I’ve just run several hundred yards up to a group of men on a putting green, who are about to have their day take a very strange turn. I take my hands away from my face and blood comes shooting out of my mouth as I ask for help. It’s safe to say this is not how they expected their golf-day to start.

It’s either Friday or Monday of Memorial Day 1986, and I, along with Jim Papa, Dan Montouri, and I think it was Ralph Coon, but it might have been Rick Miller, have spent the beautiful school-vacation morning playing  golf. One of us had the brilliant idea that if we play real fast, we can get in the second nine, so we’re basically golf-jogging. I’ve hit my ball, and am running further up the hole when Jim’s ball comes into view from my left side. The ball is head high. Specifically, my head. With the reflexes I have displayed my entire life, I slowly gawk and turn directly towards it, as it hits me between my nose and lip, bursts a whole in my upper lip, and shoots my left incisor tooth out of my mouth and into the grass. 

I’m sure I made a sound that is both sad and hilarious, but I have no idea. The boys come up rapidly, and I have no recollection of how they reacted, other than they found my tooth as I ran back towards the club-house.  One yelled to me to drop my golf-bag, which I’m still mindlessly lugging over my shoulder. 

Now, back to the poor guys who’ve just been Gene Simmons upon. The closest one, who’s been watching me shamble up like something from a zombie movie turned so pale, it’s like he’d just completed in the hundred yard bleed-a-thon, and not me. Actually those guys were great, and in rapid succession I have a towel, ice and a phone. My poor dad will, once again, get a phone call telling him that his youngest son should be taken to the emergency room for a ridiculous accident, but there’s a tale for another day. 

We went to the dentist first, actually. My boyhood dentist, with his naugahyde sofas and the world’s cheesiest waiting room music, is open, and willing to see me NOW. Dad, me, and the tooth (in a cup of ice) all go see Dr. McMahon, and he sticks the tooth back in my gum-hole, glues or screws some metal into my front teeth, and basically says “let’s see what happens.” 

Now, finally, we can go to the ER to sew up my face. I have a star-shaped scar in the philtrum-groove beneath my nose, and the numbing shots the doc put in are still the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. While he’s sewing me face up, the doc accuses me of ditching school, which is infuriating because 1) I couldn’t move to object  2) I was the world’s biggest goody-two-shoes nerd in the world in high-school, and funny in retrospect because 3) in PA school three of us DID ditch a class for most of a semester for our weekly afternoon golf-game.  

Eventually my lip will swell up to probably an inch thick, and when I get back to school, one of my best friends will tell people behind my back “I didn’t think he could get funnier looking, but I was wrong.”

This is my first memory. A memory that I know is mine alone. A memory that there is no picture of, that my mother might have imparted unto me when looking through snapshots later in life.  The most vivid thing about it is a taste. It’s the taste of the leather drawstring from the hood of a corduroy coat. I think it’s from between three and four years old. It’s near the end of the evening and I’m standing on the top of the front step of the duplex we lived in, looking towards the woods. My older brother Jim is in the woods or down the street beyond the wooded lot.  He gets to go play, and from the age of the memory I’m too young to do that. It’s a wistful memory. The bitter tang of the leather in my mouth is in harmony with the feeling of unfairness that he’s out there, and I’m stuck on this bare concrete step. 

It’s not surprising that the memory is tied to a taste. Scientists know that smells and tastes are among the strongest of our memory triggers, being older, more primal senses, and wired deep into our brains. In literature, there’s a famous, often referenced passage by Marcel Proust, who’s main character is driven into a virtually unreadable, hundreds of pages long reverie of his childhood, when he nibbles a bite of a lemon cookie from his sickbed. By the by, I have read that book because I have a rule that whenever I come across a reference to a piece of classic literature in three different novels, I have to assume the universe is telling me to go read the original. That rule has largely been a nice life guideline, but sometimes, ouch!

There’s not a lot more to share in this one. It’s a pretty raw memory. I can’t ascribe a whole lot more intellectual depth to a fragment I had as a preschooler, without turning into a liar.

October 3, 1995

OJ Simpson has just been acquitted, and the students at my school are cheering. I am their teacher. I am agog. I can’t believe these kids can be this wrong, this stupid. I think they’re so naive, and have so much to learn about the world.

