One summer night before the millennium changed Michele and I had tickets to see Cirque du Soleil in Houston. Before they were an over-commercialized Vegas show, they had a traveling show tent set up in the Astrodome parking lot, and getting to see them seemed like a big, avant-garde deal. The entire show was a weird magical fantasy and if you haven’t seen a cirque show you definitely should and blah blah blah…

The main reason I wanted to go was because my favorite juggler had been a consultant and helped them design a new juggling routine that was designed to express waves on the ocean. I’m including that piece of detail so you have more evidence as to exactly how huge a nerd I am. 

The thing that really amazed Michele and I was two performers that we still refer to as Adam and Eve. They performed a series of acrobatic and balletic balances and lifts that I don’t have the skill to capture in writing. They were physically beautiful, as many athletic bodies are, and painted in neutral, white, marble-like makeup from head to toe. The indelible thing was that it was done in such slow motion. I’ve googled a bit and though there are many iterations on YouTube, none of the videos captures what I remember exactly.  What I remember is more a series of sculptures than a dance. This act took place close to where we sat. The transitions between poses were honey-slow, and we could see perfectly, so each muscle twitch of strain was just as stunning as every rock-still hold. Their intimacy was more than just physical proximity, it was their connectedness. The trust and support they must have given each other each show was insane. I’m sure there was music, because it was a Cirque show, but my memory of it is entirely visual. I’ve frequently thought about how profound seeing that particular act, just as we began our marriage was: so much of being a partner is holding as still as you can, bearing the weight of the other, trusting them to keep you in balance, while your muscles tremble.

I’m three years younger than Jim, so my freshman year in high school was his senior year. The friend of his that I was most comfortable with had been friends with him since kindergarten, so I’d known Rob for essentially my entire life. Rob was always very good to me as a fellow youngest brother, so I expressed my teen gratitude to him by being a huge sarcastic pain in the ass.

Early in the school year, when high school life was still an emotionally fraught soup of anxiety and social confusion, I saw Rob in the West Cafeteria. The West Cafeteria was the “cool” cafeteria that had been remodeled to look like a mall food-court. I don’t remember my brief conversation with Rob, but it ended with him making a brotherly lunge at me, probably for a noogie or other testosteroney exchange. I turned to run from him, tripped over my own two feet, and watched my armload of books and binders spill out all over the speckled vinyl composite floor. As I fell in slow motion, I remember it being the most embarrassing thing that could ever happen…

… except that it wasn’t. In my memory it’s an instant revelation as I laid out on my tummy, but it’s more likely something that percolated over the next day or week. No one cared. The expected mockery montage never came. The need to live it down never had to happen. A whole room may have seen a nerdy kid fall over, but they all had better things to do then remember it. The literal scene from a sit-com or school dramedy happened, but there was no pointing and laughing. It was very freeing.  I can’t say that I am more immune to embarrassment than the average person. I am certainly just as susceptible to a surge of adrenaline that comes from expecting to look like a fool in front of a stranger. It just doesn’t stick. I learned the Ridikkulus spell when I fell down, and defeated the boggart inside me.

(This terrible cheesy ending is entirely the fault of my inability to concentrate because of the playlist I’ve linked below. I put my headphones on tonight for two reasons. First to keep my cat from meowing at me while I write. Second to get into the high-school mood. I googled 1987 greatest hits and got the generic knock-off cover version playlist below. It’s an amazing alloy of bad and cheesy in a way that you must experience yourself. 

https://play.google.com/music/listen#/album/Bciuaao5plyjj53h7fjeqhllwvy/Various+Artists/Top+Hits+1987

At some point between the time my parents bought me a Commodore 64 and the time I started trying to make my own games, I played a text based adventure game. The most famous text games are the Zork series, and this was a cheap knock off. It was fine.

