mr. Magoo on the way home.

The house I grew up in had one of those slightly more than half finished but not fully second floors, where the ceiling was a little short and the walls sloped in. Technically I guess it’s a converted attic or loft, but a loft implies you can look down to a room below, and that’s not what we had. Maybe the original house was one floor and then somebody updated it with the attic conversion, but my whole life the upstairs had a small bedroom to the left, a small bathroom at the top of the stairs, and a long bedroom stretching off to the right.  Twice as long as it was wide, with a single window at the far end. The walls went up about four feet and then started sloping towards a low ceiling. When Jim got older he moved into the “guest bedroom“ on the left, but when we were young kids we shared the big room to the right. We had captains’ beds that have a chest of drawers underneath them so the beds themselves were relatively high; the height of a dining room table, I guess. That meant that the slope of the wall-ceiling came right across the bed and really made it feel like I was sleeping in a big wood lined tent. Oh yeah, the whole room was knotty pine boards. As mentioned, the room was long and narrow, and laid out so Jim was on one side I was on the other, and there was a no man’s land walkway/canyon  from the door to the single window between our two beds. That one window and the wood paneling made for a pretty dark room.

All of that is just to help you picture the heist game we invented.

We would unroll the blind down from the top, so the room was as close to pitch black as we could get it.  At the end of the room, under the window, we’d place some object on the floor  that represented “the diamond“. The iconic thing I remember using was a big green plastic dart about the size of my hand, with a suction cup. Imagine a Nerf-gun dart, but this definitely predates Nerf guns. I’m sure we use other objects because it was just a symbolic thing.  Anyway so there’s an object on the ground under the window at the head of the bed. One of us would lay in the dark on one of the beds and be “the guard.” The other one would start outside the room and be “the thief“. The thief’s  job was to creep/crawl as slowly and silently as possible the entire length of the room past the guard and get their hand on the jewel. Obviously the guards job was to stop them, but you had to catch them in the act. We both had these big, red, metal swingarm bedside lamps that let us read at night. If I was the guard, I would lay there listening for the sound that might be my older brother’s breathing or catch a different texture of shadow on darkness really close below me, and then turn on the light and yell “gotcha!” Or I’d lay there in the dark driving myself crazy, hallucinating those light-sparkles and  listening for every sound and trying to decide how close the thief was whether it was time to make a move.  Sometimes a thief would be successful and you would  just be laying there tensing when he’d yell “I got it and start laughing with glee. 

As the thief, I’d have to decide how to balance quick with quiet and wonder if the creaky floorboard was as loud to the guard as it was deafening to me. When I was far away I could keep the location of the goal and it’s guard in one field, but as I crept closer, I would be forced to divide my attention between the “diamond” on the floor, and the the guard, who’d be looming over you on that high bed, almost behind you for those last precious, tension-filled inches. The joy of triumph impending triumph paired with the fear and adrenaline spike of getting busted.

We could play for hours taking turns being the culprit or the watchman. The absolute best times were when we would be engrossed in the scenario, immersed in our roles, and our big wonderful dog, Budgin’ would galumph up the stairs and excitedly investigate and start sniffling and barking and reveal the thief’s exact location by jumping on them and licking them all over the face.

During the fall of my freshman year in college, I continued my athletic career by being by far the least skilled player on the junior varsity soccer team at the (then) Division III SUNY-Binghamton. In case college sports divisions need explaining to you:  Division I is the stuff you see on TV that feeds the pros. Division II is where the best volleyball player from your high-school went. Division III is the place they let you walk up and ask if they have any spare number jerseys. Not quite, but this memory isn’t about sports details.

I struggled at every practice that fall, and just getting onto the field during a game would become a victory that I learned to cherish. Walking down the hill to the fields of the West Gym every afternoon was a bleak reminder of my limitations, and quite humbling. So in the long run, quite a healthy lesson, but plenty stressful at the time. 

When the school year began, practices would begin and end in some light, but as the late summer moved to fall and the days got shorter, the dimness seemed to match my moods. That sense of gloom was augmented by the Binghamton autumn weather, which is generally overcast, and trends toward the gothic. A bit of suburban London or Seattle nestled into the armpit of New York State. Perpetually, there was a bank of dull, splotchy clouds that covered the sky to the horizon in all directions. Google says they are called stratocumulus clouds, the ones that look like grey-white cotton quilting, and they gave the sky a sense of roof.

On one particular day, though the day had been grey and blah as usual, and the ambience slowly dimmed, there was a sudden beauty. The edge of the cloud line started to gap at the horizon, and the late afternoon sun edged low enough to appear below the clouds. We’ve all seen it. I know I’m not describing a unicorn or the view of Earth from the Sea of Tranquility. It’s a sunset. Woop. But this one was in some ways my first. The change from black and white to color when Dorothy reaches Oz is a cliche, but it wasn’t in 1939. It was vibrant and striking. That’s what this moment felt like. The world had been dim and grey all day, and was getting dimmer and drearier, telegraphing it’s intentions.  Then suddenly, golden light bright enough to bask in but not blind. A hint of warmth on my skin. The clouds are alive with dramatic textures from the under-lighting. And miraculously, the instantaneous appearance of fields of shadow-people stretching out from our feet to infinity…The moment lasts a second, a lifetime…  I could go back to Binghamton right now, and stand on the exact spot on the field, and turn my body and head to the precise degree of angle that the sunlight came from that day. There are moments when I do, in my mind at least. 

No doubt it’s this kind of attention to the finer aesthetics of meteorology that impressed my coach so, and ensured that they would not, in fact, have a number jersey available for me the following fall.

Salem St hill, in the neighborhood where I grew up is really steep, so if you pedal as fast as your legs can take you through the intersection with Braintree, you hit the top of the hill with a head of steam, and it feels like you’re flying. I’m seven or eight years old, cycling around my neighborhood with three or four other kids my age. My bike is red, and I blow right through the stop sign without looking, and I don’t see the oncoming car on Braintree. The driver slams the brakes in time, and I fall over. I’m lying on my left side on my bike, completely under the front bumper of the car. Luckily it’s the seventies so cars have a front hood compartment large enough to land aircraft, and a huge distance from the front bumper to the wheels. I can literally still see the tread from that tire in my memory. As I’m laying there with my adrenaline pounding, under the shade of the Chevy Behemoth or Chrysler Land-Yacht, thinking about what a close call I’ve just had.  The face of the driver of the car appears sideways underneath the grill and, realizing she hasn’t killed me, yells “Kevin Glynn!” (she knows my name?). This enraged she-demon (can you imagine how freaked out she must have been)  drags me from under the car and pulls me bodily down the street by the arm to my house (she knows where I live!?!)

She tells my mother exactly what happened. I have no recollection of the content of that conversation, because of the cocktail of adrenaline and dread, or how much trouble I was in afterwards, because I was gobsmacked at the rollercoaster of luck I’m having. I’ve narrowly avoided death and disability at the hands of my brother’s third grade teacher, Mrs. Sheehan, who lives 2 streets over.

In elementary school, the last day of the school year was the day you found out who your next grade teacher would be, and you marched down to their classroom to meet them, and be told how wonderful next year will be, before going back to your own classroom for cookies and early release home. On the last day of second grade, 1978, I walked down the hall and into the classroom of Mrs. Sheehan, immediately recognizing the woman who had almost ran over me with the car and then yelled at me, and then had the gall to get me in trouble with my mother!  That’s the only summer in my life I dreaded going back to school.