I moved to Texas in the summer of 1994 to teach science and soccer at The Chinquapin School (now Chinquapin Preparatory School). It’s a private school for underprivileged kids in Houston, with a 100% college admissions rate. The boys live on campus during the week, to better focus on their work, and keep them out of trouble. The girls, even more underprivileged, have to ride the bus for an hour each way, because many of them have responsibilities at home. In this tiny rural oasis outside the city limits, these brown and black kids (with a sprinkling of white kids in each grade), are “safe”. I, and the other teachers (all white, except for one alumnus) are here to teach these kids the ways of the world, of our world; the college world. The privileged world. 

They’re celebrating this verdict, and I don’t get it. More than that: I don’t like it. I disapprove of it. 

That’s it. That’s the memory: A young, smarty-pants white guy shaking his head at a bunch of brown and black skinned kids celebrating that someone with their skin color didn’t get punished by cops with my skin color.

This memory fills me with regret and shame. 

I can remember how worldly and wise I felt at 25. I’d seen most of America, and even left it’s shores behind, and had the stamp on my passport to prove it. I’d seen the world, and could speak to some of its citizens in their own language, though not to the parents of many of my students in their own language.

Of course some of their celebration was mere adolescent joy at seeing authority not in total control. Of course, if I had asked, the vast majority of the kids wouldn’t have been able to give me a reasonable explanation as to the nuances of the verdict, and certainly not to the standard that would earn them a high at the school they were attending. But there’s part of the problem. I would be the one deciding the grade. I would get to decide if they’d succeed or fail. I had the power. The one thing in that memory that brings me an iota of comfort is that I didn’t exert power over their feelings. I just stood there flummoxed. That’s a start. 

I think it’s safe to say, from 25 years out, that the students of Chinquapin taught me much more than I taught them. A few of them learned Newton’s Laws, and a handful learned how to write a simple computer program. I know, because I’m still friendly with many of them on FB, that I made a positive contribution to some of their lives. But the raw truth is that those kids were witnesses to, and midwives of the death throes of my extended adolescence.  If the kids responded to me, it was because they saw the thing we had most in common was that I was a child, like them. 

I don’t have a summary. I can’t explain how angry I still am that those men and women, and their families, still have to fight for their dignity every day, in ways I’ll never experience. I’m not seeking validation or reassurance from any one of those students. You’ve already given me the honor of getting to know you as young people, and allowing me to continue to witness your lives in any small way you choose. 

I’ll just add this to the end. It’s a video from Houston today, and it’s emblematic of  the spirit of the kids I taught. Be safe. https://twitter.com/Mike_Hixenbaugh/status/1267901154601701376

(Content Warning: unreliable narrator)

I am certain that I saw Jaws in a movie theater, with my older brother, and my father. Except I’m not really certain, but I just looked it up and Jaws came out in 1975, and I would have only been five years old, and my brother eight, and my dad is among the best, most careful little c conservative men on the planet. So I couldn’t have. But I know I did. I remember freaking the fuck out at a certain point in the movie (we’ll get there), and I remember ducking my head behind the back of the chair in front of me. I remember the tilted floor of the theater. 

I know the movie was a huge event; the first summer blockbuster. Dad was a teacher, and definitely could have had off, and wanted to see it, and taken his kids along. It was just PG at the time (that’s all they had between G and R), and honestly, how the hell were people supposed to know just how freaking scary that movie was going to be. There had never been a movie like it. So maybe he took us. It doesn’t matter. In my mind, I was there. 

Probably my solid memories of the film are from some rewatch on HBO later into my pre-teen/teen years. I definitely saw Jaw 2 on HBO, and I have definite very strong opinions. One actress spends the second half of the movie screaming. Just screaming. Not complaining and saying “game over man” or anything like Bill Paxton does in Aliens. Just shrieking in a ear-puncturing register. Forever. I distinctly remember changing allegiance to the shark as that movie went on. But HBO movies are for a different day. 

Relatively early in the movie, the Chief takes the Scientist out at night to look for a missing fishing boat. Scientist gets geared up and goes underwater. His big hand-lantern’s light beam illuminates the wreck, and he approaches a great gaping wound in the wooden hull. He sees a reflection of his light amidst the dark of the crack, and approaches, removes a tool from his belt and starts working a white tooth loose). As he’s intent on his labors, as we’re focused tight BAM! the waterlogged, severed head of the fisherman jumps into the frame of his light and scares the bejeezus out of us all! I can still see that face in the darkness. That face is why they invented PG-13. 