If you’re not familiar with text adventure games, here’s a quick tutorial: 

Everything is words. You move by typing in move north or move south or east or west. Every time you move you need to tell the computer you’re looking around. It tells you what objects you see or find. You tell the computer what objects you want to interact with and then it gives you a description. From all that you slowly piece together that you’re in a puzzle, and assemble information to solve it. Think badly written Sherlock Holmes choose your own adventure.

Pretty sure this was a science-fiction game that started me off on an abandoned plane. That’s not the important part. What I remember about playing it was how lost I was when it started, figuratively and literally. 

I remember stumbling from location to location without logic, filling my head with a messy  collage of objects and descriptions that left me confused. The world seemed huge and overwhelming. This was way before you could get information online, and even computer magazines where I probably could’ve gotten hints and tricks were just starting.

Eventually I broke out a notebook and markers and began systematically exploring. I went as far south as the computer would let me, and then started moving north one “space“ at a time until I hit the limit. I repeated for East-West, until I had the boundaries of the world. I can see my hand written grid map on the spiral notebook page, and recall how flummoxed I was to find out that the whole world was only a 10 x 10 grid. This gave me the edges of the puzzle. By systematically exploring each grid  space I could fill in the pieces of the world that I could picture and stop getting lost in. I don’t really remember what the plot and solution of the game were, because they were anti-climactic compared to the labor and value of mapping it out. That game was one of the few things I attempted mastery at in my teens, where perfection was the goal (besides math tests). 

The other vivid memory is typing “Fuck” into the game. The first time, it gave a firm but polite warning about using bad words, and requested I not do so again. Of course, I did so again. The screen, and it’s border, started rapidly shifting colors (it was connected to a 14-inch TV, maybe) and the game quit back to the C: prompt. It was very startling, and quite effective, especially since it didn’t save the game before quitting. I did not do so again-again. 

The lesson here, in Doogie Houser style is that problems often seem huge and overwhelming until you get a chance to map them out. Also, randomly typing “fuck” usually doesn’t net you much. Most people on the internet would benefit from learning both of these. I’d settle for either.

Rick Miller sent an email out to me Jim Papa and Dan Montuori, reminding us that this past week was the 30th anniversary of a camping trip we took the summer of 1990. He’s trying to get the New York guys together for a reboot of it, which I think is fantastic, and makes me want to be back there, in more than just memory. 

Here’s the funny thing: I have only a couple fragments of memory from that trip. One of the things in the email that the other three guys all referenced I have no recollection of. Even typing this makes me uncomfortable, because I know those guys will read it.

The most important thing I remember from the trip is that it was cut short. We were still hiking up the mountain when Rick stumbled and cut his knee cap open on a rock. We could see his bone through the skin. He tied a bandanna around his knee for a bandage, I think, although even as I say that, I realize that I had just come off of Outward Bound and had a wilderness first aid certification. I was probably nerdy enough to be carrying a fanny pack of wilderness medicine crap with me. I actually can’t wait to hear what they say about that, because my memory is suspect on the issue. Anyway we headed home. 

The other fragmentary set of memories I have are not flattering to me. Again, I need to express my nervous feelings as I put this down. I think I acted like a dick that trip. I had literally just gotten off of a month-long intense super crunchy granola back-to-the -earth spiritual hiking course. And I was a literal sophomore in college (I had just finished technically) and as you know all 20-year-olds instantaneously have moral certainty about whatever they had just learned a little of. The rest of the guys were looking forward to a fun reunion of high school buddies, and I was very judgey that they “weren’t camping right“. I know we hiked up with beer, and I was so not happy with them. Also, because “I was the expert“ I piled a bunch of expectations and responsibilities on myself, and that somehow I was the leader, because we were in the woods. Looking back at it it’s so easy to see what bullshit that was. We were literally on a mountain that Rick had chosen because it was near a part of the Adirondacks that he grew up hiking, yet somehow I imagined myself in charge. I was never the leader of this group in high school, if we had a leader. This story illustrates so much about the weird mix of overconfidence and fragility I was at that age. Honestly examining that little section of story I see so much of the baggage that I would wrestle with when I started teaching at Chinquapin four years later.

The tragic part isn’t the memory of the twenty year old person I was; it’s how the memories crowd out the marvelous twenty year old guys I was with. They were much of the bedrock of my high school experience and development. It might be that I pulled away subconsciously. It’s possible that weekend may have been the beginning of the natural change in our relationship that was going to happen with time. That doesn’t make it any less poignant.

On the off chance that any of those guys read this, and feel like they owe me anything for the 30-year-old feelings of a twenty-year old man, I want to preemptively say “I’m sorry”. My love for you, and the wonderful guys you were, and are, is timeless. Honestly the fact that you are still friends back home in New York is a thing that brings me peace and joy in the moments when I sit quietly.

I’m tired today, and don’t have a lot of energy for memory-mining. As I was flopping around for something to write about, the phrase “phone it in” came to mind. 

• My parents, despite moving to Texas almost a decade ago, decided to keep the home phone number I grew up with, so people could still find them. It’s now connected to a retired iPhone, and gets mostly spam calls. But if you still remember my phone number from high-school, you can call my parents.
• I had a pager at some point. I don’t know why. It would have been 1994-95, at most. I was a boarding school teacher. I can’t imagine why I had a pager, but I did. 
• My first cell phone was a TeleTac 200 or 250. Looking at the pictures, I can’t tell. I got my phone in ‘95 and the 250 was new that year. I might have got the coolest gadget I could as my first phone, but I don’t know. It was a thick grey brick. It was for “emergencies” in my car, when I drove to and from Houston from my teaching job. Did it have a memory speed-dial? If so, Michele’s phone number must have been in there at some point. Remember monitoring your minutes? At one point 200 minutes seemed like a lot, and then it didn’t. Now I don’t think I could talk on a phone for 3-½ hours a month to win a bet. 
• I think my next phone was a Nokia 3310. It had a plug-in external earpiece and microphone. It was the only “cool” phone I bought until I joined the iPhone cult as soon as the iPhone 3g launched in 2008. Between those were a series of uninspired phones that kept changing when we moved for jobs between 2003 &  2005. Remember when moving cities would change who your cell phone carrier would be?

Michele and I were married in mid-August 1999, and honeymooned in the Pacific Northwest. My mentor Rosemary Sebastian, whom, to my great shame, I have lost touch with, pointed us towards a charming set of cabins about an hour up the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. To her great credit, Rosemary made sure that we were very, very aware that the gorgeous river-view came at a cost, but not a financial one. The cost was auditory: the amazing rustic, A-frame, split-log cabin was sandwiched between the water and the train tracks, less than one-hundred feet away. Their website now boldly announces “Whistle free as of March 2016”, but it sure wasn’t when we were there. Instead of mints on the pillows, they had earplugs. If you’ve seen the movie “My Cousin Vinnie”, then you’ve seen our honeymoon video. Having said that, we were warned, before, during and after we booked the place. I have always thought of it as one of a series of marvellous metaphors for marriage. You tell yourself what you’re getting, and you think you understand, but you don’t.

Our days in Stevenson, Washington (the north side of Columbia River is WA, the south is OR), coincided with the county fair. On a lovely cool night, we wandered the fairgrounds, and watched the crowds. My favorite part of any fair is always the 4-H barns, and the kids of Skamia County didn’t disappoint. I saw the biggest, fluffiest bunnies in my life! What really popped the top off the cute-o-meter that night was standing there with my wife watching two baby goats butt heads. They couldn’t have been much bigger than my cat, with round nubbins on their crowns. They stood, braced forehead to forehead, with their little legs trembling, whether out of fatigue or youth, I could never decide. If that’s not also a metaphor for my life with Michele, I don’t know what is. 