We had a pool when I was growing up. Half of it was a nice little-kid friendly three-feet, but then it sloped off to the deep end, all of eight feet. Deep enough to dive, and a nice challenge for fetching things from its bottom during the warm summer days. But oh at night. When the low sun cast shadows, or worse, when the moon was the only light after a hot summer soccer game the deep end of that pool had its own soundtrack. A low thrum of menace. Duhhh-dun… Duh—dunnn…. It was almost bad enough to turn around, go inside, and take an actual shower. I was in high-school dammit.  I knew it was irrational. 

The thing about fear, it’s pre-rational. The ancient, animalian fear part of our brain mocks our fancy new frontal lobes.  So I’d hesitate there, at the far end of the pool, with my toes curled over the cool metal edge, gazing out toward the safe light of the kitchen; not down into the abyss. The longer I hesitated, the darker it would get, the faster the bassoons and basses would play in my head and my heart. Duh-dun, duh-dun, duh-dun, dh-dn…. Eventually I’d dive in with my best, shallow racing dive and swim like hell for the safety of the shallow end, stand up in the belly deep water, and whip around to check behind me, gasping for breath. Survived another day.

SUNY-Binghamton – Fall of 1988. At the edge of campus there’s a path that leads down a hill, through a hundred of feet of trees, and over a creek into the backyard of a mid-century split ranch house. White on top, half-story of brick on the bottom. This house could not be more generic and non-descript. I’ve seen houses like it a hundred times before and since. 

I don’t know why I walked down that hill in the first few weekends of the school year: maybe homesickness and I needed a sense of continuity. Maybe my roommate being an observant Jew exploring his own relationship to his faith gave me a little push.  Maybe just my RA (Mike Pagan) asking if anyone wanted to go to Catholic Mass. I don’t remember, and I’m not sure I’d have recognized the reason at the time. I would NOT have counted myself a religious person at 18, and while my family went to church weekly, it was a mild obligation, like regular dental visits or skimming the leaves off the pool. 

It’s likely the first time I walked down that hill was with someone, but in my memories, I am alone. So many of the times after must have been with other people, often my best friends.  It doesn’t matter, because that transition from grass and blacktop of campus, through the shadow of the trees and over that little brook is internal, and somehow solitary. The chapel, as it was in the first years I was there, is frozen in amber. The bottom floor and garage had been converted years before into a long, shallow, low ceilinged room. Each bench was a six or eight foot log sawed in half, with pegs jammed in for feet, the way a kid might stick toothpicks into half a potato before putting it in a dixie cup of water to sprout. The wall was lined in rough boards, and the altar was another big-ass tree split in two halves. It’s more suited for a boy-scout meeting room than a church.

When does it change? When does it make sense, and become a home, a holy place?

When he speaks. Not HE. Not G-d. (Besides, G-d’s not a he – don’t @ me). Little ‘h’ he. Father Bob Sullivan. Fr. Bob. Do you have a dentist? Or an accountant, maybe. Can you picture someone bland, and generically mid-sized, white and unassuming. Can you picture a Toyota Corolla as a person? Then you’re picturing Fr. Bob. But now listen… In this low little room, with the autumn light going golden with sunset and moving toward dark. Listen to this sonorous, resonant, instrument of a man intone. 

The first time Janice Joplin went on stage in California in 1967, people saw this mousy little hippie-white-girl walk out, and then transfigure into a powerful, soul-filled siren, and the crowd was stunned. Imagine if James Earl Jones’ voice came out of Pee Wee Herman’s face. Imagine he’s asking the Lord for mercy, or for the forgiveness of our sins. Don’t imagine that. Imagine a better version of that than I can write, because if your throat isn’t choked up while you read this, then I haven’t got the skill I want so much in this moment. 

Imagine walking back up the hill, toward your brick and glass dorm, a few days after you’ve moved away from your friends and family, and how different your world must be.

The tent is soggy, and chilly, and we’ve been inside for 2 days, waiting for the rain to stop. Bill Church and I are in the southern tip of New Zealand in Fjordlands National Park, having flown into Auckland four or five weeks earlier. We’d had big dreams of climbing rockwalls and getting our first experience on glaciers, but the weather in the big mountains is “the worst in years”. Even experienced climbers have come off the peaks crying for the families back home, so we’re definitely not going to be trying that, thanks. 

We are 23, and have drifted south in a bit of a fog, which is fitting, because that’s what the weather here is all about. The peaks are high and lush, and stab into the cold water (boats from the Antarctic expeditions come and go out of ports nearby).  They are gorgeous and they are awesome. As in, they make you feel awe. As in tiny, insignificant. On our first day in the park, I started to climb up a hill to get a better view, thinking it was only a couple hundred feet high, only to realize I was off by a factor of ten. My eyes and brain literally couldn’t conceive of something that high, and I trudged up for an hour before I could recalibrate. 

Between the drizzle and the massive inferiority complexes, we’ve made an unspoken agreement to hide in our tent. I am now halfway through the copy of the Lord of the Rings I bought in Christchurch just a week earlier.  I’d never read Tolkien before (I know!), and Bill made me buy a copy in the most amazing bookstore down the street from the Cathedral Square where all the buskers perform. It was a big one-volume paperback, which I’ve upcycled into a “hardback” by duct-taping cut of slabs of cardboard onto the spine and covers, to hold up the rigors of tramping. I’ve interrupted my musings about how much Middle Earth must feel like New Zealand (I know!) to pen fan-fic about Eowyn after she gets left behind in Edoras while the men ride off to war (I know!), as our condensed body odor and sweat damps our sleeping bags and drips off the ceiling of our tents onto my box-book. 

In a few hours we’ll have a meal of Lipton Ready Noodles and Sauce, and in the morning the clouds will part, enough so we can spend most of a wonderful day hiking up a shoulder of the mountain behind us, and crawl around on some boulders while we eat cheese and apples, and head back down to our stinky tent.

In a few days we’ll take advantage of a “free” rental car (many tourists  rent cars when they fly into Auckland, drive south to Christchurch, then fly home – so the cars need to come back north) which we will damage in three…entirely…different…accidents, the last of which will be a collision with an unlicensed, uninsured driver less than a mile from our final destination. By then Theoden will be dead, and Faramir will have stolen the heart of the woman of my dreams.

“No, zat is wrong. Do it ag-ken.”

I’ve just put gloves on the wrong way, apparently, for the second time in a row, apparently. I’m literally being scolded by a stong-accented German woman, like something out of a Mel Brooks movie. I should be listening for lightning strikes, or the horses to neigh in the distance.

It’s my first week of clinicals in PA school, after a year of classroom drudgery. It’s the ER. Nights. At the poorest hospital in Houston – Ben Taub. Coincidentally, there are military EMTs rotating there too, because it’s their best chance to see serious trauma and gunshot wounds, until we invade Iraq in four years. But they’re miles ahead of me; they know how to put on their gloves. Apparently.

Sterile gloves come prepackaged in pairs, and once you touch them, they are NOT sterile anymore. But if you do it correctly, you only touch the INSIDE with your skin, so the OUTSIDE stays sterile, and you won’t smear nasty germs onto the patient’s skin. Nestled inside the folded tissue paper envelope (“Don’t touch the inside of the paper – it’s no longer sterile. Start over!” say’s Frau Blucher  – honestly she was a 23 year old 4th year med student studying abroad) the glove-wrists are cuffed up so they can be pinch-lifted up with my germy hands, and I can slide the fingers of my  right hand inside without ever touching the pristine outer surface of Mr. Right. Then, I am supposed to wiggle-worm the the gloved fingers of Righty McClean under the cuff of the left glove to lift it up, and put my fingers in Lefty. Got it? No? Me neither, apparently. 

I have just sabotaged a successful right hand insertion, by PINCHING the cuff of the left glove to pick it up, thereby touching the inside (yucky) of the left glove with the outside (shiny) of my right, thereby contaminating R and assuring the imaginary patient will catch Kevinitis. 

I understand this in theory. But unfilled gloves are floppy, and I’m still the kind of person that gets hot-fudge on my face when I eat a sundae, so this is my first challenge, and I honestly can’t recall if it took me three or four tries to beat this first tutorial-boss of the ER.  But conquer the great glove trap, I did. This triumph will allow me to move on to such levels as, “Good job, Kevin, but next time don’t forget the lube when you catheterize the car-accident victim’s penis” and When it Takes Too Long to put on your sterile gloves, the Nice Lady on the Backboard will Pee All Over Herself. 

It was my first rotation! They make great stories, but people suffered because I learned some things the hard way. I’m not proud of that. I’ve gotten much better in the last twenty years. I promise my sterile technique is sound, and you will not catch Kevinitis from me.

Wear your masks, folks. Don’t touch your face. Wash your hands

I am wearing a Swatch™ watch. Maybe I owned more than one. Probably more than one. But only one of them is burned into my brain. There were many like it, but this one was mine. Without it, I was nothing. With it, I was “cool” (no I wasn’t). 

Black, round. I think the face had black/white pin-stripes. I know that in its final form, I had added two of those face-protecty rubber’ bands. One black; the other white. Twisted into a SPIRAAAL!!!! (guitar noise!!!)  