Michele has a fascination with boats and water that either makes no sense or perfect sense for a woman raised in landlocked San Antonio. On our travels, we have never met a body of water she didn’t want to kayak, canoe, row, be towed or peddle-boat upon, Since she took swimming lessons two years ago, we can now add, snorkel, swim, float, and, I assume someday, scuba. Our honeymoon cabin had a two-person kayak whose siren-song led us out on the water on a lovely evening. We paddled a while towards the setting sun. How well do you know Western State geography? Which way do the rivers flow? Ding-Ding-Ding! West, towards the sunset. When we turned around we discovered that the “first half” of the trip gave way to the “hard nine-tenths” of the trip back. We ground our way, inch by inch, back up the shoreline as the last of the day-glow turned into the first of the “Jaws in the deep end of the pool” darkness. We finished, sweaty, and frustrated, and taking it out on eachother. This story has no marriage metaphor at all. I swear.

Can you remember what a Defender joystick feels like in the palm of your hand? Or  the inertia of the control-wheel for a game of Tempest? I think I could identify the exact sound of the extra five tokens you get from putting a five dollar bill into Aladdin‘s Castle vending machine. The tokens were bronze colored, but I can’t recall if they were perfectly round or, as I think, slightly octagonal to distinguish them from quarters in the machine.

So many memories of arcades are blends instead of discreet, because for lots of boys my age, we went as often as we could get away with it. I’m not sure what are from my own senses versus TV or movies, and now nostalgic recreations of arcades on TV and movies. I know that “my arcade“, the aforementioned Aladdin‘s Castle, was a dark windowless shop in the Colonie Center mall. It was dark or black and low lit, mostly from the cabinets in an unimaginatively laid out square lining three walls. The banks of games in the middle maximized the floor space for efficient money removal. Even though eventually it would be eclipsed by the much grander arcade at the new Crossgates Mall, I honestly can’t remember anything except that it was bigger. By the time Crossgates was a destination, I had “outgrown” the arcade as the cool place to be in the mall.

When I look online at the dates of the “golden age” games I played, it’s clear that most of my arcade game memories are from before I finished junior high. That means that the formative friends of my youth: James, Danny, Ralph, and Adam post-date these memories. Only Rick Miller might have been an arcade buddy. He did live near the mall, and we might have been able to walk there, though I can’t remember if my parents would have let me bike to his house at that age?

The arcade cabinet was probably the first place I was able to project my mind into where I could shape the reality, where my choices mattered. Even books, TV, and movies, no matter how much they engage the imagination, could give me such a sense of agency the way five minutes of Star Castle did. I also think there might have been something perfect about the size of a classic arcade cabinet to me. The box was big but not intimidating to a 10 or 11-year-old boy. Standing there in front of it, it seemed like the right button combination could open it up to an entire universe inside, like a Narnian wardrobe. 

(It’s a complete coincidence that the lead character in the movie Tron is named Kevin Flynn.)

I still play. I have an Xbox, and a Switch that keep me connected with friends and family during our weekly games of Minecraft or Rocket League. There are brilliant games, like Red Dead Redemption or Inside that are as artfully beautiful as great movies. The Dark Souls games push the limits of my physical abilities as much as any workout ever has. There are games, like Animal Crossing, that are just plain relaxing after a tough day. Games like Fortnight or Minecraft keep me engaged with the worlds of the kids I care for at work. I’m actually surprised at how many parents say they don’t play or understand the games their kids play. It’s odd to realize that most people in my generation let go of video games the way they gave up baseball or football; as activities for young people. I expect that I will be hitting the A button or the right trigger on a controller at a time when I can no longer remember how to take care of my own bodily functions.

The human immune system has a default programming of “tightly wound”. If it doesn’t recognize something, it tries to kill it. It doesn’t bother asking detailed questions, and it only bothers to get to know it at all, so it can identify and kill it even quicker the next time. It’s an elegant system, mostly. Someday, our bodies will immediately recognize COVID as it enters our nose or eye, and destroy the virus before it gets past the front line, because we’ve been exposed to it either through illness or vaccine. Sometimes this system of defense doesn’t work. It’s either too lazy, and it fails to protect us, or it’s too aggressive and attacks things it shouldn’t, like our own thyroid or joints. 

Sometimes, our body throws a big panic-attack about benign things like cat hair, oak pollen, or egg whites. It dials “911” when my next-door neighbor mows the yard, and every immune cell in my body races towards my eyes and nose, like cops that have just heard an “officer down” squawk over the radio. When I was growing up in New York, my mom always referred to this as getting my “Summer Cold”, as the flowers bloomed and the grass grew. It was a minor annoyance. 

When I moved to Texas, I was beset by allergies to everything, from the moment I arrived. I took a job on a lovely green, grassy campus, and lived in a house dwarfed by the wonderful oak tree that shaded it. Every verdant plant I could see or smell shot tiny sneeze-producing spores at my face year round. One particular morning in my first fall, I was teaching pre-algebra to the eighth-graders (Chinquapin ‘99), when my face began to leak. I started a sentence and sneezed, and continued teaching and sniffled, and continued to talk and snarfled, and tried to keep going and snorted, and wiped my nose where I could and snotted, and turned to write on the board and SMEARED A STREAK OF BOOGERY SLIME BEHIND THE CHALKED EQUATION LIKE SOME SORT OF OOZE MONSTER. 

You know how everyone supposedly has an anxiety dream about getting up in front of a room and realizing they’re not wearing pants? This was worse. I would have happily dropped my pants then and there if it could have made me wake up underneath the pollen tree, instead of having to turn around to meet the eyes of the harshest, most jaded, cynical mean girls (and boys) that school had. I’d only been teaching a few weeks! 

(A brief aside. Here now, comes an interesting test of a person’s innate narcissism. Often, we remember our “worst moments” and no-one else who was there has any recollection at all, indicating that we are our own worst narrators, and blow things out of proportion. Through Facebook, I am still in touch with several members of that class, including Eddie DelaTorre. If the ridiculous good luck I cling to holds, none of them noticed or remember. If they do, then it really was as bad as I recall it being).

That day, that moment, I decided that I would have to quit my job and leave Texas, or go see a doctor for medical help, because if I may paraphrase,  I vowed, as G-d as my witness, I would never smear snot on a chalkboard again. I was able to see a local allergist fairly quickly, who promptly put me on a powerful new antihistamine, which worked wonderfully, but did enough damage to my liver that my primary care doctor lectured me sternly on the dangers of being a binge-drinking alcoholic. We stopped that medicine, so I could continue binge-drinking alcohol (I’m kidding), and started allergy shots, in which a small amount of everything that makes my itch was injected into me weekly in an attempt to make me give up and move back to New York. My main side effects of regular allergy shots were pain and a face that frequently looked red and stupid and embarrassed. The injections were fine, but the nurse who gave them to me was pretty and young, and I was socially inept and tried to ask her out. I got shots for an awkward three years after that.

I’ve always thought of my experience with allergies, medicines, and shots to be quite symbolic of a more general human experience. So many of us are bothered, or legitimately debilitated, by “little things” that cause us to wildly overreact compared to the actual threat. The intellectual knowledge that peanut dust isn’t anthrax does nothing to reduce the emergency need for benadryl or an epinephrine shot. If you don’t have access to them, you’re wrecked. I had to go to the doctor’s office every Friday for half a year, then gradually stretch the visit interval out. I had the time, money and schedule freedom, as a teacher, to compliantly complete the plan. And to remind you, that plan was to regularly expose myself to small, safe amounts of something my body was erroneously convinced was potentially deadly. So many people I know aren’t as lucky, even if what they’re facing isn’t actually dangerous, just vexing. Their finances, schedules, commitments to care for others, and lack of access to resources keep them from receiving the help they need to thrive and survive. I’m obviously talking about more than allergies now.

I came to with the touch of light rain on my face and the sound of dad’s voice, calling my name. The view was straight up into the cloudy sky. I was strapped in a gurney wearing a collar, and was quickly loaded into an ambulance, and I don’t recall if my dad was with me for the ride, since he was also strapped to a gurney, hurt slightly worse than me. 