Do I specifically remember wearing it with my acid washed jeans, with the ankles folded over and cuffed tight? To show off my boat shoes? No I do not, but I probably did. Was I wearing it with the peach-colored Izod™ shirt, with the collar up? Who knows, because no-one could have possibly bothered to look at the wrist of a person that thinks they look cool in a peach colored Izod™ shirt. 

Oh, I’m in physical, cringing pain as I think of that boy, and write this. He was a good kid. Nice kid. Loved all of his classes. Liked getting approval from teachers. Pervy little twerp, though, to be honest, and more desperate for attention from the girls in his class than any one of them should have had to put up with, but that’s for another time, maybe.

Did he own Tom Cruise-Risky Business sun-glasses? Sadly, dear reader, he did. But he wouldn’t be wearing them in the hallway at school though. He wasn’t Corey Hart, or one of the kids who could actually pull off this look (I’m looking at you Joe Bleichart). 

One thing I definitely remember about that particular version of me, was that I had no idea of who I was, socially, or wanted to be socially. I was a happy, satisfied kid with success in academics, and decent enough at a sport (soccer) that I had tribes who accepted, and genuinely liked me. I suppose I wanted to be something different than what I was for the same reason as everyone else, because it comes naturally in adolescence, and because marketing and media encouraged that instinct. I wish I’d had more actionable compassion for the other kids at school who felt similarly (I’m guessing all of them), instead of having my head up my own socially, status-insecure ass. Maybe I’ll go look at my yearbook, now. 

We’d been in the canoes for three days, and the river was a designated wilderness gorge area. That meant no trash, no food, no waste of any kind left behind, as a condition of Outward Bound groups using the area. So for those three days we’ve been shitting in buckets. With screw on lids. Two buckets for 15 people, eating hippie food.  It was July. You learned how to hold your breath and poop quick. 

When we were finished cleaning the boats and gear,  they told us that somebody had to clean out the buckets. I don’t remember why I decided that I’d volunteer to do it (with another member of my group), but I remember thinking “what the hell –  it has to be done.”

I can still smell it. Right now, as I think about it. The physical presence that happened when we unscrewed those buckets made me gag. It made  the hole of the  septic tank seem benign. It is, without question, the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. 

But here’s the thing: I remember thinking even in those two minutes, I mean how long does it take to dump a bucket and spray a hose into it? It couldn’t be that long because we definitely tried to hold our breath the entire time.. But I remember thinking as I slopping out the honey-bucket, that this would definitely be the most disgusting thing I’d ever have to do, and if I could do this, then I’d know that I never have to do anything more vile in my life. I never have. Of all the things I learned that summer, hiking through the North Carolina wilderness with strangers, that’s definitely one of the biggies. Plenty of things are unpleasant, to the point of physical discomfort, but they just need doing. So you do it, and then go get a piece of gum, and move on.

I hadn’t been in Texas very long. It could only have been a couple months because by Thanksgiving of 1994, I already ruined the nascent relationship with the woman I met when I got to Houston. We were down the coast in Kemah to go to dinner at a reasonably nice seafood place, which was a big deal in the Houston area. Both of us were working low paying jobs, so putting on decent clothes and spending decent money to go out, was a supposed to be a big deal.

I can’t recall anything about the meal or the conversation. The vivid memory I have from that night is this amazing thunderstorm. It was out over the water of the bay, so we were stone dry in the warm summer air. Two huge thunderheads were separated enough so you could see them as two clouds in the evening light. You could watch the lightning shoot sideways, from one cloud to the other, like two giants at war, like a movie. It was almost in slow motion. The bolts must’ve been huge because you could see them form from one end to another. Then so many seconds later, you’d hear the thunder and it would be this magnificent rumble and you could tell exactly which lightning bolt it had been from. I don’t know how accurate the count is in my head but it feels like there must’ve been a half dozen, dozen, fifty people standing in that parking lot, the gravel under their feet, watching the storm, knowing it was a bigger deal than whatever puny plans they’d made for that Friday or Saturday night. 

Summer as a six or seven-year-old, during early evening summer in New York when the sky was clear and golden. I was tromping down the stairs in that loud way that only a kid can. Our front door was at the base of our stairs and the screen door was open to the cooling evening air. I jumped off of the second or third step. Just as I thomped at the landing, a lightning bolt, the first bolt of a storm, hit a power-line across the street and blew up a transformer. To this day it’s one of the most vivid memories of terror I have. I remember crying and I remember my mom comforting me.