I spent most of the  80’s playing with Village Youth Soccer Club, and that weekend day in 1982 started off with the same plan, despite the weather. I dressed in my red and gold uniform and filled my Pizza Hut™ jug with ice and water, and watched the rain stop and start, wondering if a canceling call would come. It did not, so dad loaded me into our brown Ford Escort™ wagon for the drive out to Guilderland or Niskayuna for the game. When the rain intensified, or the thunder rolled in, the decision was made to cancel the day’s game. That’s the last thing I remember until the rain on my face and the sound of dad’s voice.

I can identify the intersection where it happened, now, because my family would mention it when we’d drive by later, and during occasional commutes to the area. I believe we were stopped at a red light at the bottom of a slight hill.  The young woman’s car hydroplaned through the intersection when she hit the slick watery pool and slammed into us. This is all per reports by people whose memories weren’t swatted away when their forehead cracked a pane of auto-glass. 

Because it was 1982, there was not a mandatory seatbelt law. Because I was not wearing a seatbelt, my reflex was to throw my right arm up to shield my face. Because the right arm of a twelve year old boy is exponentially weaker than a spinning car, my wrist broke but kept me from eating a windshield. 

I got another trip to the ER, setting one of my few superstitious patterns, which was breaking a bone at age nine, twelve, fifteen (we’ll get there). “Luckily” I broke that curse when I took the golf-ball to my mouth at age sixteen (see Jim Papa – you actually broke the curse – I am deeply sorry it traumatized you). I got a cast, a couple of stitches, and a summer banishment from the swimming pool. 

The tight confines of the small, economic Ford Escort™ meant my dad’s kneecap broke when it dislodged the center console.  During his hospital stay and surgery, my aunt and uncle, Peggy and Mike Coryea, took me fishing. Mike shared the picture recently, but I can’t find it. It’s of a mopey kid in a canoe with sutures above his left eye. I won’t speak for my dad, but thinking about this now makes me think that he and I “learned” different lessons from that accident. As an adult, it must have been one more thing he couldn’t protect me from, deepening the anxiety that parenting brings. One price of protecting your child is their increasing sense of invulnerability. 

As a kid, this would be just another mishap, some worse than others, from which I would recover with a few scars, and a good story. I have a little PTSD when I’m in a car in heavy rain, but otherwise unscathed. We got a small insurance settlement to compensate for the medical bills. As a minor, “my” settlement went into a trust that I couldn’t touch until I was eighteen. Ten years after the paramedics loaded me into an ambulance, it paid for my Wilderness EMT course, the beginning of my medical career.

Somewhere in western North Carolina, there is a facility for mentally handicapped people where I spent a day volunteering. Somewhere near there is a park or nature preserve where we went afterwards. Somewhere in there is a creek where our Outward Bound group did our “solo”. Somewhere along that creek is where I turned downed branches and leaves into a shelter for those three-days and two-nights. Somewhere up the creek from that shelter is an overhanging rock I shaded under for the hot part of the day.

I sat and wrote sappy poems in my journal, and sappy letters to a girlfriend.I ate all the figs that first night, and didn’t have anything sweet to eat for the next 36 hours. I spent a considerable amount of time wishing I’d had more figs. I spent a morning watching flying insects couple in mid-air and flutter down to the surface of a rock to make more flying insects. I refrained from doing David Attenborough-like voice over, because we weren’t supposed to talk. Despite that,  I made up a song and sang it to the setting sun. 

I crept along the rocky bank of the creek looking at every detail. I found a section of blue granite with lovely white crystal streaks. I collected a golf-ball sized piece that hung from my keychain for twenty years. I used to lick that rock occasionally because it tasted like the water from that stream.

Sometimes people, mostly on TV, say “Go to your happy place” or “Find your quiet place”. That’s mine. I couldn’t find that place again, even with google maps, but I would recognize it in a second.